By Mike Pardee, gcLi Faculty, Dean of Faculty & Academic Director, Lab Atlanta (GA)
Among my foremost blessings have been a slew of extraordinary mentors. They have included college and graduate school professors, high school football coaches, and countless other teachers over the years. Recently, however, I am growing ever more conscious–and appreciative–of another source of growth and wisdom for me: my (ashtanga) yoga practice.
For the past few years, I have been practicing an ancient, distinctive yogic tradition called “ashtanga.” It tends to attract especially dedicated adherents, since the practice is so disciplined and demanding. The optimal recommended frequency of practice is six days a week, for an hour-and-a-half to two hours per session. My work and other commitments leave me plenty satisfied with doing “just” four or five practices per week. But my ideal goal is six, if possible.
One lesson this practice consistently reinforces for me is the dialectic between effort and ease, or exertion and grace. Ashtanga practitioners breathe consciously, in conjunction with every pose (or asana) and all the transitions in between. Each movement is synchronized with either an inhalation or exhalation, so the pacing of the flow depends entirely on one’s respiration rate. Growing up as a student and an athlete, I had learned to worship sheer exertion as the necessary precursor to progress. I learned to suck it up, to grit my teeth, to pull an all-nighter while studying for the big test, to squeeze in another rep while “maxing out” in the weight room, to give everything 110% commitment.
In the shorter term–in various contexts–that approach often led to success. It also led to burnout and some counterproductive excesses. Nevertheless, I dutifully taught this rigorous type-A mindset to the players I coached and the students in my classrooms. I had learned to valorize rigor, effort, and intensity over just about everything else. So I passed along this driven mindset into which I’d been indoctrinated. It’s especially disconcerting now to reflect on the fact that the Middle English etymology of the word “discipline” derives, at least in part, from the concept of “mortification by scourging oneself.”
I didn’t think as much back then about things like sustainability or healthy balance; just giving 110% at all times. Fortunately, though, that’s not how yoga works. And certainly not Ashtanga. In order to maintain a diligent daily practice in this tradition, practicing with ease and joy–even reverence–is as important as vigorous effort. As a matter of fact, a “vigorous” daily practice trumps a “rigorous” one in every sense of both those words.
Integrating this essential insight into my life is currently one of my most important growing edges. My goal is to use this wisdom to inform my daily practice as both an educator and a yogi. And there is another salient lesson from my ashtanga practice that applies equally to my work as a teacher. Ashtanga yoga is typically practiced Mysore-style. This means that yogis come together to practice a common sequence of poses in the presence of a teacher, but each at our own pace, according to our breathing rhythm and skill with the various postures. Even though this tradition is ancient, we might call this a “personalized learning” approach in current educational jargon. It entails meeting each student wherever they are and calibrating all instruction to each individual’s distinctive needs and learning process.
What does this have to do with exercising leadership or the Pedagogy of Leadership® we espouse at the gcLi Leadership Lab? It reminds me to be patient with, even surrender to, the process of learning new things. It reminds me that each of us is on our own unique path, progressing at our own unique pace. In other words, we must be honestly self-reflective and personally accountable, but without comparing ourselves to others.
There are three essential foundations to a complete Ashtanga practice. The most obvious is asana (or the sequence of hatha yoga poses themselves); the next most obvious might be the conscious breathing process (called pranayama in Sanskrit). The hardest of the three for me to master has been drishti, the focused yogic gaze. It relates to the kind of one-pointed awareness that a yogi manifests by “stilling the fluctuations of the mind.” Quite often, my mind still wanders–even races–while I’m practicing yoga. I spend too much time scanning the rest of the room and getting distracted by other practitioners or the adjustments my teachers are making to my poses or breathing. Or I’m rehashing something that’s already happened or rehearsing things still to come.
Of course, I know better. I know that I can best serve my students by being more present. And patient. And persistent about giving them ample opportunities to practice, to learn from their own direct experience. Ashtanga yoga teachers are literally “guides on the side” instead of “sages on the stage.” The best ones allow the practice itself to enlighten the practitioner, reserving their interventions to strategic, often subtle, adjustments to facilitate our dawning self-awareness of our experience of the practice itself.
Alumni of the gcLi Leadership Lab know that I’m an avid disciple of Harvard Professor Ron Heifetz’s approach to exploring and encouraging Adaptive Leadership. I have always been drawn to a pedagogy that sees exercising and nurturing leadership as responsive, “improvisational arts” instead of quasi-scientific or prescriptive techniques. The more I practice yoga, the more deeply I experience and understand the sense of equanimity that helps us endure all the messiness that teaching or exercising adaptive leadership this way entails.
One less welcome consequence of a vigorous ashtanga yoga daily practice is that it can leave one’s body perennially sore; my joints and muscles often ache from the intensity of the practice. Life can really be a grind, at times, and the demands of a regular practice can feel onerous. I’m sure that’s why the ashtanga method allows for–even insists on–a day of rest each week. Of course it resembles the Judeo-Christian Sabbath, and serves an equally important purpose. It offers us a weekly reminder to temper our zealous, intense exertions with compassion and simply to rest every so often.
This is a lesson I can’t wait to master myself. In the meantime, I try my best to share with my students my own imperfect practice of these timeless wisdom principles.
Mike Pardee is a founding gcLi faculty member, currently serving as the Academic Director and Dean of Faculty of the innovative, experiential, civically-engaged Lab Atlanta semester school for high school sophomores. Mike has practiced vinyasa flow yoga for many years, and ashtanga for the past few. He hasn’t yet achieved nirvana, but aspires to be on that path.