A Series on Communication

After a somewhat difficult morning with our six month old baby who disagreed with us about the level of daylight that should accumulate before starting our day, my husband and I had a rough conversation or two before he left for work at my dad’s business, where he is a senior engineer. 

I felt very in the right in the somewhat tense conversation… until he left, when I looked around and saw all the blessings of our life together, remembered that he let me sleep in this morning, saw that he did not get to make himself coffee. I felt a wash of gratitude for what this relationship has given rise to. And I felt sheepish, not because the things I said were unimportant or inaccurate (they were both), but because they were not spoken from a place of alignment and attunement. I felt sort of the way I do when I attempt a difficult yoga pose without any warm up, aligning and breathing my way gradually into it. I realized suddenly that this is how I go into many important conversations – as though they were a leisurely walk. In fact, we are discussing parenting and working for a family business– these are not walk in the park conversations. Discussing our fallibility, our challenges as parents, our bad habits, our interactions with our extended family, these are not walking in the park. These are Uttitua hasta padangustasana, a pose that really requires the yogic principles of alignment.

The alignment principles of yoga empower us to take on challenging poses, which prepares us for the challenges of life.

So I asked myself, what can I do to align myself to have difficult conversations? This series explores this question.