©2002 Ziji
These are the teaching notes from our workshop of the same name. If you would like to know more about this or other workshops please contact us.In directing awareness in yoga nidra, are there differences between the responses experienced by the student on hearing: 'take your awareness to', 'let your awareness go to' or 'become aware of.'. These may relate to the differences in students' experience of agency and of safety in another's hands. A wise choice of words, voice tone and body language can support students' trust in their own process. How about the different responses to 'feel your right hand thumb' and 'imagine your right hand thumb, picture it'. How is it when we instruct our students to 'listen to your right hand thumb, taste it in your mind, feel its texture'.
Each of us has a preferred, a subordinate and a lead or start-up sensory modality a bit like right and left handedness. In addition to the sense modalities, we understand the linear sequence of instructions with our left brain and perceive the rhythm and relationship between the parts of the instruction with our right brain. The richer your sensory language as a teacher, the more you will include the 'left handers' and encourage links across the senses like color and mood. Likewise, each sense has composition e.g. sound has intensity, sight has contrast, touch has temperature and taste has sweet/salty. The more your language can range across these sense dimensions or sub-modalities, the more enjoyable your classes will be. That has obvious flow on effects in repeat business and positive word of mouth advertising.
How do we differ in our responses to 'don't fall asleep' and 'check that you are awake' during yoga nidra. I remember doing exactly what I was told not to do by authority figures as if the negative were an instruction to do its opposite. And that is without considering the effect on the receiver of your voice, timing, body language, the context and the other subtle flavors in your teacher-student relationships.
Which part of the mind are you talking to when instructing in yoga nidra and pranayama? Is it the right side undaunted by complexity or paradox or is it the left's love of rules and sequences? Is it another part of mind that listens to meditation or asana instructions? Are you heard as an authority figure, a loving guide or as a neutral background figure? Is the student in a trance, dissociating or free associating with the sensation or body part instruction ten steps ago because that place has some special significance to them? How do you know what response you are getting and how do you maintain rapport when the listener is silent and still?
Explore the effect of your voice, language and behavior on the listener by asking for feedback from your students. Examine the simple principle that the message or instruction sent is not the same as the message received by saying something like ' I'm trying to improve the accuracy of my instructions. Could you give me an idea what you think I said.'. Frequently people ask 'do you understand' and our answer is too easily 'yes'. For a change ask 'what do you understand I have said', so that they can give us the bits we have missed in response.
We communicate with our words, voice quality and body [your posture, gesture and expression]. 'Some message is conveyed even if you say nothing and keep still.' Each person has a range of associations, meanings and physiological responses to each significant word, both spoken and thought which, in the speed of communication often goes unnoticed by both sender and receiver.
Try slowing down the process of communication to such a degree that you become aware of your own subliminal responses to giving yoga instructions. You can do this most easily by recording one of your yoga classes and then playing it back, responding as if you were the student. Then practice giving class instructions altering your voice, language and behavior to more often get the effect you intend.
Some words, images and body-mind processes in a person's life are like keys. A superficial example from the mainstream culture would be the association of red with danger. These keys have sensory and motor embodiment and can both lock and unlock the full potential of the person in that moment. How often can a word or a glance make all the difference in the world. You know the power of naming an experience which has remained unresolved for years. Often that name is anchored into a whole set of key chains and related life decisions, which may not have been examined by the student. This is like a neural network or an inner map for encoding and decoding experiences. In this way key words and phrases spoken into a state of relaxation or preparation for meditation by the teacher, may trigger psycho-physiological activity in that network of associations. It can create a feeling of joy, dread, curiosity, resolution, fear etc.. Knowledge of these responses in your own body-mind can assist your effectiveness as a teacher. Ignorance of them may hinder your business prospects as well as your teaching as you inadvertently turn people down or off.
Put simplistically and in the left-brained language of sequences, one of the ways the body-mind makes sense of the world and shapes our perceptions is by locating an experience on a series of internal continua. Two of them, for example, may be firstly a horizontal one bounded by opposites for example light - dark, hot cold, yes no and secondly a vertical one bound by the surface to cellular dimension. When you speak key words such as one of the following 'move, go, take, your, awareness, feel, let go' the body-mind tends to seek these compass points and the relationships with other experiences semi-consciously, automatically and instantaneously. Loosely speaking, this occurs in the right brain and can be likened to the experience of driving along the freeway and not remembering the trip from point A to point B. In that instant, a life long decision to stay away from or to approach the opposite and the depths of associations suggested by the words eg 'feel heaviness', especially if it is emotionally charged, can be enacted. Some of these decisions are life saving e.g. avoiding red back spiders or changing lanes to avoid a hazard.
As an example, if we give an instruction including the word 'feel', the body-mind may seek out historical comparisons such as 'not feel' or 'dissociate' [the horizontal dimensions] as well as calibrate the depth of feeling from affects to sensations [the vertical], in order to locate the extent and direction of the instruction and the appropriate response in the given situation. If you give this process more time and slow it down, you can discriminate finer and more subtle distinctions in yourself than those above without wanting those experiences to be different. And when you do that with a loving, kindly relationship with yourself, then your students will learn to resonate with your attitude without overt instructions to do so. In this way you can influence others' responses just by changing your own behavior.
One way of describing this inner work, is to call 'feel' the primary process and the unstated contrast or dimension for example 'not feel', the secondary process. As meditators we allow the secondary process to unfold wherever it goes. As yoga teachers, we want to give instructions so that both primary and secondary processes are included in our expression, choice of words and posture without losing the intended direction of the instruction. We want to nourish and support an atmosphere within our students consistent with the practice being taught.
The way to do that is to find your own language, which softly includes the disavowed without covertly directing the student to that experience for example to sleep, to not feel, to remain unaware, and to do this in a way which does not discriminate against that particular inner state, whilst also supporting their freedom. That sounds like a big task and an awesome responsibility with 20 or more people in a class. And it is, but it can be made a simple task by examining your own responses as widely and deeply as you are free to do.
In business as well as in teaching, your own sensory motor response to a word such as service, poverty, success, identity, money, love is sent out as a vibes and communicated subliminally to friends, students and colleagues, a vibe which can attract and repel them, produce helpful and hindering responses in the listener and which can inform them about the journey in your heart that you will travel and those that you won't. This is particularly true for people to whom you are important and whose recognition you value.