A Perspective Of Stuttering During Yoga Teacher Training

 

I've stuttered since I could remember, since the early 1970's, and in the way I've thought about my own different way of speaking I'm very much a product of my time.

Stutterers born later in the 20th century or early in the 21st might not identify at all with how I view this way of speaking, or societies response to it. That's fair. We each respond to the stimulus available to us, until we learn not to (a skill I am just beginning to acquire, so forgive me my blind spots and remnants of long held beliefs). But, this is about me, so there we have our start point of understanding this essay at it unfolds, I hope.

Public speaking - which is a hugely important skill if you are looking to teach - isn’t easy for a great many people. And for those of us who speak differently than the ‘norm’ it can seem an even bigger task. The mere fact that we as a society tend to call things like lisps, stuttering or stammering ‘speech impediments’ signals that it can seem easy to many people to see anything other than perfect speech as a problem to be corrected. The 2010 film ‘The King’s Speech’ emphasizes this view as it shows us how King George VI wasn’t taken seriously until he’d ‘overcome’ his stammer. Other examples of stutterers who are said to have ‘overcome’ their problem include Bruce Willis, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Branson, Tiger Woods, Elvis Presley and Samuel L Jackson.

So, despite the negativity and psychological damage we know we create when we tell perfectly healthy people that they’ve a problem, we’re still led to pronounce, and in my former case believe, that a speech difference is a hindrance to be cured somehow, perhaps with hypnosis, or something else akin to a scene from 'A Clockwork Orange'.

A far better way of looking at it might be to advise those with a speech difference that it’s handy to speak fluently so that you can communicate everything you want to in a way that others feel easily comfortable with, but if you can’t do that then you perhaps take another route and work harder than most to find your own individual voice. This is advice that I never had in any workable format.

We listen to stutterers all the time and never realise it because they’re found their own voice. And there is terrific help out there these days for people like me who stutter. For instance here’s some solid, workable advice from Richard Branson, who still stutters to this day;
"Try to talk as you would to your best friend. Whether there is one person, ten people or a thousand people in the room, try to relax and chat as you would in your living room."

And here’s some more from Joe Biden;
"I’ve helped myself by reading poetry aloud in front of a mirror, to smooth out cadence, and by forcing myself to participate in as many public speaking events as possible." 

Tiger Woods helped himself by talking aloud to his dog for hours on end, whilst Rowan Atkinson over articulates certain sounds to help him deal with difficulties, which has in turn helped him become known for a unique speaking style that people enjoy rather than feel uncomfortable with.

But all that is advice that’s easily found via the internet, and since I grew up in pre internet days, it’s - as I've said - advice that I never got.

Some stutterers choose to believe that nobody cares anyway, that believing that anybody is thinking about you at all is a self indulgent mistake and that you may as well just get up there and speak because who cares?! You think that people actually pay attention to anything you say! And anyway, even if they do, everybody is just as riddled with errors in their own way so why dwell on it!

But such stutterers are rare. Most of us, and I've met a few (we number approx 1% of the world’s population, over 77 million people) sometimes put a silver lining on it in order to give ourselves some measure of self worth after a particularly crushing, cruel experience at the school or workplace. We can say, for instance, that we are blessed to have been forced to discover other ways of communicating, to explore ourselves more fully that we would have done had we learned to speak differently, and for being pushed to realize that if society was so lazy and stupid as to be constantly lured in by dictators and salesmen just because they spoke nicely then we were so happy not to be fully welcomed into being part of such a foolish set up.

And at other times we explore the roots of stuttering in order to give it some valid cultural context. For instance, in my case, did you know that in England after WW1 stuttering was respected as a sign of PTSD? Many young lads developed this ‘problem’ in honour of the soldiers who saved our country. That’s one reason why so many Englishmen stuttered through the 1920’s up until the 60’s. And it’s why those men passed the stutter down to their sons - en masse. I remember several lads in my street stuttering as I did. Stuttering was seen as a sign of bravery, of physical ability, of sacrifice.

But as the 60’s wore on society discarded that cultural reference and by the time I got to school stuttering was seen not as a badge of distinction but as a problem which the teachers thought could be cured by making me stand up in class and read aloud from whatever novel was then in vogue (in my case I recall it was ‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’).

This is what I tell myself, anyway. Or, told myself. Why? I am not sure there is an easy, or right, answer. A stutter can be a very real hindrance in life that leads to truly brutalizing events but at the same time it can be something to hide behind, to be lazy behind, to be selfish behind. Between all this and more may lay some sort of truth, I suppose.

