The Courage to Say I Don’t Know

 

Yin Yoga Podcast: The Courage To Say I Don’t know
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[00:00:00] Today, my friends, we are going to talk about having the courage to say, “I don’t know.” And this really isn’t about not knowing, it’s about how we as teachers relate to not knowing, or you could even say as humans on the path in life. ‘Cause of course, I’m going to talk mostly about teaching, but all of this is applicable to our actual lives.

So can we have the courage to say, “I don’t know”? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Stay tuned.

All right, my friends, welcome. If you are new around here, welcome to a Yin Yoga podcast. If you are a familiar, welcome back.

We’ll get into today’s topic in just a moment, but I wanted to just give you a reminder that we have adult subject matter and adult language in these podcasts. And so if you have small people around, [00:01:00] you should take a moment to grab some headphones now. All right, let’s dive into today’s topic. Those of you on YouTube, again, you will notice that I have notes.

Gotta keep my ADD brain on track. , If you’re listening on audio, you probably won’t notice, but YouTubers, if you do see my eyes moving around a little bit, that would be why. So today’s topic, I was thinking about this, after teaching one day, how a student had come up to me and presented me with kind of a complex problem actually, of what might be going on in their body, and how comfortable I was to say to her, “Yeah, um, I don’t know actually what’s going on there.”

And then of course, to refer her on to doctor, chiropractor, physiotherapist, et cetera. And how when I was a newer teacher, I probably [00:02:00] would’ve not known that I didn’t know, and I might have tried to come up with a theory, or I might have tried to give her some solutions, or I might have tried to give her a pose for that.

And how now, as a more, experienced teacher, I realize that actually how detrimental that can be. The sort of, , false knowing or false courage, when really the courage to say, “I don’t know,” is what’s courageous. And again, it’s not about not knowing, it’s about how do we relate to not knowing? A new teacher says, “I don’t know,” and they can feel like that might be an inadequacy.

But a more experienced teacher, when they say, “I don’t know,” it can reflect humility, curiosity, and respect for that complex human being and human experience. And you see, this cuts against the pressure in our yoga world. And I know because I work with a lot of [00:03:00] teachers, that a lot of new teachers… And when I say new, I mean that could be anywhere from I just graduated to I’ve been teaching less than 10 years.

But to a lot of newer teachers, there can be this unspoken expectation that the teacher should always have the answer. And no wonder we have some confidence issues and some, , imposter syndrome happening rampantly with newer teachers. But I actually think that one of the marks of a mature teacher is to become comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

Not from insecurity, but from humility and from curiosity

What if one of the most trustworthy things a teacher can say is, “I don’t know”? So when we’re new teachers, we may feel like our credibility depends on having all the answers. If a student asks a question and we can’t answer it, [00:04:00] we may feel somehow like we’ve failed. But remember, dear teacher, you were trained to teach yoga.

And you probably, depending on how many hou- hundreds of hours you have and how long you’ve been doing this, don’t even have maybe a ton of experience, of- with just even that. I mean, I’ve been teaching yoga for over 20 years at the time of this recording. I finished my first program in 2- 2004, and I am still constantly learning new cool things about yoga.

So if, you know, 20-plus years in I’m still learning, please, dear new teachers, cut yourself some slack, will you? So it’s not a failure to say, “I don’t know.” And after years of teaching, I’ve found almost the opposite to be true, that the more I learn, the more aware I am of what and how much I don’t know

The beginner’s illusion. [00:05:00] So when we first start teacher training, we often experience what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect. Now, if you’ve never heard of this, I’ve got a definition for you, and this is from Britannica. The Dunning-Kruger effect in psychology is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence in an intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their knowledge or competence in that domain relative to the objective criteria or performance of their peers.

Long-winded, don’t worry. We’ll get into this more. Or of people in general. So according to the research for whom it is named, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect is explained by the fact that the metacognitive ability to recognize deficiencies in one’s own knowledge or competence requires that one possess at least a [00:06:00] minimum level of the same kind of knowledge or competence, which those who exhibit that effect have not attained.

Because they are unaware of their deficiencies, people generally assume they’re not deficient. In keeping with this tendency of most people, choose to think what they think is the most reasonable or optimal option. Although not scientifically explored until the 20th century, this phenomena is familiar in ordinary life and has long been arrested in common sayings like, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” and in observations by writers and wits through the ages.

