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47: Our Oopsie Stories from the Teaching Trenches
1k Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Episode 47 of the Movement Logic Podcast—our last episode of season 3!
In this episode, Laurel and Sarah reflect on their most cringe stories from the teaching trenches and the big and small lessons they learned from them. You will belly laugh at their mistakes, and also learn vicariously through them!.
DISCLAIMER: the language in this episode gets a little salty so you may want to listen when there are no children around.
You will learn:
- That making mistakes is a crucial part of getting better at something, and in fact if you aren’t making mistakes, you probably aren’t learning as much as you could be.
- Why Laurel dislikes the phrase “in the trenches” to describe teaching weekly classes or privates.
- Why the only way to learn how to teach skillfully is to teach—and there will (or must be) mistakes!
- The difference between people who are excellent versus mediocre at something often comes down to how many mistakes they made—people who are excellent at what they do have often made a lot of mistakes and have learned from them!
- What Sarah’s oopsie taught her about what she was looking for in a studio to teach for, as well as what kind of teacher she actually wanted to be.
- How the concept of somatic dominance helps both Laurel and Sarah better understand their mistakes in retrospect, and how much the yoga and fitness community has changed (and hopefully continues to change) on a systemic level since.
- Mistakes often involve multiple different lessons, some of which can be learned immediately, and others that might take years or decades for us to realize.
- That shame is a normal human emotion, we can experience shame while also not letting it shape our identity and prevent us from learning and growing.
- The mistake that taught Laurel she was teaching people not poses.
- How making big mistakes can sometimes fast track really important lessons that might have otherwise taken much longer to learn.
- How story-telling can transform shame and help you process what happened in a healthy way.
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Transcript
Introduction and Salty Language Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Laurel here. Just a heads up, in this episode, Sarah and I are recounting our big teaching oopsies, and we get a little salty in our language in case there are any kids listening. Alright, enjoy the stories.
Hosts' Background and Approach
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up to date and cutting edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:00:53
Speaker
Welcome to
Season Two Reflection
00:00:54
Speaker
the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Kort, DPT. This is our last episode of season two. I'll speak for myself when I say I am limping toward the finish line with this one. It was a great season of great episodes. We started off in Yalapa, Mexico.
00:01:18
Speaker
and recorded all our duos there. Then we went off and did our guest interviews. We did our solos, and we are now recording this final episode from our respective homes in Los Angeles and Alabama online.
Recap Format Change and Production Challenges
00:01:35
Speaker
Whereas last season, we did a recap this season.
00:01:40
Speaker
I have not listened to all the episodes of this season, and so I have decided to change the format instead. Instead, I'm going to try. I'm going to try not to be insulted that you have not listened to every episode this season. I can only say that you were there for the recording, so you know what's in them. I do know what's in them.
00:02:10
Speaker
but still. I will listen to them eventually. It is very,
Podcast Production and Personal Time
00:02:16
Speaker
I'm going to complain for a little while, just a second. It is very, very time consuming to produce a podcast I'm learning. Sarah, and I know we said this last season. Yeah, I was going to say, are you just learning that now? Well, it's like sinking in. Ah, it's sinking in. How's it sunk?
00:02:33
Speaker
It's sunken in. And so, you know, all of the time, you know, it adds up because it's on top of all the time I'm spending doing all the other things for you as well, right? So it seems as though I might need a little bit more time to go back and really appreciate the work we've done and consume, listen to and enjoy the episodes that I did not get to listen to this season.
Balancing Work and Personal Life
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm going to call bullshit on the time as a reason not to have listened because anytime that you have gone on a hike, which I know you can do mere minutes from your house because I've been to your house, that's when you could possibly have been listening. But Sarah, do you ever feel like you need a break from work?
00:03:24
Speaker
Yes, but I never feel like I need a break from the sound of my own voice. Maybe that's where you and I are different. Because I spend hours, and I'm not kidding, I spend hours every week editing myself speaking. That's a good point. From my virtual studio. Yeah, that's a very good point.
00:03:42
Speaker
really tired of listening to my own damn voice. I will say also, I like listening to your voice. So that's part of it. I'll go on a walk or a hike and I'll listen to an episode and I'll be like, I remember when we were in Yalapa and how beautiful it was. And after we recorded this, we went and drank some margaritas and sat on the beach. It's a little nostalgic for me as well. I'm like, February, that was a great month.
00:04:06
Speaker
I know I hear you and I have the same experience. I'm just finding that I need to compartmentalize just a little bit more my work life and my not work life. Yeah, that's fair. And one of the ways I do that is that I won't even listen to any podcast about movement. I won't listen to my most favorite podcast produced by other people about movement either on these hikes. I am more likely to listen to something like
00:04:37
Speaker
a commentary on a recent documentary or look up some like murder mystery series that I want to really get into. So like all this to say, I am going to listen to these episodes. I just didn't have a chance to this season. So what we're
Embarrassing Teaching Mistakes
00:04:54
Speaker
talking about today,
00:04:56
Speaker
is my replacement topic, which I thought would be really easy to talk about. But then actually, it was really painful to have to prepare for this. And the reason it was painful to have to prepare for this is that Sarah and I are sharing today our oopsie stories from the teaching trenches.
00:05:18
Speaker
Sarah, has this ever happened to you where you're just randomly doing something, like you're sweeping your floor or brushing your...
00:05:27
Speaker
I was going to say brushing your cat. You don't have a cat. Mowing the grass. Do you have grass in LA? Probably not. Yes, but I don't mow it. Okay. How about brushing my teeth? That's something I brush. Okay, brushing your teeth or doing some random daily thing. Then all of a sudden, your mind, you let it wander off, which is always nice to do, but then it decides.
00:05:50
Speaker
that it's going to land on the single most embarrassing thing you've ever done as a yoga teacher? 100%. And then in a moment, in a flash, your entire body is overtaken with the shame and embarrassment of that moment. And the weather is nice, and the environment is relaxing, and inside you're dying. I will say this, the most embarrassing things that I've done as a teacher
00:06:19
Speaker
I very quickly found them very funny. So, I mean, I have a couple of stories in particular.
00:06:29
Speaker
one of them I found immediately funny. The second one I found funny pretty quickly. I guess that kind of stuff, when it's like a teaching mistake, I get less embarrassed because I'm like, this could potentially happen to anyone, potentially.
Learning from Teaching Mistakes
00:06:46
Speaker
When you hear my stories, you might be like, hmm.
00:06:51
Speaker
I self-douse myself in that shame about certain stupid things I have said in the past. There's some that are easily 20 years ago and I still in my head just go like, pow, as if anybody else remembers it except for me. With the teaching, I'm a little kinder to myself because I'm just like,
00:07:13
Speaker
Yes, I made a mistake, but it was either like I was a brand new teacher or it was a slip of the tongue, which has happened to me, or I don't know, stuff like that. I'm much more willing to not give myself a hard time about that, right?
00:07:27
Speaker
Nowadays, if I was going to give myself a hard time about anything, it would be like nowadays, if I miss something about a patient for the first three weeks and they're not getting better the way that I want them to get better, and then I suddenly am like, oh, you ding dong, you never did this thing. Even with that, I don't give myself that much of a hard time anymore because I know how hard my job is. I guess the short answer is I've gotten better at not giving myself a hard time.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, that is. We probably could all stand to do. Yes, we could all stand to do it at every stage of our growth, but I think definitely we could all stand to do it in the beginning. A hundred percent. Which is when I find we tend to be the hardest on ourselves. Yeah, no, I mean, I had an incredible gift in PT school. It was one of my favorite teachers. In fact, I interviewed him in season one.
00:08:17
Speaker
His name is Dr. Ben Cornell, and he was my advanced orthopedics teacher. He taught a few classes for me, but one of the things he said to us, this is in year three, as we're getting ready to go off and do our clinical rotations and then take exams and then be unleashed on the world as PTs, he was like, you know, you are going to screw up.
00:08:33
Speaker
And you are going to hurt people. You are not going to mean to do it. Obviously, it's not your intention to set out. Your intention is to help people feel better. But you're going to make mistakes. And there's going to be people that, no matter what you try, you can't get them better. And there's going to be people that you actually screw up with. And that's OK. And I remember the time being like, I mean, I guess that's OK. But then into it, as I've been working this job longer and longer,
00:09:00
Speaker
The amount of time I spend giving myself a hard time about the people that I screwed up with has shortened to like maybe an hour, whereas previously it would be days. So I think that was a really great gift from him for becoming a PT, but I think that's 100% applicable for anybody who's teaching movement. You're
Teaching: Trench vs. Lab Metaphor
00:09:22
Speaker
going to screw up.