As you might imagine, for the Dave of long ago, all this ‘sink or swim’ method my school teachers employed achieved was to ensure I sunk, and grew to loath the embarrassment that came with stuttering in front of a class full of working class lads who enjoyed making fun of each other. It wasn’t just me and my stutter, every difference that anybody had was singled out for ridicule. We were the typical crabs in a bucket pulling each other back from escape. Poor, working class kids stuffed into a hole by the ruling classes and playing along when we were encouraged to make fun of each other rather than at least trying to give each other a hand up and out.

Education, my personal experience led me to believe, was something I should get out of ASAP and public speaking, I vowed, was something I’d avoid at all costs.

And apart from a few brief occasions when there was no way around it, I have managed to do just that, to hide and avoid, throughout my life. 

Writing and taking photos has mostly taken the place of speaking out loud. I make more sense in those mediums, I’ve always thought. I felt confident in them. And that wasn’t a perfect state of affairs but it was fine, and I accepted it as my lot.

Until this year when I was offered the opportunity to take a 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training Course at the Octopus Garden in Toronto.

I really wanted to take the course. I had recently quit my job, disenchanted with the realities of a regular 'career' undertaken just for my own self interest in a world that seemed to be crying out for far more than that. Did the world need another guy who just tried to survive? Or who tried primarily to earn enough to afford medical care, or to send their kids to university, or to build a swimming pool in the back yard, or to get a golf club membership, or to travel extensively for ‘self development’ or just plain old good-natured fun, or to somehow stave off the fear of never having enough to survive old age when the world would surely be cruel to me and I’d have no choice but to stand alone with only my savings as a shield?

I wasn’t sure but it seemed that bearing in mind the forest fires, the refugees lining up at Western borders, the fast rate of animal extinctions, the unnatural speed of global warming, the severe sense of disconnect and apathy that seems to infect many societies, and more that no, the world did not need another guy like that.

So after saving up enough money to pay the rent for a while I’d quit, to give myself the time and space to look around and see what the world might need from me and what, in turn, I was capable of offering it.

I’d thought that it might be a good start for me to learn how to help people, and perhaps by giving something real to the community I might in turn give something very valuable to myself. I didn’t see myself becoming a yoga teacher but having practiced yoga for a couple of years I reasoned that getting more involved in this community could be a first step. These yoga people, it seemed, were more often than not trying their best to be grateful, kind and helpful. And without knowing much more about it those three aims seemed like things that yes, the world could use more of.

‘But you can’t put out forest fires with kindness!’ my rational, working-class self mocked in one ear whilst something else said,
‘But the gloves are off now Dave, the things that worked in the past don’t seem to work any more. This rational way of thinking has led us to where we are, so maybe give the yoga teacher idea space for a while?’

I’ve undertaken so many journeys in the past - walking across deserts, across countries - where at the start I had a solid idea of where I’d go and what I’d get from the trip. And almost every time I’d ended up places I’d never previously heard of, learning things I couldn’t have possibly imagined before, things that had turned out to be the highlights of the journey. So, I thought, Dave, give this yoga course a go, maybe kindness CAN put out the forest fires. Maybe being helpful, and discerning what ‘being helpful’ actually means in my personal existence, IS what the world needs. And if not, well, it’s only a month wasted, which isn’t much, right? If it all fails you can just get back to trying to be president or prime minister, or whatever else the hell your mum told you you could be if only you tried hard enough.

The thought of teaching people though, of speaking out loud to a room full of strangers, I just couldn’t imagine myself doing it. The embarrassment would be excruciating.

But the fear of this being how my life was to fizzle out, that I’d be the guy who thought he had so much good stuff to say but never the ability to say it, was perhaps even larger than my fear of talking aloud.

So I signed up for the month long course and promised myself I’d give it a go no matter what happened. I had no idea how it would turn out and I was frightened of how foolish I’d appear when it came to introducing myself on Day 1, but for the want of any other tactic I decided to just take it all on the chin and plough through in hope.

My hope wasn’t without justification, I should say. I wasn't just bravely, blindly stepping out of a condo window and hoping to be caught by a passing cloud of contentment. I’d been going to yoga at the Octopus Garden Studio for a couple of years. I knew some people there quite well. They seemed decent to me, like they were trying to be kind all the time. Not like regular folk you meet at work who don’t put up much resistance when society invites them to be cruel and selfish. No, these yoga people seemed like they might be worthy of my trust, and more importantly, that they wouldn't laugh at me when I invariably made a fool of myself talking out loud.

