Assumptions

Assumptions are a funny thing, and can really color communication.

Something occurred to me recently when I was at the Raw Spirit festival.

The festival hosted a spectrum of folks from the die-hard long term 100% raw foodists, to the raw curious, and everyone in between. Most of the long-termers were the people involved in the production of the festival in some way, whether giving talks or running booths where they served food, information or products.

While perusing the vendors, I came upon a stand where the person running it, busy as he was, didn't take the time to find out anything about what I knew about raw food or what I eat, and instead proceeded to launch his one-size-fits-all mini-lecture about the benefits of the raw food diet. I understood his position of running a booth and maybe not having the time to go beyond this informational blurb, but I felt a little like I was being condescended to, like "dude--I know!".

I didn't take it personally, but it made me think about how often this happens--how often we assume we know more about something than the person we are talking to and come from a place of authority without stopping to check in with where they are at, thereby creating a two way dialogue rather than a soapbox style monologue that accomplishes little more than allowing us feel important. Even if the person we are speaking to knows less about whatever the subject may be, this is obviously not the most effective means of communication, but rather is reflective of our cultural bias toward specialization and our willingness to surrender our autonomy and personal power to a "specialist".

But that's another story.

The point to all this is that I swore then that I would be extra conscious of this and never approach people from that place.

But then, something funny happened out side of lulu's at the end of our break two days ago.

I was walking up to the front door where two elder women were standing. I heard the younger of the two (who was probably in her 60s or 70s) say to the older who was using a walker "it's a yoga studio". As I approached, the younger of the women said to me "how are the yoga classes here?" I responded with "Great, we are having a teacher training in there right now". She smiled and indicated something along the lines of "that's nice" as she began to turn to leave. As parting words I continued, "yeah, you should check it out some time". She responded with "I live in Santa Monica" and I said "oh", thinking that she was simply suggesting that she couldn't try lulu's classes b/c she's from out of town. But she continued "yeah, I do it. I have since about '75" without looking back at me and in a tone that said much more than the words themselves.

Her tone and body language indicated that she felt that I had done to her exactly what I was writing about above. I think that she assumed I was just some young whippersnapper who thinks only people like me do yoga, and that she must need me to enlighten her. In actuality, I had made no assumptions about whether or not she practices, and might even have guessed that she did based on the way she asked about the classes!

I felt really weird after this exchange. It was so quick. So little was said and so much was interpreted on both ends. And now she was gone and I couldn't explain myself. Oh well.

It showed me that I am not the only person who dislikes when people approach me from that place, and that some people may be even more sensitive to this kind of thing, and that their experiences with this type of interaction may lead them to project their assumptions upon situations where there was no intention of condescension.

This seems like something for all of us to be aware of in all our interactions, and especially in teaching.