Honoring how we got here...

I have recently re-entered a yoga phase. I love yoga. It's like mind and body therapy all in one. I also think it's highly applicable to oh, say, everything, and I am constantly finding connections with yoga and work or yoga and relationships or yoga and the world.

Another reason I have started doing yoga lately is to help heal a knee injury. The physical therapist said part of the reason the knee was hurting was due to very tight hip flexors, so I have been doing yoga like a madwoman in order to try and open them up. I am a very goal-oriented person and I can do yoga with great enthusiasm in pursuit of a goal (my knee getting better). In the middle of one of the poses, the instructor remarked that it was very important to honor where your body was at that moment. She said that it took a long time to build up all that tension and it wasn't going to go away just over night. I had worked hard for that tension-- hours of sitting, stress, unbalanced exercise-- it didn't just happen.

This struck me for some reason. I tend to see where I want to be much easier than appreciating how what I have done has gotten me where I am. I could be much kinder to myself (and to my body) while moving forward on the stretching plan. I'm not saying I don't want to keep working on opening my hip flexors-- I do--but perhaps I could appreciate the stress I have been through or the adverse conditions that my body has had to endure to create this tension.

Then I thought of the classroom. Some of the students whose behavior is the worst come in with metaphorically "tight" hip flexors. Through lots of different experiences, they have learned a certain way of acting in the world, just as my hips have learned a certain way of being tight. Generally, we focus on how to immediately change the student, but we don't honor all the things that have happened (whether we know them or not) to lead to the student acting out. We see how we want students to be much easier than we usually find it to honor them where they are in this moment, but if we don't do this, we don't see the tremendous amount of work it took the student to get to wherever they are. And it did take a tremendous amount of work and struggle for any student to get to where they are-- it's a struggle to be a human being, a fact that we all too often lose sight of in the classroom (and probably in the rest of the world as well).

I am not suggesting that students are not encouraged and supported to learn different ways of acting in the classroom, just as I would not want my hips to stay tight. Tight hips lead to injuries, and students acting out usually ends up emotionally injuring someone-- often him or herself. It has to do with how we frame the behavior of the student in front of us-- do we focus only on how the student needs to change or do we see him or her as a person who has worked very hard to get to this point and appreciate all that effort, even if it didn't help in this situation?