Project Overview

Productive dialogues are ones that provide a safe, supportive opportunity to be heard. I believe the practice of modern postural yoga (MPY) with its focus on practice, self-reflection and acceptance, is keenly poised to create such an opportunity. Using three resources; Parker Palmer’s Tragic Gap, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and Hermeneutics, I designed a training module for a 200-hour yoga teacher training around the topic of "the utility of discomfort in dialogue." Through a series of lectures, exercises and interviews, I attempted to discover if these techniques alter the dynamics of discussions around a socially taboo subject: cultural appropriation in yoga. 

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The project was field research based. Data was gathered via field notes, ethnomethodology, and an email interview after the project. Because my project involved Hermeneutics, which is fundamentally the theory of creating new meaning through communication, the use of ethnomethodology for gathering data was used. Ethnomethodology is “the specialized, highly detailed analysis of micro situations… [wherein] social meaning is fragile and fluid…constantly create meaning as an ongoing process” (Neuman, 2014, p. 436). With ethnomethodology, we “document how we apply micro-level social rules and create news rules “on the fly” (Neuman, 2014, p. 437). Applying this data gathering technique allowed me to test the efficacy of the theories in real time and adjust as necessary.

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The project took place over the course of two small-scale social settings; a 200- hour yoga teacher training in New York City. One training took place over four weeks, the second over seven weekends. The project was interrupted by the COVID-19 quarantine and had to be shifted to an online platform. The first training was completed half in person, half online. The second entirely online. The original presentation had to be re-made to reflect the new format.  

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In both sessions we discussed the utility of discomfort, grappled with issues of cultural appropriation and the concept of "common ground" as a disrupter of successful dialogues. The discussion topics included historically taboo topics in yoga trainings: power, race and gender.