For example, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge does.” That was by Darwin. And, , I often say ignorance is bliss. So I’m gonna give you a real-life example of this so that those of you that’s eyes just crossed when I read that definition. When I was a brand-new teacher, [00:07:00] long before I ever met Paul Grilley, and long before I learned about skeletal variation, and long before I learned about functional anatomy and different bone structures and how we’re all different, so long before that, as a new teacher, and I was reared, some of you know this, in the Iyengar tradition, which definitely has rules about where things go and how they go and what they look like.

There’s lots of so-called, air quotes, “alignment rules.” So- I thought that I knew things that in later in hindsight, I didn’t know. Let’s use a very common Hatha yoga pose as an example. I used to tell people that the front leg in Warrior 2 needed to be at 90 degrees, and that your knee needed to track over your middle toe, and that your [00:08:00] thigh needed to be parallel to the ground, and that was the air quotes, “correct way” to do Warrior 2.

Now, some of you might be listening and going, “Wait, what? That’s not the correct way? What? What? What is she talking about? Isn’t that the correct way?” Nay, nay, I say. Because there are a whole bunch of bodies in the world that can’t do that, and they never will be able to, either because of a limit in their bone structure in their hip, or who knows what else it could be.

So here’s the thing. I used to teach my classes that way, you know, front leg at 90 degrees, thighs parallel to the floor. Oh, your knee is dropping in, push your knee back. Oh, but now keep your torso squaring forward. So heart and hips face me, but knee goes back. And I remember I had a student once who just literally couldn’t do that.

She could choose either , knee moving back, not dropping forward, and [00:09:00] her torso slightly turned towards the front leg, or she could turn her torso towards me, but then the knee would come forward. And this wasn’t air quotes, “tight hips”. Well, I mean, it was, but it wasn’t tight soft tissue in the hips.

It wasn’t tight muscle. It wasn’t tight fascia. It was her bones. Now, I did not know this as a new teacher, and I just kept repeating that direction, and I didn’t know why she couldn’t do it. And when she asked me once, “Why is it that when I sit cross-legged, my knees don’t come to the ground?” And they never have.

And I did not have an answer for her. So I just said, “Well, are you comfortable? That’s all that matters.” Because I didn’t have an answer. The truth was, I didn’t know. I now know, now that I have learned more. And if you are listening to this and you’re a teacher and you have not watched Anatomy for Yoga, it used to be a DVD, now it’s streaming, by Paul Grilley.

It is [00:10:00] linked in the episode notes of every episode. I cannot recommend you get that and watch that enough. Your mind will be blown. It will forever change the way you look at bodies and make you a far better teacher. Okay, shameless plug aside. , And that’s a plug for Paul, not for me. I didn’t make this

that’s Paul. I didn’t go through all of that. That was Paul. So if you are listening to some of this and some of this is kind of poking your buttons and you’re a little bit uncertain about all of this, never heard of skeletal variations, if you’ve never considered that the air quotes, “right way” to do, warrior two may not be available to everybody, and therefore is it then the right way?

Uh, then I would highly recommend you check that out. So this is a sort of hands-on example of what I just read, that big definition. I did not know as a new teacher how much I did not know because my mind could [00:11:00] only hold so much. And so I thought that I knew far more than I actually knew. Now luckily, I am of the personality type who loves to learn, who questions everything, and is super curious and nerdy.

So this sort of beginning phase of, you know, unintentional arrogance did not last long because two and a half years into my teaching I did discover Paul’s… It was a DVD at the time, and yes, I watched it on a DVD player ’cause I’m a dinosaur. , I watched it and that changed the way I looked at everything.

And once that paradigm was busted in my hea- my head and I realized that all of the so-called anatomy cues and alignment cues that I learned in my first teacher training actually only worked on a small part of the population, then it opened me up to, huh, well, what else have I learned that actually might not be true?

Hmm. [00:12:00] And welcome to, um, going down the rabbit hole of the rest of my life in teaching. But had I not been an open and curious person, I might have rejected the information and been like, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There is a right way to do warrior two, and this is what it is because this is what I have learned, and this is correct.”

So sometimes in a teacher training, we’ve learned enough to feel confident. Sometimes not. There’s a lot of new teachers out there who definitely don’t feel confident. But then there’s the ones who feel confident, sometimes very confident, too confident, like I was. And then we keep studying. We learn more anatomy.