00:09:23
Speaker
But it's not on purpose. That's the thing. You have to give yourself space to be a human. Right? The title of this is our oopsie stories from the teaching trenches, but have I ever told you how much I hate the phrase in the trenches, especially when-
00:09:38
Speaker
applied to teachers. I one time got a series of texts that got like increasingly more um just like uh uh the frustration you could tell was increasing each with each text and the the oh there's a word I'm reaching for that I can't find but that like the intensity of the emotion around it where it was like it went from like this is annoying to like I am outraged and it was all about the phrase in the trenches and how it's used
00:10:07
Speaker
for teachers, I don't even totally remember what was so aggravating to her because after, I think it was the ninth or the 10th text I wrote back, have you been drinking? And she said yes. Yeah, I got a little carried away. I don't know what triggered me.
00:10:32
Speaker
to even start talking about in the trenches. I don't either. It was a while ago. It was a long time ago. I started to think about this. I'd been thinking about it for a while, and I think someone else had just recently said something using the phrase in the trenches. In the trenches is like you're a soldier fighting a war. You are the front line. You are in the trenches. If you've ever seen any World War I or World War II documentaries,
00:10:56
Speaker
It's World War I, it's trench warfare. Yeah, it was all trench warfare, pretty much. That is an incredibly dangerous, brutal, grueling, scary, thankless place to be, basically. It's where you die. You're kind of fodder, right? Mm-hmm. And so I don't find that this is a fair way to talk about teaching. But I hear, what I hear is people who are more
00:11:27
Speaker
I don't even want to necessarily use the word like advanced in their career. Like maybe they're workshop presenters primarily or maybe they mostly teach trainings.
00:11:37
Speaker
But they refer to teachers that they're training or teachers that they're teaching as being in the trenches. Whereas they no longer teach these weekly classes or they no longer really see private students. And so what they're saying, they're not saying like your job is dangerous and thankless. What they're saying or your job is just extra grueling.
00:11:58
Speaker
What they're saying really is like you're down and dirty with the people,
Teaching as a Career and Journey
00:12:02
Speaker
teaching them, you're seeing them, you're talking to them, and you're doing this on a weekly basis.
00:12:08
Speaker
And that's what I think their intention is. But when I hear it, I think you are in a position that is categorically lower, or you are in a position that is categorically a little bit less advanced in the sense that you're not a general or a captain. You're not calling the shots in the same way.
00:12:31
Speaker
So I feel like this couldn't be further from the truth, especially for someone who's in a presenter position, someone who's in a training position, someone who's in a workshop leadership position where you're actually coming now to do a higher stakes type teaching event where you're possibly teaching teachers who are in the room, not necessarily gen pops so much, but actual people who are making money as teachers.
00:12:59
Speaker
that I think one of the things that sets certain presenters apart is that there are presenters who are no longer teaching weekly classes and no longer teaching privates, and then there are presenters who are. And I find the presenters who are have so much more practical information to share because they are applying their advice
00:13:28
Speaker
and getting better at applying the advice on a regular basis. I'm not sure in the trenches is the best way to categorize teaching. I feel like it might be in the lab. Is it maybe a little bit better? I mean, don't you feel like, just generally speaking, the images that are conjured when you say in the trenches, and then the images that are conjured when you hear in the lab.
00:13:52
Speaker
there's been sort of an elevation in status there, hasn't there? There's been like a level now of like value assigned to teaching that is actually irreplaceable. You cannot get this value unless you are teaching.
00:14:07
Speaker
You will not learn and know the things that you learn and know about teaching to then be able to give advice to teachers unless you are teaching. You will only ever be able to think back into your history as a teacher, which becomes increasingly longer in the past to recall, to remember what it was like. And all of the ideas you suddenly have about teaching are rooted
00:14:35
Speaker
in a theory more than they're really rooted in practice and in the actual trial and error that is teaching. Today we're telling you about our errors because I think it's really important. This is like my big reason for wanting to do this. The difference between people who are really excellent at something and people who are maybe not as excellent at something isn't how many mistakes they've made.
00:15:01
Speaker
In fact, I would say the people who are really excellent at something have probably made a lot more mistakes because they've been doing it longer. The difference is actually the people who are really excellent have learned from those mistakes. In other words, the more mistakes you make, the more you have to learn.
00:15:17
Speaker
Absolutely. The thing is like you don't remember the things that you did perfectly because you did them perfectly. So there's nothing about it to stick in your head if perfect is an idea. But all of the things that I have, you know, things when I was in PT school that I messed up on exam, I never messed up again, right? Or
00:15:35
Speaker
you know, to your point about teaching, these errors are things that I never did again, you'll see why. But to your point about like in the trenches versus in the lab, you know, there is sort of this self created hierarchy of I'm the kind of teacher who doesn't teach group classes anymore. Maybe I do privates, but I teach workshops, I train teachers like I have
00:16:00
Speaker
ascended to this higher level of teaching is sort of the like conceptually and there is something about that where it's like Yeah, you you think of yourself as sort of the general because you're teaching the troops and the troops are the ones out there like leading the masses or whatever But I I agree. I don't think there's
00:16:20
Speaker
inherently, like that's really attached. It's a capitalist argument because that's attached to this idea of your value, that your value is now such that you can go to a yoga journal conference and command a 300 person class or something like that, right? Your fame, your notoriety, your social media following, all of that is a direct
00:16:45
Speaker
uh indication of how good of a teacher you are and if you're some level of if you've achieved some heightened level of skill as a teacher then it's almost like you they don't people or some people think that you shouldn't then still be teaching your monday 6 p.m class anymore like that's not for you the number of teachers that i know who are beyond excellent
00:17:10
Speaker
And who, if I named them by name, maybe three people listening to this podcast would know who they were is a lot, right? So, you know, we don't, the things that get rewarded
00:17:25
Speaker
when it comes to being famous as a yoga teacher and that then propel you into this like, I'm not in the trenches anymore place, have a lot to do with like, well, do you have a PR company that's promoting you and you have a social media manager that's like, they're not the most brilliant teachers necessarily. Some of them are, some of them are, and some of them were just kind of like right place, right time, right skin tone, right face, right body.
00:17:51
Speaker
Right. You know, and kind of got themselves moved into that position. This is not sour grapes. I am not like I don't everybody who's famous like good for you.
00:18:01
Speaker
Great. And people who aren't teaching weekly classes or privates, also good for you because probably what's happened is that you've reorganized your schedule to make it work for the ways that you do enjoy teaching and or the ways that you are able to make money as a teacher. And maybe you're a better workshop teacher than you are a class teacher. Some people are very much that.
00:18:25
Speaker
But it's not a, I think the definition is really like, there's not one skill that's better than the other. And the goal, you know, if you think about your teaching as a career, if you kind of, you know, zoom out and look, for some people, the goal is to get to that level of like teaching stuff. And for other people, it isn't. And it's not like, it doesn't have to be. Your goal should be to like work in a way that feels exciting to you, that you enjoy that,
00:18:53
Speaker
keeps you refreshed in your teaching, that keeps you excited about what you're doing. And so maybe for you that is being a workshop teacher or a presenter. And maybe you got to that level and you're like, you know what? I miss teaching a group class. I like a woman, you know. So I think that's part of the story as well is like really allowing yourself to, to kind of do some self-inquiry and figure out what do I really love about this job and how do I, cause that's one of the things that's great about it is you can kind of
00:19:22
Speaker
manipulate the parameters of the job to suit you. If you don't like teaching corporate classes, you don't have to. If you don't like teaching privates, you don't have to. So I think that's the more nuanced is like it's not a one is better than the other. It's more like, how do you pick the path that best suits you for your own longevity? Yeah, absolutely. And it might also change too, right? Yeah.
Humor in Teaching Mistakes
00:19:50
Speaker
Cool. Well, let's start telling our oopsie stories from the teaching trenches. Who wants to go first? Neither one of us are raising our hands. You're in charge. You're in charge. This is your pod and your episode. So whatever you want to do. Sarah, you go first. I'm going first? OK.
00:20:08
Speaker
So I have recounted this story before and, um, Laura and I actually even filmed this story. We're going to do a little thing and then it didn't end up happening. So I don't think anyone on the podcast has heard, if you only know me through the podcast, you probably have not heard this story before. Yeah. We, we share, we, we recorded these stories to share with our mailing list, right? We did. Did we ever share this embarrassing story? No. Okay. So.
00:20:34
Speaker
Great. We'll share it here. We'll share it here. And then maybe randomly, if you're on our mailing list down the road, you'll get it. You'll get it again. What if I slap her? Okay. So this week when, cast your mind back, picture it. I'm just trying to remember what year it was. That's why there's a pause. Probably 2006. 2005, 2006. I was a brand new teacher. Yeah.
00:20:56
Speaker
And this was at Jiva Mukti in New York. And we talk about Jiva Mukti quite a bit in an earlier episode about somatic dominance, if it's not a style that you're familiar with and you want to hear more about what my experience was like. I'm not going into any of that stuff today, but the thing with Jiva Mukti Yoga is that it was known for these very vigorous, borderline aggressive, hands-on adjustments.