Day 1 was not quite as bad as I’d feared. As I waited for my turn to introduce my neighbor I was frightened. We were doing that thing where you talk to a partner in private for a few minutes and then take turns to introduce the other. I’d done this lots of times before at work and hated it. For me it’s worse than just introducing yourself because not only do you run the risk of stuttering and seeming inadequate to some but also I'm fearful of missing out vital pieces of my new friends’ idea of their identity, and as a result possibly portraying them in a less than generous manner.

When it came to my turn I didn’t do well at introducing my new friend but the feeling emanating from my classmates was noticeably non judgmental. It wasn’t the same as at school with it’s sniggers and harsh alienation or even at my most recent job here in Toronto where management were absolutely obsessed to the point of madness with a person's ability to speak loudly and clearly, regardless of the lack of reflection their words may or may not betray, and wouldn’t give credit or adequate reward to anybody who didn’t speak the way they wanted them to.

As we sat in a circle on the floor I wasn’t embarrassed after my turn at talking. This was a new feeling for me. In those early stages I thought I could see that my classmates were not only on my side, but also genuinely kind people who were trying to be the very best that they could be. Am I safe here? I thought. Can I just be myself without fear of ridicule? You know, I think I can...

Over the coming weeks the teachers also addressed the elephant in the room. They used the word ‘stutter’ several times when talking about the challenges of public speaking. This helped me a lot because it was the obvious and the right thing to say, and to be in such an honest environment was a huge relief to me. Often these days people I come across are so overly concerned with being politically correct and not offending anybody at all that whatever of value they might say gets buried by their looking the other way. However well intentioned their avoidance of issues is it doesn’t help, it just reinforces the feeling that they simply want to get past the inconvenience of whatever isn’t considered mainstream and pretend that they’ve dealt with it in lieu of practicing real kindness and critical thinking.

You’re a woman in a room full of men at a company that believes men are superior? Ok, we’ll not mention your sex and instead let’s talk about other things, as long as those ‘other things’ aren’t wage gaps, sexism or how Bob, who despite being an incredibly sweet guy, constantly talks over you and is completely unaware of his male privileged.

Ditto coloured person/white society setup.

And if you stutter, well, it’d be polite not to mention it. You can bumble through and we who can speak mainstream style can pretend we don’t mind whilst secretly making a note never to promote you because you might fail in a scenario that is never likely to occur. And then we can all claim due diligence and pretend things are fine, or at least as good as they can be.

But at the teacher training it wasn’t like that. They faced the issue and dealt with it in a compassionate way. Ok, their honesty implied, you don’t talk in a way that most will accept as it is but you need to get over that if you want to impart your knowledge in this setting. There’s no getting around it, you have to find a way because people are as they are and until we show them a kinder way to be, which is indeed part of our practice, then we need to operate on their terms.

Part of being a yogi is to cultivate the discipline needed to face up to challenge. To hold a difficult physical pose, a headstand perhaps, or to concentrate for a long time during meditation, or to think through a complex moral issue. And part of YOUR challenge, Dave, is to find a way to talk that the masses feel comfortable with so that they don’t have to focus on what they perceive to be your disability but instead focus on what will hopefully be the wisdom of your message.

The big moment I was dreading was late in the course when we were to stand and talk to the class for five whole minutes about a book that has influenced us on our yoga journey. But as the days and weeks ticked away and the time neared, the constant questioning that yogic training requires made me look at the situation - at my situation - in a new, more positive way.

Sometimes it can seem that modern yoga culture is all about being kind to yourself by letting yourself off the hook, by sprinkling fairy dust everywhere, by eating bowls of fruit in the sun, pulling handstands and generally having a life that looks on Instagram like it consists of an endless pamper day. Yet I began to see that for me, at that moment, being kind to myself meant stopping being so selfish and self absorbed and to begin to cultivate the discernment to learn to see things for what they actually are.

As my time came to speak out so many thoughts confronted and helped me.

The foremost was that maybe I’d been wrong about everything, about everything that I've thought in the past and indeed said in this article, that I’d been bruised and hurt by my early experiences to the extent that I saw everything through a cynical, brutalized lens. How could I be sure that this wasn’t the case? I couldn’t, so it would be wise to put it up for consideration and hold it where I could see it.

What was without doubt though was that this group of people around me, my yoga class and teachers, were my friends and I would be a fool not to see that. They weren’t looking for me to be perfect, to speak every line well. In fact they wanted me to have as good a time as possible when I addressed them. I didn’t have to fear their scorn, their secret laughter, their judgement that because I couldn’t talk ‘well’ that somehow I wasn’t a complete person. I’m not trying to paint them as saintly but having spent every day for 3 weeks with them in an environment where vulnerability and honesty is seen as part of the gateway to self improvement I think I had some reason to believe I knew them to be genuinely kind. And even if this weren’t the case, it seemed reasonable to assume that the type of person who’d take a month out from work and pay for a course that was meant to help them become teachers and more developed as individuals weren’t the sort to get their kicks from bouncing cruel jokes off a guy’s back.