We meet more bodies. We encounter injuries. We learn more about pain and start to be curious ab- about pain science. Maybe we dip our toe in learning about Chinese medicine. [00:13:00] Maybe we explore trauma informed teaching and realizing that most of the cues we were given aren’t overly helpful for a big group of the population because they’re not very trauma informed.

Maybe that happens. Suddenly, what seemed really simple, and we were super confident about, actually becomes wonderfully complicated. Not because we’re worse teachers, but because we’ve become honest teachers. Because you see, students are not textbooks. You can look in a textbook and look at the anatomy and look at the pictures and start to think that’s how everybody’s built, right?

Don’t we all look the same on the inside? And I always think it’s funny, and don’t get me wrong, I fell into this trap too, we all can acknowledge, we can have a room full of us, and we can all acknowledge how different we look physically on the outside, in different heights, weights, body types, eye colors, hair colors, skin colors, body proportions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And that’s clear when we can see it. And yet somehow we assume that on [00:14:00] the inside, inside the meat suit, that everything’s the same. All our bones are the same, all our muscles are the same, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nay, nay, I say. It’s just not true. So our textbooks can give us kind of a general visual, but our students are what actually shows us what really happens.

One student loves dragon, another has knee pain every time. One person’s hamstrings are lis- limited by tight muscles and fascia, another by maybe their nerves, another by fear, another by yesterday’s hike. We start realizing that every rule has exceptions.

Every rule will have an exception.

And then there’s this myth of certainty. So the wellness industry often re- rewards certainty. I mean, how many times have you heard or even said some of these things? I see it all the time on Instagram. Oh my God, [00:15:00] if I see any more times the number one pose for back pain or the best breath for anxiety, and it’s always box breath for some fricking reason.

Ludicrous. There’s no one pose for back pain. It depends why a pr- someone’s having the back pain. There’s not one breath that works for everybody for anxiety. In fact, box breath makes me anxious. So, you know, we see this everywhere. Because the wellness industry rewards certainty, and Instagram certainly does, think about how often you have heard or maybe said things like, “This pose always…

You must… The liver stores your…” Eh, that’s one that comes up in Yin a lot. “Never do… Always. Never. Must.” These words might feel comforting when we’re new teachers or maybe a new student even, because they make a messy world feel more predictable, but reality is it’s rarely that tidy And even [00:16:00] science changes.

One thing I’ve become increasingly comfortable with is changing my mind, not because I’m inconsistent, but because new evidence emerges. Let’s look at fascia, for example. Up until I think it was 2013, 2014 even, fascia was pretty understudied.

Like, there wasn’t a lot of people studying it. Now there’s whole fascia research congresses, people studying fascia. So constantly what we learn about fascia is changing and growing by leaps and bounds all the time

So it’s not because we’re inconsistent, it’s because new evidence emerges. Pain science has evolved, exercise science has evolved, our understanding of fascia has evolved, and even with Chinese medi- Chinese medicine, there are schools of thought, different views. If knowledge changes, then [00:17:00] shouldn’t our teaching?

Daoism has a little something to say about this. One of my favorite Daoist ideas is the wisdom that begins with recognizing the limits of what we know. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. So this means that the true eternal reality of the universe, the Tao, is infinite and cannot be fully captured or contained by human language, that any name we give it or description we make of it is merely a label for a small part of it.

To break this down further, the nameless Tao is the ultimate unmanifest source of all existence, the origin of heaven and Earth. The named Tao is when we assign names to things. We create categories, boundaries, and duality. This is the mother of all things, representing the [00:18:00] physical observable world. And the moment we think that we’ve captured reality into neat little boxes, life will remind you that it is bigger than our concepts

So I don’t know isn’t the end of learning, it’s the doorway

The freedom of not knowing. Ironically saying, “I don’t know,” actually makes me less anxious as a teacher. I don’t have to defend a position. I don’t have to pretend certainty. I don’t have to, you know, wear the hat of an expert that I’m actually not and not qualified to be if students ask me questions for things that I’m not qualified to answer.

I get to stay curious. And let me tell you, curiosity is much lighter to carry than certainty[00:19:00]

So what students actually need is not someone who knows everything. They need someone who’s paying attention, who’s willing to observe, to ask questions, to collaborate, and to adapt. So our presence often matters more than perfect knowledge. Here’s some examples. Student: “Why does my hip hurt in this pose?”