00:21:21
Speaker
And the way that we were taught to teach a Jiva Mukti style class was there was some demonstration of some poses sometimes, but not really. The understanding was that everyone kind of knew what was happening. There was a format to the class where you were allowed to kind of bring in a few things here and there, but certain things had to happen. Like they had, I think it was like 13 things that had to happen in a class. And so I was teaching a group class and doing what I usually did, which was,
00:21:51
Speaker
as I'm teaching the pose, I'm going around, I'm like talking to the room about certain things like where to put this body part or bring this around here or whatever. And at the same time, I'm doing manual adjustments on people in the poses. So the pose that everyone was in was Marichasana 3, which is that seated spinal twist where you've got one knee up and that foot's on the other side of your thigh and the other leg is tucked in by your butt, right?
00:22:17
Speaker
You're kind of a little bit of like pretzel-y legs and then you use your arms and you twist yourself around. So that was the pose. And the adjustment that we had learned in training was that you stabilize the pelvis. I mean, as I'm saying it, I'm laughing because it's like such force shit. Nothing about what this is stabilizes anything. But anyway, you put your foot on the person's thigh
00:22:43
Speaker
So let's say, for example, if you were in this pose, I just really want to paint a picture for people. If you were in the pose and you were twisting to the right, you would have your right knee bent into your chest and your right foot over on the outside of your left thigh, and you would have your left foot tucked up against your butt. Okay? So in that situation, the person's rotating to the right. The adjustment is the teacher puts their foot on the left thigh.
00:23:09
Speaker
and supposedly pins the left thigh and thigh bone to the ground. And then you use your hands on their upper body to increase the rotation. Got it. So that was the idea. So I was like going down a row of people and I was doing like pin the thigh, rotate, pin the thigh, rotate. And I'm not really looking at what I'm doing because, you know, apart from like, just like once you know what you're doing, you get general,
00:23:38
Speaker
you know, glance at a body like where is this in space, you know what to do. So I did it and then I go to put my foot on the next person's leg. And in my immediate reaction is that's not muscle. That's not a lot like I don't know what I'm stepping on right now, but it does not like what I usually feel when I'm stepping on. Now I'm embarrassed as I'm about to tell this. So I look down and
00:24:07
Speaker
It was a male student. And so what had happened because of the severity of the crossing of the legs is that his penis and his testicles were on top of his thigh. But because I was so accustomed to doing this to women, it wasn't even a consideration to me that perhaps there might be something else there that's not a leg.
00:24:28
Speaker
So without thinking, I put my foot down and I'm like, I mean, this happens in like a split second. I put my foot, I'm like, that feels weird. I look down, I see what I've done and I immediately pull my foot off. Right? Yes. Thankfully, the man, he would have been in every right to say, what the hell are you doing? Right. But thankfully he didn't, I don't know if he felt like
00:24:53
Speaker
He was protecting me or protecting himself. He didn't want to bring attention to the fact that he's the one who's got his penis stepped on. But the problem now is at this point, what I have done is I've gone up to this person. I stepped on their penis and then I took my foot off their penis. So now I have a problem because I can't leave. I can't just come over, put my foot on his penis and or testicles.
00:25:21
Speaker
quickly take my foot off and walk away. Like that cannot be the entirety of the interaction with this person, right? So I have no choice, I believe.
00:25:31
Speaker
but to actually fix what I'm doing and do the adjustment correctly. Okay. Wow. Right? Can't just be like, from this person's perspective, it can't be like, how was yoga class? Oh, it was fine. At one point the teacher came over, put her foot on my junk, took it off and walked away. That can't be. Right. You're trying to fix it. So inside my head, I mean, I'm in full panic mode inside my head, but I, you know, have been trained enough in like,
00:25:56
Speaker
you know, performance face that I'm just continuing on with whatever I'm saying to the room about breathing or who the fuck knows at that point. So then I had to move my foot down his leg onto his leg. Right. Put my foot down. Secure the thigh. Do the twist. Listen to the sound of my echoing screams inside my own head until I feel like it's been enough time that I've done this adjustment. Take my hands and my foot off of his body.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. And walk away. Right. And teach the rest of the class. And I now think that's really funny. Yeah. But at the time, I did not think that was really funny. I have a question. Do you feel like you sort of fix the situation by going through with the actual adjustment? Or do you think it would have been better to just walk away?
00:26:48
Speaker
I still think it's better that I went in and did what I was supposed to do, because then that then clarifies what happened previously as an error. Right. If I didn't, then it would seem like he would have grounds to go complain, because it seemed like what I did was came over, touched his penis with my foot, and then walked away. Right. Which in the context of nothing makes no sense, right? Yeah. I felt like at least doing it correctly showed that my initial foot placement was a mistake.
00:27:19
Speaker
Gotcha. Do you think it would have been better just to walk away? No, I mean, I don't. But I don't know. See, like, because I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't there. Yeah.
00:27:32
Speaker
Well, let's say it was you, and somebody came in, they were doing a twist, and the first thing they did was accidentally put a hand on your boob, and then they quickly took their hand away. That was the only amount that they had touched you, and then they walked away. Really? Yeah. Okay. When you put it like that. That would be way more weird than if they then put their hand and put it on your shoulder and did the thing. When you put it like that, it becomes clear in my mind. I think you did the most right thing in that situation.
00:28:00
Speaker
Yeah. It was a series of poor choices. It was an honest mistake. It was. Now, okay, so this error is one that was just basically a slip up in terms of your execution of some technique, right? Yeah.
00:28:19
Speaker
You knew how to do this technique. You knew it so well. And you applied it so freely that you could simultaneously not look at someone and direct an entire room verbally while giving it. And then, oopsies, you actually miscalculated where your foot needed to go. And you probably wouldn't have had you looked, right? Yes, 100%. If I had looked, I would have not put my foot on his junk. Did this change the way that you gave all hands-on adjustments or that hands-on adjustment going forward?
00:28:47
Speaker
I think it panicked me for probably a good couple of weeks and I like stared at everything that I was doing. And then I think I realized that part of what happened was in that particular position, I didn't know where a male genitalia was going to
00:29:04
Speaker
end up. Right. And then after that I knew, and I have a feeling probably what I did from that point on is I never adjusted a man in that position again. Okay, so yes. You did make a big change to your teaching going forward. Now here's another question. That was like your takeaway at the time at that stage of your learning curve as a teacher. Yeah.
00:29:26
Speaker
Now, at this stage of where you are now, I know sometimes you still teach yoga workshops, right? So would you, in any world, make this mistake again? This exact mistake? Or let's say this, this exact mistake? And or a similar mistake? Could it happen again? I mean, it could always happen. Right? Never say never. I don't do merely as
00:29:56
Speaker
aggressive hands on adjustments anymore. So my cueing tends to be like the me putting my hands on you is you know, the way I was told what you've looked is you're putting your hands on someone to physically move them
00:30:15
Speaker
you know, with your strength. And now I'm less like that's my last option on the ring of option like rungs of options like I go I'll do it verbally, I'll put a hand onto a body part to highlight it like I might touch, you know, with a couple of fingers and be like, Can you move this hip
00:30:34
Speaker
backwards towards me or something like that. I'm not just taking someone's body and shoving it into a position. And if they're really, really not understanding what I'm trying to make them do, or I might say something like, okay, let me move you, and then I'll move them. And then I'll be like, okay, do you feel how that's different than where you were? Something like that. So I'm not doing adjustments where I'm not looking at what I'm doing anymore. That's a big part of it. Okay. Now, my next question is why do you no longer do the types of adjustments you did back then?
00:31:14
Speaker
Initially, when I stopped doing it, some of it was to do with my own experience of having physical adjustments done on me and the kind of power dynamic of that. Some of it was I saw and heard stories of people getting hurt with this aggressive hands-on adjustment. So that means you're pushing past someone's limit. As I learned more anatomy, more kinesiology, I
00:31:27
Speaker
because I know more.
00:31:39
Speaker
stopped valuing this kind of overpressure, I'm pushing past someone's limit as a way to teach anything. And as I learned more about things like motor learning and how bodies, and proprioception, how bodies know where they are in space, I started to see that ultimately, the bigger value for the person in terms of understanding their own anatomy,
00:32:01
Speaker
is to use a lot of other tools like the way that I just described with like light touch and giving them an external cue like move this body part to this part of the room where they are, it's got far greater value to them and they're going to learn a lot more from it and they're going to actually have an improved proprioceptive sense of their bodies.
00:32:23
Speaker
Now, a lot of people, I remember you telling a story, season one, about you had a private client who just really loved the feeling of those hands-on adjustments, right? So a lot of people, you know, a lot of people who did and probably still do practice ji mukti do it because they like that feeling. And the people that like that feeling tend to be bendier people for whom that's a good feeling, where it's like, oh, yeah, I get that last bit of stretch that I can't quite get myself. I don't know that that doesn't
00:32:50
Speaker
Apart from feeling good in the moment, I don't think there's an inherent learning value to it. I think it's more like getting a nice massage. Great. So my next question is, if it took you one slip up to become more, I would say, attentive to how you're giving this adjustment, we could call that learning from the mistake. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. But how long did it take you to come to the conclusion that actually that whole category
00:33:18
Speaker
of hands-on adjustments might actually just be something that you could retire as a way that you teach. How long did it take you to get to that point? That's another level of learning from that mistake, right? A hundred percent. You can be like, oh, that was a whoopsies, but just keep doing whatever you were doing and just chalk it up to like, oh, I never experienced doing this on a man.
