Learning from Our Lenses and Our Biases
In the process of writing the Ayurvedic Yoga book, challenges and big lessons have presented themselves. This will be the content for my next few blogs, for as challenging as things have been, they are also really cool topics to consider.
One of the neat concepts came up, is that of bias. By bias, I am referring to the lenses or experiential filters that we see the world through. These lenses affect how we see pretty much everything.
And what’s really neat, is that some of them are so engrained that we don’t even know the tint they are putting on the windshield of our lives!
Here’s how this came topic came up.
I got an email from one of my teachers with feedback on the Ayurvedic Yoga book. I was both excited for the feedback, and scared silly… Writing a book is really putting yourself out there, and you never know how what you put out there is going to be received.
I know my teacher is an amazing yogi, and she approaches everyone with love and compassion. She approaches me, her student, from a place of supporting my growth.
She offered a series of wonderful suggestions, and a consideration. She said that, by her read, it was as though I had a preference towards a certain way of teaching. I was surprised, as I had tried to present the content in a balanced way, although once I thought about it, I realized she was totally right!
For years I have been working with students who are in pain and who have trauma, and through these experiences I developed a lean, a bias - I teach through a trauma-informed lens. My teacher was able to see this. And now I can too.
We don’t know what we don’t know, until we know. What a great thing to become aware of, and I am so grateful to my teacher for helping me to see myself more clearly.
I share this story with an invitation – what are the lenses you live and teach through? Are you an academic and everything needs peer review and publication? Are you a parent and everything is seen through a lens of the parent-child relationship where those around you need parenting (even if they aren’t your children)? Or a teacher who is always teaching? Are you fit and healthy and assume everyone else is too? Are you capable and think everyone else is too? Do you see the world through the biases of your gender or culture?
If you know some of your lenses, please share them in the comments below. Wouldn’t it be neat to create a list of lenses that we can read through to see the assumptions we might be making in our lives and teaching?
Thanks for reading. Share your thoughts below!