Old me might have said, “Tight hips,” or, “Oh, it’s probably your psoas.” Current me: “I’m not sure. Tell me what’s happening.” Student: “Is Yin good for everyone?” Current answer: “It depends.” Student: “Will this help my back pain?” “I don’t know. It helps some people. It doesn’t help everyone. Let’s see how your body responds.”

So what saying I don’t know isn’t? It’s not [00:20:00] laziness. It’s not avoiding res- responsibility. It’s not avoiding stepping into the seat of the teacher. In fact, I would say it means owning the seat of the teacher. It isn’t refusing to learn. – It’s refusing to pretend.

There’s the difference. When we are comfortable saying I don’t know, then we’re being honest. When we try to make something up because we don’t know, that’s pretending, and there’s the difference Also, in the bigger picture of life and things, for our own lives, for our students’ lives, we’re modeling intellectual humility.

So every time we can admit uncertainty, we give our students permission to do the same, to become explorers instead of performers, to ask instead of assume, to experience instead of conclude. Here’s another [00:21:00] example, real-life example of something that happened with a student when I was teaching. Now, at this point, I was partway through my yoga therapy training.

I had taken my yoga and trauma module, and I was d- I was never really hands-on adjuster in a big way simply because even my first style of yoga didn’t really include a lot of hands-on. In the Iyengar tradition, the way I was trained was you verbally correct the whole group twice, then if the person is not understanding what you’re saying, you may use their name if you know it and correct them again.

Notice I’m using the word correct, because that’s how they looked at it. We were correcting people. And then if they still didn’t get it, that’s when we might go over and offer touch. Now, when I learned of this method, this sort of four-step process before you touch someone, trauma-informed yoga was not a thing.

There were no consent cards. None of that was happening. [00:22:00] Teachers just went around touching people. So I would say that what I learned is actually quite reserved, because in a lot of styles, they would just gone over and manhandled that student or woman-handled that student, whereas I learned, you know, verbally correct once to the group, twice to the group, to the individual, then go over and touch.

Now, I don’t do that anymore. Very rarely do I touch my students. And I remember when this conversation started to become popular in the yogaverse and everyone was talking about whether or not we should be adjusting people, and then there was consent cards that came out, which I have a big issue with consent cards as well, but that’s probably a rant for another time.

And I remember a student at one of the studios I teach at coming up to me and saying, “What is with all these cons-” She was probably old, older than myself, so… And she, I think she’d been practicing years. And, she came up and she said, “What is with all these consent cards? This is ridiculous. I come to yoga for the teacher’s [00:23:00] guidance.

If I’m not doing the pose right, I wanna know.”

Rewind that in your head. If I’m not doing the pose right, I want to know. So that was the paradigm shift right there. She had been brought into the yoga world where there was a right and a wrong way to do poses. And so I looked at her and I said, “Well, what if there is no one right way to do a pose? Like, what’s right for you might not be right for me.

We have different bodies, so – what would the teacher be, air quotes, ‘correcting’ anyway?” And I could tell just by the look on her face that she had literally never thought of that. It had never occurred to her because she’d been in so many yoga classrooms where there was a, air quotes, “right way to do things” and there was specific alignment cues that everybody must follow.

And if you can’t do it, then that’s the goal, and you just practice and practice until you can. And that was the [00:24:00] culture that she was brought into with yoga. And so she had literally never thought, “What if there isn’t a, air quotes, ‘right way?’ And then what is the point of this teacher coming up and touching me if she’s not giving me the right way?”

So another little example from my own teaching, and this was right again at that point where this was being heavily discussed in classes. Lots of teachers were moving away from giving hand-on adjustments. Other styles that relied on them heavily were using consent cards, and some were just kicking it old school and just putting their hands all over everybody anyway.

So it was an interesting time in the yogaverse. So again, we have to experience instead of conclude. We have to ask instead of assume So I think there’s an interesting distinction here that can be made between certainty and clarity. [00:25:00] We don’t need certainty to teach well, but we do need clarity. I can be very clear on how to approach a pose.

How do you get in this pose? How to work with sensation. , How I create a brave healing environment while also being honest that I don’t actually know exactly why one student’s shoulder behaves differently from another. It could be their bones. It could be their lifestyle. It could be previous injury And there’s a difference between having expertise and being attached to being right.