00:33:43
Speaker
It was, you know, I pretty quickly obsoleted myself in the Jiva world because I pretty quickly was like when I, I mean, by pretty quickly, what do I mean? I mean, maybe like.
00:33:57
Speaker
Within two years of teaching Jiva Mukti, I was already looking outside Jiva Mukti for what I thought were better yoga styles. And within that was where I started to be like, okay, this kind of super aggressive hands-on thing is maybe not so hot. I was still teaching Jiva Mukti, so I was still doing it somewhat.
00:34:17
Speaker
Sometimes I think it's just a matter of recognizing that not everybody in the world does it this way. Yeah, the idea that there was a different way for it to be was like, oh, wait, what? And then pretty quickly, as I started doing that, Jeeva Mukti invited me to stop teaching for them. And I can tell you the exact reason why. I remember being called into the office by Carlos, who was the manager at the time. And he told me that people weren't sweating enough in my class. Oh, right. Because the class wasn't as vinyasa-y and sweaty and repetitive.
00:34:47
Speaker
because I was now teaching other stuff, more alignment kind of things. And I was like, okay, that's fair. But he said, you know, people, there needs to be, for the electricity to spark, there needs to be the water of the sweat or whatever. And I was like... I think you mixed your metaphors. Yeah. And I was like, isn't that supposed to not be in the pool when there's light in it? Isn't that how you get electrocuted? Yeah. And so I was sort of like, and this is why I don't really do this anymore, is because these are the kind of answers that you people give
00:35:18
Speaker
things like this. If you had stopped at the like, people aren't really sweaty, I would have been like, sure, because I wasn't doing 10 surya namaskar A and 5 surya namaskar B at the beginning of every talk, which is what a lot of people did. I 100% agree with you. People are not sweating as much, but the lightning and the electricity and the water,
00:35:41
Speaker
Oh, dude. So he was basically like, you either have to change back to how we teach or leave. And I was like, the clearer path and the one that I'm obviously on is the leaving one. Yeah. So that's what I get. So that's my story. Now it's time for Laurel's story. I hope it's the one that I think it's going to be about the shoulder stand. Sarah, can we do our bone density mini course ad?
00:36:09
Speaker
Yes. Can we talk about it? We can talk about it. It's our free bone density mini course. So what happens in this mini course? What do people get? Oh my God. They get so much. Yes. So this mini, it's a four part mini course that you're going to get in four daily installments as an email. It's about an hour and a half of content. It's a lot. We're giving you a lot.
00:36:34
Speaker
We always over-deliver. We give and we give and we give. We're givers. What our bone density mini-course is about is really teaching you the ins and outs of lifting with a barbell. The reason why we have sort of come to this conclusion that barbelling is the way to go for bone density is
00:36:51
Speaker
the weight of what you need to lift. And even if you're like, look, I'm a total beginner, I'm out here working with like eight pound dumbbells, believe it or not, you are going to outgrow that stuff really, really quickly. And so the best way to spend as little money and save as much time and energy is to get into barbells.
00:37:09
Speaker
Part of what we're showing you is how to do these three classic lifts, the deadlift, the squat, and the chest press. As well as some ways to regress and progress those lifts with barbells. And also then how to use these things that you may have heard of or maybe never have heard of called like a 1RM chart and an RPE and an RIR to help you determine what weight you should be lifting that will put it in the bone density improving category.
00:37:38
Speaker
Right. So we're going to teach you how to not just do three sets of 10. In this mini course, we actually teach you how to do a buildup. Okay. So that's where you actually put less weight on the bar and work at a lower intensity and you do fewer reps to kind of warm up. Then you put a little bit more weight on the bar. You do a few reps to warm up even more. And then you put your working load on the bar and you do however many
00:38:03
Speaker
repetitions of a particular exercise that you're doing. And you can actually use this warm up set or build up strategy for really any piece of equipment. So it's helpful. This course, even if you don't have barbells yet, if you want to feel more comfortable in the gym, like when you go to your gym or when you go to your hotel gym and they happen to have barbells, you don't want to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is a great course to give you some familiarity with the terminology, with the equipment, with how to do these basic lifts.
00:38:32
Speaker
and with how to do a proper build up to a heavier load, heavier than the loads that you would lift with three sets of 10. Because I remember when I first started lifting weights, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I would just pick up something that felt like pretty heavy. And then I would lift it up and down a bunch of times. And then I would be like, I guess that's right. And then I would leave the gym, right? I had no idea that any of sort of like training parameters. And in fact, the whole concept of training parameters
00:39:00
Speaker
sounded like it was for bros or it wasn't something that I found interesting or thought it applied to me. Right, because it can be intimidating. The language around it can be sort of intimidating. So this mini course is actually going to give you that baseline knowledge to be able to use barbells, to be able to understand how to use a training load chart or a 1RM chart, to understand how to use
00:39:25
Speaker
ways of measuring exertion put them all together to be able to really reasonably, really appropriately warm up for and work toward a heavy set of these exercises which will potentially be stimulating to your bones, right? To cause your bones to build themselves stronger over time. And not only your bones, it's going to stimulate your muscles to become stronger. And I was actually just having a conversation with a patient of mine this morning
00:39:55
Speaker
And I was bragging to him about how when I first started deadlifting, it was 70 pounds and now my deadlift is 145 pounds. And I feel pretty good about that. That's amazing, Sarah. Thank you. 145 pounds. Yep. Okay. So, cause I was just editing. It was like two episodes ago in the barbell episode, you were like, my deadlift is a hundred pounds. That was February, right? When we recorded that.
00:40:17
Speaker
Oh my gosh. So Sarah has added almost 50% more load to the bar in, it's June, it's June, four months. So this is what I mean, that barbells, there's no ceiling to how much she can grow with the equipment that she has now. Whereas with kettlebells, with dumbbells,
00:40:42
Speaker
You just keep accumulating more and more and more. It gets expensive and it starts honestly to take up more space than the setup for barbells. So to be able to say like in a few short months that I've gotten that much stronger feels really good. And it's not just about, I mean bone density, absolutely, but there's so many other things that are going to, like your mood gets improved and your outlook on life and your ability to go into the store and grab
00:41:08
Speaker
the heavy bag of dog food and put it on your shoulder and walk out of there. And when they say, do you need help getting into your car? You're like, nope. A lot of that kind of stuff is so important. And for women, it's so minimized. The fact of the matter is there are certain adaptations, certain changes to your body that you can only make with heavy loads.
00:41:27
Speaker
you cannot make them with moderate loads. And it tends to be things like tendon stiffness, which is just another way of saying a stronger tendon, bone density, bones that are less likely to fracture, and even so much as load-specific balance. Load-specific balance, meaning you will have better balance under heavier loads. So think like
00:41:52
Speaker
When you pick up your large five-year-old child, well, all five-year-old children are relatively large compared to how they began.
00:42:00
Speaker
You were talking about a kid who's maybe 45, 50 pounds, right? You're picking up your five-year-old child and simultaneously carrying something in the other arm and then walking up a flight of stairs. If you've been lifting heavy weights, like I'm talking like 90% of your one arm, this is like a load you can't lift more than five, six times for a while and you've been doing squats and deadlifts, it's much less likely that you're going to be knocked off balance even while this kid is having a tantrum.
00:42:29
Speaker
or the steps are particularly slippery or someone left a toy in the steps, right? So like there are adaptations that you simply will not see because strength is specific, okay? All strength is specific. You will not see these adaptations until you start lifting heavy. And so this is why, again, like
00:42:50
Speaker
Barbells are not the only tool that we can use to lift heavy for a while, but at a certain point for certain lifts like the squat, which is one of the most useful exercises you can do for functional strength for the long term, for longevity, the squat.
00:43:08
Speaker
there's a certain point at which most people are no longer going to be able to continue to drive adaptation stored maximum strength in the squat with something like dumbbells and kettlebells. And so the purpose of this course is really just to help you become more familiar with the barbell to make it less scary, not make it seem like it's something that's just for young people or bros or young bros or athletes or bro young athletes. Because Sarah and I, I don't know if you've noticed, we're none of those things. I'm none of those things.
00:43:38
Speaker
None of those things is us, but it's such a great tool. I had a patient in the clinic the other day who I've been trying to, she's an older woman, she's in her seventies and we tried to do a little bit of strength training one time and it didn't go so great and I was like, and then I left it alone for a while.
