I’ve been in and out of the yoga industry for about 15 years now and I’ve had to endure a lot of conversations with a lot of people about yoga. I wrote about it for Recovering Yogi this week. In case you missed it: Conversations I’ve had with people about yoga
I just spent a week in Cape Cod with my oldest girlfriends. The seven of us grew up together, and now we are growing old together too. We’ve been friends our entire lives, and so when we get together, there aren’t a lot of barriers. We talk about everything and in really loud, fast, interrupting-each-other kinds of voices. But we never talk about yoga. Yoga might come up in conversation once in a while; after all, three of us have been yoga instructors, two of us actually owned yoga studios, and every single one of us has taken plenty of yoga classes. Even the least yogic among us has done her fair share of down dogs. But when we get a chance to see each other, yoga is generally the last thing on our minds. It’s so refreshing not to talk about yoga.
In the yoga world, you learn how to talk to people in a certain way. You use Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication techniques to avoid hurting feelings. You take Responsibility with a capital R for your own emotions, judgments and thoughts. In the yoga world, you don’t cross-talk and you don’t interrupt and you always respect other people’s opinions (or pretend to) and you listen thoughtfully with your head slightly tilted to one side and, above all, you never, ever break eye contact. Conversations are punctuated with tender touches on the arm and they always start and end with a big, lingering hug.
In my tribe of childhood friends (I feel justified using that word for once because of the savage nature of our bond) we have to vie for airtime and the most alpha always wins. Therefore, interrupting and trying to talk over everyone else is the nature of our communication. At any given time, 5 of the 7 of us might be talking at the same time, or, I should say, shouting at the same time. People snap, feelings get hurt, sometimes someone cries briefly. No one ever tries super hard to be nice and if they do, it’s obvious and seems a bit false.
It’s exhausting. It’s also refreshing. Cuz it’s real. And there is so much love behind it all. It’s like we’re a big Italian family who never went to therapy.
