Everyone is having their own experience...

Any proficient classroom teacher knows that each child in front of you is having a different experience.  Ergo, the importance of differentiation in your lessons: you have to have multiple entry points to the lesson's content so that the material is interesting and accessible to all of the learners in your classroom.  It's sort of a "Well, DUH!" thought:  Of course every child is having a different experience.  They all bring varying backgrounds to the table and those differences influence the way they learn and perform.  As a teacher, you can choose the degree to which you let this influence your lesson.  GREAT teachers are flexible and talented enough to incorporate a lot of this, weaving a brightly patterned lesson. So-so teachers know what the fabric is supposed to look like and weave the same cloth over and over again.

So, when my Instructor mentioned this concept "Everyone is having their own experience..." during our lessons on Wednesday, why did they have such a profound effect on me?  When she spoke these words, I felt like the clouds opened, raining sunlight down on our class, enlightening me with the most philosophical statement I had heard in weeks!

I understood how she was relating the words to being a teacher in a yoga class - you don't know what injuries someone brings to the table and you don't know what level of yoga experience someone is bringing.  The bottom line is that you have to be careful about the way you phrase certain directions when teaching postures.  You can ask the class to slide their right ankles forward, but one student may be already at his or her edge, and the ankle can't move any further forward.  Another student may be new to yoga, and have no idea why the right ankle has to be in that position.  Other students may be recovering from injuries, and moving deeper into the posture is just too painful.  The main message of this lesson was that as the instructor, you have to be observant of your pupils and choose your words carefully.  Give personal directions when necessary, and keep in mind that "everyone is having their own experience".

Going deeper, I realized that this statement can be applied in every situation, and that's what got me, gave me pause to think.  I looked around at my colleagues in our cohort (which is 18 future-yoga-teachers big!) and listened to their (brief) biographies, realizing that each of us in in the training for different reasons.  Over the next few days, I started approaching a lot of situations with this outlook, and I swear it made me feel more compassionate.  At the kids' sports practices this weekend, every parent was having their own experience - some were fully engaged in watching the practices (even helping with coaching directives), others (like me!) took advantage of the time to catch up on emails and texts before trying to chat with fellow parents and see how the first few days of school were going.  Even at a (really, really fun) birthday party last night (it's not a proper party unless the Taco Truck shows up!!), chatting and catching up with various friends we missed seeing over the summer, everyone was having their own experience.

We are all having our own experience, no matter what situation we find ourselves in.  I encourage you to give it a try, and see if it brings you a little more understanding and compassion.  Driving around town, going to a sports practice, sitting in a class, there are always multiple viewpoints to consider.   What comes to mind at present is my training class.  No one's reason for being there has any more gravitas than anyone else's - we are all parts of the whole (cohort), and I'm sure the fabric of the lessons we weave over the next 9 months will be vibrant, brilliant, and one of the most valuable I've ever been a part of!

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - Henry David Thoreau