00:43:56
Speaker
And then she brought it back up. And so I started, I used the technique bar with her. It's a 15 pound barbell. It's the right weight for her. We did deadlifts and we did squats. And at the end she was like, this is fun. I love this. And I was like fist pumping and like high fiving myself. And that's happened to me more than once with patients where I start to introduce them to the barbell and they're like, yeah, I feel good. I feel strong, right? Amazing.
00:44:22
Speaker
That's an incredibly valuable thing to give yourself. So you should 100% sign up for this bone density mini guide. It's going to show you everything you need to know about lifting so that you can go into a gym confidently with our equipment guide. You also then get all of the equipment that we suggest you get, all of our hyperlinks and pictures and explanations. And so if you're so motivated, you can set up your own gym at home to start doing these lifts with, right?
00:44:52
Speaker
And I don't see any reason. There's no reason why someone shouldn't get it, in my opinion. Yeah, you definitely want this material. Also, Sarah and I, you know how we are on the podcast where we say random things that are, I mean, some people think we're funny. We're in the same room in this course. She came to Alabama and we filmed it. And there are some moments. There's one moment where Sarah's sitting in my cage getting ready to demo the bench press.
00:45:20
Speaker
And she puts her hands up on the poles of the cage and she looks straight at the camera and like cranes her neck through and she goes, help me.
00:45:31
Speaker
I can't believe you kept that in. Oh yeah, that stayed. All that stuff stayed because honestly, if I have my top complaint about the fitness industry is that it's just, from my vantage point at times, it appears as though there are a lot of really swole bros taking themselves way too fucking seriously. Oh my God. Way too fucking seriously.
00:45:55
Speaker
so seriously. So we're going to change the tone a little bit on barbelling for you. That's right. Okay. Sign up and we'll see you there. Cool.
00:46:17
Speaker
What I love about the story is that Laurel is still horrified by this story. Like when she tested the thing at the beginning about like, do you ever just think about a teaching moment and you just are like, you know, folding the laundry and it's like doused with shame. I would like to take this opportunity to intervene. We're going to have a little mini intervention with Laurel right now. What I want you to try to do is the next time you remember it, instead of allowing the normal cascade of like,
00:46:46
Speaker
horror and shame to envelop you on a Tuesday at 11 for no reason, I think you say, that was silly, wasn't it? And then you put your brain somewhere else. Look, I think actually the more self-realized thing to do is to be experiencing shame and go,
00:47:06
Speaker
You know what? This is just who I am as a person. This is how I process my experiences. I can experience shame in this moment and still be a whole person. Yes, but there's no reason for you to be experiencing shame in this moment.
00:47:22
Speaker
There is, though. There kind of is. Well, let's tell the story. Let me tell the story. No, but hang on. Sorry. I'm sorry. But if I'm allowed to step on somebody's penis and not feel bad about it anymore, you're 100% allowed to do what you did in this story and not feel bad about it anymore. Well, maybe this is why we're friends, right? Why? Because I'm nicer to you than you are to yourself? No, because your perspective is different than mine and therefore rounds me out a little bit.
00:47:48
Speaker
Fair. All right. Let's hear the story. I'm still going to continue to be horrified by my past actions randomly. That is just going to happen. I'm going to start texting you random times and be like, do you remember that time that this thing, that story happened? And I'm going to do that immersion, what's it called? Exposure therapy, where I just make you think about it so much that you no longer, you can't feel shame around it anymore because you've run out of shame.
00:48:13
Speaker
Well, I have to say, since telling this story once and having it recorded and now telling it again and recording it, it definitely is losing its power. But I still, I swear to God two days ago, I thought of it. I was like, oh God, I cannot believe that I let that happen. Okay.
00:48:31
Speaker
All right, so I was a new teacher, and I had just taken over this very early morning class. It was like a 7.15 a.m. class at Union Square, if anyone from that group of people that were my diehard regulars is listening, what's up? So this happened in this class where, again, I had probably just finished my 300-hour teacher training a couple of months ago. Probably, it was around 2009, okay.
00:48:59
Speaker
So I'm teaching all of the postures that I've been taught to teach and I'm doing hands-on adjustments for the postures that I've been taught to do these particular hands-on adjustments for. And so I was trained in the yoga work style. And actually yoga works is not that big on hands-on adjustments, but they do teach a few. And this particular adjustment
00:49:21
Speaker
was actually taught to me by my mentor and she said, she said, I would not teach this until you've had a lot of experience practicing it on like maybe fellow teachers. You've received it a lot of times. Like she was like, this is not one to just whip out and try. And you know, she was also like, you may never want to teach this one because it whatever like it's it's hard to teach.
00:49:46
Speaker
And it's an adjustment given in shoulder stand, which is already a really challenging pose. Can I break in for a second and just say like, cause I was also, I was, this is an adjustment that I also learned as a teacher. It's freaking hard to do really hard, but I've, I received it. I received it and I loved the way it felt in my body. Okay. So this is where I'm coming from. It's like, oh, this felt so good for me.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah. And I watched my mentor give this adjustment to people. I was like, she's so good at giving this adjustment. I really wanted to be like her. Sure. Is the time of this story, how would you estimate, how many times would you guess that you had given this adjustment previously? Never. Oh, yes. This was the first time? Listen, this is what I'm saying, okay? I deserve to feel shame. No, no, no, no. It just makes it more funny.
00:50:38
Speaker
No, I had given it maybe once or twice in a teacher training scenario. With other teachers, never on the lay person. Sure. Never unleashed it on the gen-pop. This is a group of regulars. Already, I have this core group of regulars. It's awesome. One day, this new person comes in and it's the only guy in the room. Again, another guy.
00:51:04
Speaker
And he comes in, and he doesn't look like he's done a whole lot of yoga. And it's like a level two class, right? So it's supposed to be intermediate, whatever. You know, this may be the only time that he could try a class at YubaWorks. He might be new, right? So he comes in, he's practicing, and I'm teaching a class towards shoulder stand, obviously. So the way I have people set up for shoulder stand is how I learned in teacher training, where you put two or three blankets down.
00:51:26
Speaker
If you lie down with your head off the blanket, your shoulders are on the blanket. The idea is like, this is supposed to be a safer way to do shoulder stand. That's questionable. But anyway, everybody comes up in a plow. So your legs are over your head. You're basically on your shoulders. You're looking up at your thighs. And then you walk your upper arm bones, your shoulder blades together on your back. You squeeze your elbows together. You put your palms on your back ribs, and then you lift your legs up.
00:51:51
Speaker
You walk your hands towards your upper back, closer to your neck to help your rib cage get more vertical, help your legs get more vertical. And so, okay, if I'm right, this guy is in a level two class. He's trying to do shoulder stand. He's doing shoulder stand on blankets, maybe shoulder stand for the first time, probably blankets for the first time. He's doing everything I'm asking to his very best ability.
00:52:19
Speaker
He comes up into shoulder sand and he's making a giant C with his body. His upper back is flexed. His hands are closer to his butt. His legs are more over his face. Honestly, that might be the most appropriate. Looking back, in retrospect, that was probably a more appropriate range of motion for him to even be exploring this pose in. Of course, as a newer teacher, I'm like,
00:52:44
Speaker
Nope, that needs to be better and I'm going to fix it. The way I'm going to fix it is I'm going to do this hands-on adjustment on this guy. This is what I think is a good idea. His back is to me because when you give this adjustment, you walk up to the student with their back to you. I think I did manage to peek my head around his legs and go, I'm going to help you.
00:53:14
Speaker
And he's like, uh, okay. And so I'm back behind him again. And I step my feet onto the blankets where his upper arms are, his elbows are, and I start to wedge his elbows closer together.
00:53:28
Speaker
Then I bring his legs over my shoulders and I fold his knees over my shoulder. So now he's like, you know how you can hang upside down from the monkey bars as a child or as an adult? Okay, so the idea behind this adjustment is that picture someone in shoulder stand.
00:53:44
Speaker
you walk up to the backside of their body you have to latch their knees over the top of your shoulder okay because then basically as you walk toward their body their knees get higher up in the air you're basically lifting their body up on your shoulders then your feet are alongside their outer elbows and you're like walking their arms closer in and then you can like use your knee to like
00:54:09
Speaker
bring their rib cage more upright and it's all supposed to just be so helpful and wonderful and like
00:54:16
Speaker
Okay, so this guy starts to seize up and get super nervous and like he's like in freeze mode. Like he went into, you know, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Like this guy's in freeze mode. So I suddenly start giving him verbal, verbal directives. Like, just let your knees bend. Let, let me lift your body up. I'm going to walk your elbow. No, no, no. No, no. I'm trying to push your elbows under you. No, no. Let me move your elbow.
00:54:44
Speaker
And then, like, my tone goes from, like, directive to pleading. I'm like, no, please, just relax. Let me help you. Please. Oh, wow. Now listen. Now listen. Now my head is between his knees. I'm above him looking down at him. Can you picture it? He will not make eye contact with me. He will not look at me.