You wanna see how quickly a teacher is attached to being right, give them any constructive criticism about what they’re currently doing, and watch how easily they get defensive and shut the conversation down. That is being attached to being right. And having expertise and being attached to being right are not the same thing.

The teachers who have influenced me the most are the [00:26:00] ones whose, aren’t the ones who seem to know everything, even though they know a lot. They’re the ones who are willing to revise their understanding when new evidence or experience invites them to. One of the things, for example, that I loved about my teacher Paul Grilley, is that he is incredibly humble.

He’s a big nerd, he loves to study, he loves new information, and if new information is presented, then he can look at that with critical thinking and go, “Huh, well, look at that. Maybe what I thought was the case isn’t the case.” This is how this whole anatomy for yoga thing came about, is that Paul, after years and years and years of torturing himself trying to get into poses re- repeatedly that he never managed to master, just happened to be in a shop one day where there was bones, and he just happened to be looking at some femur bones, some leg bones, and noticed how different they all were.

These were all human femur bones. Why are they so different? And that started to spark this [00:27:00] aha, and this exploration, and then his understanding of skeletal variation. Which, by the way, other industries other than yoga have known about for years. Other industries other than yoga, physiotherapists, massage therapists, for example, have known for a long time that the picture you see in the textbook is just a visual representation of what might be average, but certainly doesn’t encompass everybody.

But in the yoga world, this was not being discussed until Mr. Paul Grilley brought the conversation to the table. Now, what if he hadn’t been open and curious? He had just said, “Nope, I have heard that if I just keep practicing my wheel pose, regardless of whether or not the fact that I’m getting shoulder pain doing it, I will eventually master the perfect looking version of wheel pose,” and he had just rejected anything else and refused to study anything else.

Wouldn’t we all be at a [00:28:00] huge loss for that? Imagine if that, if Paul hadn’t come to his ahas and had the humility to go, “Huh- And the curiosity to go, “Hmm,” and to explore, then none of us would have functional yoga. Anatomy for Yoga never would’ve been made, and I would still be believing that my limitation in extended side angle was, air quotes, “tight hips,” not my actual bone structure.

So there’s a difference between having expertise and being attached to being right. You can be an expert in your field and still be open and curious to new information and to learning and to other people’s perspectives and things that you had never thought of. Teachers who have influenced me the most, like my teacher Paul Grilley,

They aren’t the ones that seem to know everything. They’re the ones that are willing to go, “Hmm, curious. Interesting.” And then [00:29:00] to look at things and to be open

And then they revise their understanding when new evidence or experience has invited them to. And then finally, I wonder if there is a, a Taoist paradox here. The more we let go of needing to know, the more available we are to seeing what’s actually right in front of us, and then the more we know. In that sense, I don’t know isn’t a limitation, it’s a practice.

It keeps us open, curious, present, which might be exactly what our students need from us, and I would argue what the world needs now. Imagine if instead of vehemently defending your opinion on something with your family member or a neighbor or social media nowadays, you actually had the openness and the curiosity to [00:30:00] ask questions about someone else’s perspective.

If instead of getting defensive and defending what you think you know, you actually said, “Huh, haven’t thought of that. Tell me more about that,” or, “What do you mean by that?” Imagine how different our world would be if we were all more open and curious and had the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Okay, here’s some closing thoughts.

Perhaps confidence isn’t having all the answers. Perhaps confidence is actually trusting that you don’t need them all, that your role isn’t to explain every sensation or every injury or every limitation, air quotes, in someone’s body. That instead, it’s to accompany your students as they discover their own experience.

Sometimes the wisest words a teacher can offer are simply, ‘I [00:31:00] don’t know. Let’s find out together.’ Okay, my friends. That’s it for today, and I hope that you found this helpful. I hope that you can take a look, perhaps at your own life and see where maybe you’ve been a little bit too certain, a little too defensive, whether it be through yoga or elsewhere, and where maybe we could be a little more open, a little more courageous to say, “I don’t know.”

And I can promise you that once you get comfortable with that, a wealth of new awesome things to learn will land in your lap because you’re finally open and curious enough to see all the things you don’t know, and then, yay, we get to learn about them. All right, my friends. That’s it for today. I hope you found this helpful.

And until we meet again, bye for now