00:55:10
Speaker
And I'm trying to talk to him, like I'm trying to like exude this like calm authority. And I can see that everything is just completely falling apart. And that my whole idea about how this was going to go has completely backfired on me. He's having a terrible, terrible experience. He's not enjoying this class. This moment might go down as like the single worst thing that's ever happened to him in a group class in his entire life.
00:55:39
Speaker
And I'm responsible for it. So I was like, you know what? I think we should just keep working on this at another time. I extract myself from the adjustment and I back away quietly. I'm crying. And I pretend for the remainder of the class that it never happened.
00:56:07
Speaker
Because it's the only thing I can do to keep going, to keep teaching the class, is to basically just block that out. Yeah. That guy never came back to my class again. I'm not surprised. Yeah, me either.
00:56:23
Speaker
I would be surprised if he did come back. Well, yes, but it's got nothing to do with you as a person. It was just like the incorrect application. But listen, it does have something to do with me as a person because here's the deal. I tend to be a little overconfident as a person.
00:56:41
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Which has served me well. It has served me well, but sometimes it is not a great trait. Well, okay. So let's back up because I have some follow-up questions slash thoughts, and then I have a question about that specifically. But so first of all, the thing with that adjustment that
00:57:03
Speaker
never really occurred to me when I was taught to do it. But, you know, if you, again, if you listen to that episode or if you know anything about Jeeva Mukti, you've got your hands all over people in, you know, probably questionably appropriate ways. It is so wildly inappropriate that you as the yoga teacher have your head between a person's knees
00:57:32
Speaker
And as you look down at them doing a shoulder stand, you're also looking straight down at their genitals. Your head is like mere feet, if that, depending on how the person is, from their genitalia.
00:57:46
Speaker
Let's say the person's wearing like loose shorts or something, right? So anyway, that's- There is a world, so here's the thing. I think there is a world where that adjustment is okay. I think it's a world where someone has hopefully not just come to your class for the first time with very little yoga experience. I bet if you tried that adjustment on one of your regular students in that room on somebody, I bet if you had tried it on someone else, it would have gone much better. Or even if it hadn't, you wouldn't have felt as bad about it.
00:58:15
Speaker
Maybe, maybe, because here's the thing, that adjustment is, it's so like, they have to give so much trust to you. Yes, they have to relax. And they have to like, be very familiar with the posture. Yep.
00:58:32
Speaker
So I don't know that it would, it was actually an adjustment that I had no business even trying for like three years. Yes. And this is my second point about it. To your, to your mentor's point about like, this is one that you should practice on other teachers and get really familiar with. And maybe you don't ever want to do this one. I would guess in some, who knows, but I would guess in some trainings, some of these more hands-on aggressive
00:58:58
Speaker
adjustments maybe have been sort of like backburner a little bit. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, this is where we were at this time. Like, yeah, this was totally considered totally fine, right? So like totally normal. But but now like, if let's say if I if there was a teacher training, where somebody was like, I really want to have I want to I really want to teach the new trainees this hands on adjustment, how would you recommend I do it? I would be I would literally be like, you tell them they're not allowed to do it until they've been a teacher for a year.
00:59:28
Speaker
I would have such strict parameters. I mean, she kind of did say that. She definitely really warned us against it. It wasn't a rule of the training. It was just her recommendation, and it just so happened that you are a confident person. Also, I don't necessarily know that that rule
00:59:47
Speaker
It applies, right? Because let's say you're working with a private student for a while, like six months, right? And this person is really comfortable in shoulder stand. They love the pose. They always want to work on the pose. They want ways to access the pose that keep them engaged and that are interesting.
01:00:09
Speaker
you start with maybe that single person using this adjustment like there's that trust there's that like and time like there's that time and space with this one on one context where you can be like this is the adjustment and you describe it and you show it or you like you have them do the post you're like this is what what would happen we won't do it
01:00:25
Speaker
today, but I want you to kind of get an idea of what it would be like, and then maybe we'll try it like next week or something, right? Where you can really lay the groundwork for them to have their expectations situated in a way where it's not going to be like this completely disorienting experience. Right. Once you're already upside down. I guess my point is like, it's not that there should be some sort of boundaries around it.
01:00:50
Speaker
Like, I don't know, it was, there was nothing about it in my teacher training that I remember where they were like, Hey, this is a complicated one. And, you know, don't do this until you're ready or something. Really? No. Oh, wow. Here's but so so based off of what you asked me, do you think what you did in that situation where you just backed away and said, we'll work on this later?
01:01:11
Speaker
was the right thing to do? Or do you think you should have double down and gone in and tried again? I was saving face. I mean, I don't know if it was the right thing to do. I think if I had tried to not save face and just be sincerely apologetic, look, I just made a really big mistake. I really should not have tried that hands-on adjustment on you. I'm a new teacher.
01:01:30
Speaker
I was told not to use this adjustment until I had more experience with it. I decided to ignore that advice. I don't know. I'm sorry. What new teacher is going in and trying to do anything but seem like a slightly less new teacher? That's what I mean, right? You know what, Sarah? It was my own insecurity about being a new teacher that propelled me to want to do
01:01:54
Speaker
this adjustment that was considered to be more advanced, because I was like, well, I mean, who's, who's the beginner here, I can do this adjustment, right? Like that there's, there's the there's the overconfidence coming in, which I feel like overconfidence can kind of mean one of two things. One, it's like,
01:02:10
Speaker
You don't really, you're not really prepared for like being overconfident. It's like you think you're more capable of facing a situation than you actually are. And one of the reasons it could be that way is that you just don't have enough information about the situation to accurately assess your ability to do it. That's kind of like the Dunning Kruger, right? Where you think, you think you're, you're,
01:02:30
Speaker
You think you're more capable than you are because you actually don't know enough to know how incapable you are. This was a case, I think, of that, but propelled mostly by insecurity, propelled mostly by this need to want to validate myself.
01:02:45
Speaker
and show myself you are further along than you actually are somehow to be on more equal footing with the teachers that I really looked up to. And I wanted, I aspired to be like them. I really admired them. So I feel like it was coming from a place of insecurity, that feeling that it's not quite enough what I'm doing. I'm not enough. I need to do a little bit more to prove myself. Right.
01:03:14
Speaker
So looking back, in the moment, I never ever gave that adjustment again. Really? Ever again? No, never again. Right. I completely just never gave it again, which I'm okay with. I think that's okay. I don't think that was quitting or anything. Wait. No, I have a question though. Do you think if you, let's say in an alternate universe, you had gone on to do it and tried a few more times and had grown successful with it, do you think you would have then
01:03:40
Speaker
potentially not be still shaming yourself about it on Tuesday at 11? For sure. I think I would have gotten much better at it. The thing that I probably would have gotten much better at is selecting the student to give it to. But then everything changed with Me Too and all the stuff that came out about physical abuse and yoga classrooms and sexual abuse and yoga classrooms. I think the other thing that made me, after the Me Too thing happened, the yoga Me Too,
01:04:10
Speaker
happened, the thing that made me actually look back on that and feel extra bad about it was how inappropriate it was for me to be in that position relative to this poor guy.
01:04:21
Speaker
the teacher standing over him with my head between his knees fumbling, fumbling horrifically to do this thing that he has no idea what I'm even trying to do because maybe he hasn't ever done shoulder stand before, right? It made me think about how I overstepped in multiple ways. Listen, I think the part
01:04:43
Speaker
I think we all, I mean, God, if I look back and think about the ways that I've had my hands on people for a good couple of years before I noped my way out of there, there are a lot of things where I'm like, wow, I really, I mean, I stepped on someone's genitals. I mean, that was an accident, but not that we're trying to kind of whitewash the past and be like, oh, but everyone was doing it, it's not my fault. But we hadn't,
01:05:13
Speaker
To some extent, there hadn't been this kind of mass awareness and awakening around like, oh, hey, maybe this is not the worst thing, but maybe this is the sort of slippery slope towards far worse behaviors that are now coming to light in the yoga world. By the way, I don't think you were touching this person in order to then sexually abuse them later. No, I know. No, I mean, no, I was not.
01:05:39
Speaker
which probably felt like really invasive on some level to this guy. Like, yeah, like not cool. I think that there are certain time courses that we have to go through in order to really learn something.
01:05:55
Speaker
and that what we're able to learn from a mistake will change with time because a lot of times the mistakes we commit are systemic in a sense that they're actually a product of a system that we're embedded within and that in some cases actually the system needs to change for us to even be aware
01:06:18
Speaker
of the other dimensions of the mistake we were making. Like we can be aware, like in that moment I was aware of the fact that I was not skillful at administering that adjustment, nor was I skillful at selecting the best student to give it to. But on another level, like years later, I realized that actually consent wasn't something I even really thought about.
01:06:45
Speaker
And now it's something that I can only ever think about that first before I touch somebody, right? 100%. 100%. I don't think I was able to really understand that level of my mistake in how to do better because systemically that just wasn't something that people were considering. It wasn't part of the conversation. It wasn't part of the training by any means, right? So, yeah.
01:07:12
Speaker
And I don't beat myself up about this. And I do think to a certain level, it's hilarious. I think it's extremely hilarious. These mistakes that we make, what we're capable of, the lapses in judgment we're capable of having. Oh, sure.
01:07:31
Speaker
You know, people are so funny, and that's why people are funny, right? It's like we're like the smartest animal, and yet we do the stupidest shit. The dumbest thing. The stupidest shit. And like, I think there's lots to laugh about and not also simultaneously condemn. But I have to say,
01:07:51
Speaker
then I still break out in a sweat of shame. And I'm okay with that too. I'm okay with that too. I'm not okay with that. I want to see if we can get the sweat of shame to go away and just purely in the hilarious category. Okay, let's tell one more story. Can we tell one more story? Can this one be a little bit quicker? I mean, I think
01:08:12
Speaker
We just told these two big stories, but I think I have one more quick story to share, and I feel like we should maybe do an episode like this again at some point in the future. Folks, if you're enjoying this, just leave a review and let us know if you'd like more oopsie stories from the teaching crutches, because I think Sarah and I probably have a good review. Okay, so this much quicker story happened probably
01:08:37
Speaker
four or five years after it was when I first moved to Los Angeles and I was still teaching yoga classes here like weekly yoga classes and it was a group class that I was teaching at the studio that I really liked they had a great vibe and I had a couple of friends who would pretty regularly come and take the class with me and it was a level one class so it was a lot of like when you're in this shape your arm goes here your leg goes here your foot is here put a block under your hand if you need to like it was very much about like
01:09:06
Speaker
Let me teach you the bare bones of these poses. It wasn't like, you know, complicated vinyasa or anything. And so we were doing warrior two.
01:09:14
Speaker
And my two friends were in the front row, because for some reason, that's where they always wanted to be, I think, so they could heckle me when I was born. So the cue that I had learned, as far as where do you put your feet in warrior two, was that your front foot, your feet would line up so that the heel of your front foot, if you drew a line to your back foot, it would cut your back foot in half. It would go to the middle of your foot. And I think that's pretty standard slash classic.
01:09:42
Speaker
Sometimes people say it's the back heel to the front heel or something. But anyway, that was what I had learned. So I was on a little bit of my autopilot, language autopilot that we get on when we said things many, many times. And so I went, I attempted, I attempted to say, your front foot cuts your back foot in half. But what I actually said was your front foot cuts your back foot in half.
01:10:12
Speaker
And immediately, my two friends' eyes just went completely round, like gigantic round saucer eyeballs. And in that moment, I was like, I either admit that I just did that, which maybe in another circumstance, I would have.
01:10:34
Speaker
But I was new enough to this studio and I really liked them. And I didn't want the students to go talk to the owner and be like, she said the C word. So I just pretended I hadn't said it. And I just barreled on through. I was like, and then you were going to find some lift in your low belly, your arms reach out, shoulder height, gaze is forward. All the cues that I knew. I was just like, if I just keep talking and the more I talk,
01:10:58
Speaker
The more words I put out there, the less we're paying attention to what I said. Let me just say as many more words as I can, as fast as I can, and get myself as far away from that word in terms of word count. So that was my solution to that moment. That was pretty funny. And afterwards they were like,
01:11:13
Speaker
Literally, I couldn't look at my friends for the rest. I had to purposely not look at them for the rest of the class because I knew I was going to just die laughing and then it would have been all over. As soon as I knew, if I broke the seal on laughing, that was it. I was a goner. Then it would be like cats out of the bag. You definitely said cats. Yeah, for sure. Then I'm admitting that I did that. You're admitting it. Yeah, you're admitting it. Yeah, so nothing. Then at the end, we all fell over laughing for about half an hour.
01:11:42
Speaker
oh god that's my one i like that one i've and anytime i said that in the future i'd be like your front foot cuts like overemphasize the word and really
01:11:55
Speaker
Made sure I didn't add an extra letter. I love it. What about you? What's your quickie? Okay. Yeah. Mine is a little bit about autopilot as well. I volunteer to teach a private to someone who won an auction for a fundraiser. I went to the fundraiser and it was at this really fancy building and some really expensive
01:12:20
Speaker
part of Manhattan and everyone was dressed up in ball gowns and I was invited because it was going to sell the gift. It's like a one hour private with Laurel Beaversdorf, a yoga teacher. These are wealthy people and they bid and some gentleman wins the bid and he gives me his address
01:12:45
Speaker
And we set up a time. So the day comes for the session. I don't know this person at all. He's never been to any of my classes. He's a complete stranger. I show up at his three-story brownstone in the 70s in Manhattan. So if you don't live in Manhattan, you don't know anything about Manhattan real estate, this is a very large house. I walk in. I've never been into such a big house in Manhattan.
01:13:15
Speaker
I'm immediately intimidated and afraid because I'm like, what the fuck? Like what? This guy, so his whole upper story of his house, his brownstone is devoted to being his gym. He's older. He's probably like 70, 75, okay? So I also don't have a lot of teaching experience.
01:13:36
Speaker
I've probably been teaching for about as much time as when I gave this horrible adjustment in shoulder stand. So I'm like, okay. But I had experience teaching one-on-one. So I was capable of coming up with stuff on the fly. So we had a little conversation and he told me, okay, I'm in great shape. I work out all the time. The one thing is that I have terrible arthritis in my hands.
01:14:00
Speaker
And he showed me his hands. He's like, they're swollen. The knuckles are swollen. I can't fully open my hands. He had done yoga before. So he was like, I don't remember even what we decided we were going to work on, but it was very clear to me at the beginning of the session that his hands hurt him and that, you know, I should take that into account. Well,
01:14:21
Speaker
I went on with the session and started teaching and kind of slipped into autopilot mode. And the thing about being a new teacher, which I think many people can identify with is that you don't have that many tools yet. So the tools that you do have, you lean very heavily on them because otherwise there's nothing to say or there's nothing to do. Like you only have like a couple of things to draw from. Yeah. So he's in down dog.
01:14:45
Speaker
And I look at his hands and they're like coming up off of the floor. Oh no. Uh-huh. And I get down on my hands and knees and I put my palms on top of his hands and I press them down because that's what I know how to do. And I was taught like when students can't ground their hands, a really helpful thing to do is to press their hands down. Oh man. With your hands.
01:15:10
Speaker
And he goes, ow, ow, ow, ow. And he comes out and he's in pain. And I'm like, oh, oh, oh, I just really fucked up really bad. I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. He's like, oh, and he's in a lot of pain. Oh my God. And then eventually he's like, he's, you know, it kind of dissipates and he's like,
01:15:33
Speaker
Yeah, I told you that I have arthritis in my hands and he's kind of pissed and rightfully so. I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I forgot. And we continue on with the session. I never hear from him again, of course. Well, sure. Yeah.
01:15:54
Speaker
And I still think about that moment. I still look back and I'm like, I can't believe I pressed that poor guy's hands down. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking, right? I was a new teacher. I made a mistake. Yeah. But what that moment taught me was that really, really acutely taught me. There's nothing like a really big mistake to really get to the heart of what you need to understand about this right now.
01:16:16
Speaker
which will take years to learn if you don't commit these sometimes really big mistakes that you can't ever forget. What I learned is that I am not teaching poses. I am teaching people. That's right. Right? And so what I was doing in that kind of default mode moment, autopilot moment was teaching a pose.
01:16:40
Speaker
And the hands are spread and they're pressing down, right? In the pose, downward dog. The hands are spread and they're pressing down. And I was not teaching this guy. And I think that from that moment on, I got a lot better at teaching one-on-ones because I went out of autopilot about poses and was like really starting to take into account the details of this person.
01:17:02
Speaker
And like what I was seeing, but also what they would tell me and like it made it on. It definitely made me a better teacher, but who he was painful for him. Like physically and for me, so frightened and so embarrassed. Yes. Well, especially because like probably at the time you didn't know, like you might've even thought like, Oh God, did I just make his hands worse or something? Right. Which I can tell you right now you didn't, you caused him some temporary pain, um, which is.
01:17:32
Speaker
you know, something that happens to all of us. But I think this is one of those, like when I was saying at the beginning, how the things that you make mistakes on are the ones you never forget. Like in a way, what a gift to have made that specific, you know, let's call, you know, oopsies or whatever, because you got such a big picture learning out
Understanding Individuals in Teaching
01:17:54
Speaker
of it. Like the small picture we're learning is, okay,
01:17:57
Speaker
someone has arthritis, don't push on their hands. That's almost useless because that's just like, oh, the place where it hurts, don't shove your body onto it. Okay, fine. Occasionally, I still in the clinic sometimes, I'll touch something on someone. They're like, oh, I'm like, oh shit, that's where they told me. In my head, I'm like, I'm sorry. I was just seeing how sensitive it was or something. I'll make up some BS thing about it when the reality often is I just happen to forget. But the much, much bigger
01:18:27
Speaker
picture to learn and career defining and changing thing that you learned from that was like, I teach people not poses. Thank you to this man with his hands because how much longer do you think it would have taken for that to
01:18:45
Speaker
occur had you not had this big kind of a moment happen? It definitely put me on a fast track. Yeah. It was a wake-up call. Totally. It snapped me out of this idea of what I was doing and gave me a really fresh idea of what I was doing. Yeah. I don't know how long it would have taken, but possibly years, honestly. Who knows? Right.
Mistakes as Learning Opportunities
01:19:03
Speaker
In a way, we say thank you for that experience because it pushed you in a direction that would have been harder to get to otherwise.
01:19:12
Speaker
Yes. The difference between people who are really good at what they do and people who really never maybe improve or stop proving or they kind of plateau for a long time or they maybe like decide like, oh, maybe this is even for me, right? The difference I think is that
01:19:28
Speaker
The people who are really excellent at something have made a lot of mistakes, and not only that, right? Because if they made a lot of mistakes and never learned from them, they probably would be fired, right? Because honestly, nobody needs to take my class. This is all elective, right? I'm not a tenure-track public school teacher who's just riding out the last five years until retirement and phoning in every day.
01:19:48
Speaker
That's not how yoga classes or most group fitness classes work. People elect to be in your class. The thing is, if you want to get really good at teaching, the mistakes must happen.
01:20:03
Speaker
And how you process them hopefully maybe is less painful than the way I process them. I'm okay with the way I process them by the way. I think the reason that I think so deeply about why I'm doing what I'm doing is because of how my brain works. The takeaway hopefully is that you're going to make mistakes. Yes. And they are necessary. They are gifts. Yeah. They're like fast tracks in many cases to you making a big leap. Yeah.
01:20:31
Speaker
I would never wish on anyone that they never made mistakes because that's pretty useless. What I will say about how much you let it impact your psyche until the end of time, I always think about things like a knife wound. Not all things. I think about painful things as a knife wound. Option one, the knife wound goes in.
01:20:57
Speaker
You pull the knife out, it hurts and then it heals. Right? Option two, you leave the knife in, it festers. It becomes infected. If you ever take the knife out, it's harder to heal that and there's going to be a scar. Right. So there's absolutely value in the learning from that moment and not that you don't ever want to think about it or kind of, you know, take some time in and think, okay, well, why did that happen?
01:21:26
Speaker
what in my teaching caused that to happen? What if it was something that I did that was stupid? What if it really is just that something about the system is kind of messed up? And sometimes those thoughts come later. But the less useful thing is reliving the emotional experience of it happening as if it had just happened yesterday.
01:21:50
Speaker
You know, so that's what I would hope for anybody listening that you like, you know, listen, I never said cunt again and I never stepped on anybody else's penis. Like you can learn from those things. Yes. I think it can also be both. Like I don't think there's anything wrong with you.
01:22:05
Speaker
As a person, if you occasionally break out into a sweat of shame about something that happened in the past, I don't necessarily know that that needs to change or be fixed. I think that's a really human thing to have happen for some people. For some people, that's how they process on a physiological level.
01:22:23
Speaker
their memories or their past, right? And I think it's potentially dysfunctional or sort of like counterproductive in terms of your growth if you allow that experience to basically shape your identity. Where you go, I'm not
01:22:40
Speaker
worthy to be a teacher, or I'm not good at this, or I am a fuckup, or whatever it is, and then that shuts down your ability to get past that mistake and learn from it. It would actually be disingenuous of me. First of all, I'm talking about this publicly on a podcast, so how ashamed of it could I possibly be? Right. If you were really shamed, you would not have ever told this story.
01:23:05
Speaker
Exactly. But the thing is, is like the emotion, the feeling of heat and shame is so real still. And it would be disingenuous of me to go like it's almost like our whole, you know, like one of the storylines of the season has been like, it's normal to feel pain. Mm hmm.
01:23:21
Speaker
Shame in this sense is kind of like pain, right? Like, I think it's okay to feel shame too. And I know Brene Brown is going to be like, no, it's shame. It's this and that and the other thing. But I'm like, by the end of the day, I still feel shame and I'm fine. I'm okay. You know what I mean? It's like, how far are you going to take it, right? It's like, is this something where, to your point, it's like, oh, this speaks to my character as a human being and I am, you know, should never try to teach and do anything again.
Catharsis Through Sharing Stories
01:23:45
Speaker
Or
01:23:46
Speaker
Is that something like, um, when I learned to ride a motorcycle, uh, I took a course, like a beginner course that you take as part of getting your license. I was a shit motorcycle rider at that point, but I was like, well, how would I be anything else? I've done like maybe five hours total in a parking lot. And now I'm here doing this course. Yeah. And I passed that course by the skin of my teeth because it was one of those things where like.
01:24:11
Speaker
You had to, they taught you things really quickly and then everyone got in a line and had to perform the thing with the rest of the class staring at you while you did it. And they were not easy things. And so anyway, I barely passed that class, but I did. And then after that is when I learned to become a much better writer. But in the class, there was a British teacher and I remember he pulled me aside and he was like, you're really not good at this. And you need to take a lot more, like you shouldn't go out on the street.
01:24:36
Speaker
And I was- He was a teacher. Yeah. It's a very British thing to do, to be like, you're really shit at this. So I- Oh my God. I felt, I was like, I think this person is right. Like everything is demonstrating that that's correct. And then the first time that I, I mean, it was true. I was like, I'm not a good writer, but like help me out here. That's the whole point. Like I'm in a class, like I'm trying to get better. That's the whole reason I'm here. And then the first time I wrote on the street,
01:25:05
Speaker
It's a very different experience than riding in a parking lot. I almost ran into a parked car and then I almost got hit by a car because I didn't look. After almost hitting the parked car, I was like, oh God, almost getting hit by a car. I got off the bike. I had a complete meltdown. I ripped off my helmet. I was sobbing.
01:25:25
Speaker
Because all I could hear in my head was, you're really not good at this. And I was like, he was right. I'm really not good at this. So that's an example of it manifesting in a way that's unhelpful. I wasn't motivated in that moment to get better. In my head, I was like, he's right. And the shame of how bad of a writer I was just consumed me.
01:25:47
Speaker
And now I'm like, fuck that guy, because I ride on the track at 100 miles an hour, and I'm way better than I was a year ago. But that's the thing about this sort of festering. Learn from the mistake. Of course you're going to remember it. Maybe you're going to remember it with a shadow of the shame, but you're not immersed and engulfed by it to the point where you can't even have your day or do your job anymore. I think that's my point. Do you think that what this guy said to you
01:26:15
Speaker
was in any way helpful. The fact that he was just so honest, he was not trying to sugarcoat it. No, he wasn't. I mean, no, only because I knew well enough that I was not very good. All right. It was very clear to me that I was barely passing this course, right?
01:26:36
Speaker
And it, you know, but I guess, I don't know for me, like if, if the, if it had been followed up by like, look, come take this course again in two weeks, I'll be here. I'll give you a little more, you know, something like that. If it had been followed up with like actual like help assistance that I was supposedly paying for, for this course, then I would be like, okay. But the fact that it was just like your shit,
01:26:59
Speaker
You better be really careful out there. Goodbye forever. That's kind of fucked up. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, British, pretty, pretty standard. That's pretty standard. I was used to it. I was like, there's something horribly familiar about how cruel this man is being to me because I grew up there. So I'm very familiar with mean British teachers. Yeah. So that's me.
01:27:24
Speaker
Do you have some catharsis having told your story? I was going to say it's been oddly cathartic.
Season Wrap-up and Listener Engagement
01:27:32
Speaker
So hopefully listeners, you found these stories helpful on some level. We invite you to, if you haven't yet, go back and listen to all of the episodes of season two, just like I will be doing in the coming weeks, because Sarah and I are again, getting into our research mode for future episodes in season three.
01:28:01
Speaker
All right, this is it. This wraps up season two of the Movement Logic podcast. As always, it really helps us out a lot. If you could please give us a little love in the form of a star, five stars, five stars. Yes, not just one, five. A review, subscribe, share this podcast with a friend,
01:28:22
Speaker
and uh or just reach out to on social media and and and tell us what you thought about this episode or episodes past follow us on instagram at movement logic tutorials where we are most active if not that is actually the only platform that we are active on and then
01:28:37
Speaker
hit us up on our website at movementlogictutorials.com where we have our free barbell guide. And you can sign up for the free mini course, the free bone density mini course that will teach you the ins and outs of how to use barbells for some of the three staple lifts as well as how to
01:29:00
Speaker
build up to work toward lifting heavier than say three sets of ten. I just want to break in and say we are getting ready to record season three and some of the content of season three is from listener requests that they put into their reviews or that they messaged us on social media. So if you have a topic that you would like us to talk about
01:29:23
Speaker
Write us a review and stick it in the review or shoot us a DM or you can reach us through the website and your topic may come up in a future episode. Yes, it will. All right, that's it. And so we will see you next season. Don't touch them on the penis. And don't say cunt. Don't put your head between their knees.