Another thought was about a friend, the poet Jason Stoneking. He loves speaking in public, it’s a huge part of what he does. And here was me with a chance to speak in front of a willing audience, something he would love, and I was shaking in my shoes at the thought! How ungrateful of me was that, to be drowning this great opportunity in fear! It felt like I was turning my nose up at a slice of some wonderful cake that a hungry friend would readily devour. From that perspective, my fear didn’t feel like a very decent emotion to feel at all.

My last job had showed me just how important it is for good people to speak up. I had worked in the recycling/green department and so many times I’d seen bad choices being made by management, choices that negatively impacted our earth and our regional society. I would constantly, privately moan about how bad the management were but looking at it a different way how was it their fault when I hadn’t spoken up and given them better options? They were the sorts who’d moved straight from business school to work and were so richly rewarded for the act of performative workaholism and for grimly accepting that the needs of the business were more important that those of the natural world that they had little incentive to undertake genuine personal development. How ridiculous then was it for me to expect them to make the right choices when they had to choose between company profit/personal bonus, and the environment!

It had been selfish of me to place my embarrassment of public speaking over the needs of the business and the world. How anti-capitalist, how anti-nature had I been!

How many hundreds of tonnes of raw materials had been sent to landfill, how many toxic items had flooded into the Toronto water supply, how many decent, honest workers had been laid off, how much trust had been destroyed and how much white collar crime committed because I’d lacked the courage to speak up and present the bosses with a more measured, worldly approach than they themselves had the experience to conjure up. Wasn’t it time I got over myself, and the fear of appearing imodest, and put the needs of society before my own? I was a half a yogi now and as far as I could see that involved some measure of warrior nature. I was certainly no expert but it didn’t seem right that a warrior would hide from such things as personal embarrassment or fear.

What a selfish snowflake I was being! Turning down gifts, denying the world my 51 years of experience and for why, because I was frightened of being embarrassed and taunted? Suddenly, I understood fully that this shouldn't really be about me. We’re all in this life together. We need to learn to think as one. And to think as one we need to think as individuals, and understand how to navigate that complex strategy. My personal embarrassment was of little concern when there were bigger issues to take into account (and there are always bigger issues to take into account). I was a little fearful of my ego being bruised, so what! And what did that say about my values, about my honesty, about where I get my validation, about what I actually thought of those around me?! Wow, I didn’t come out of this ‘fear of public speaking’ thing very well at all now that I looked at it with a more critical eye.

And with those thoughts, the fear ebbed away. I found myself looking forward to my talk, and I got up eagerly (before it way my turn in fact) and bumbled through quite happily. I wasn’t good, I'm sure, and I probably wasn’t very interesting or logical but it was a great start for me because what mattered most was that I wasn’t scared any more, that I actually quite enjoyed doing it and that I had begun to trust people.

Since the end of training I have taken every chance to speak aloud. And I didn't just talk aloud, I ENJOYED talking aloud.

In the past few years I’ve been invited to appear on TV and Radio in the UK and Canada because of my knowledge of running, travel, of the world and of veganism. But I’d almost always turned these opportunities down as I'd been too frightened and selfish to take to the mic. Now it was going to be different.

Soon after the training finished I was asked to speak at the forthcoming Toronto Veg Festival - the largest vegetarian food festival in North America - and I didn’t hesitate in saying ‘YES PLEASE’.

There is so much I do not know.

When I hear the more publicized public debates roaring around me I feel that few if any are speaking for me. These groups of extreme, angry people are standing on the right and left sides of a canyon that soars far above and all their shouting at each other does is push the sides of the canyon further apart. And then there’s me, and the majority of you, sat at the bottom of the canyon thinking something like

‘These people shouting are not speaking for me at all. I do not feel that way. How can I speak up? I don’t want to shout, so how can I be heard? If I don't scream, will anybody hear me?’

I do not know if what I have inside me can genuinely help our world or if I will ever learn to speak well enough to convey it as I feel it. And I don’t know that even if I do manage to convey it well whether the communication channels will convey my message if I do not shout about God Given Rights or Human Rights or Animal Rights or Non Existent Rights or work myself up into some other sort of red faced anger, which is something I’m not going to do.

So I will just do what I did at the start of teacher training. I will step forward, do what I can to the best of my ability, keep learning how to be better, and, looking at it all with a gentle gaze, see how it pans out.

And briefly, it’s not just my speech that the yoga teacher training has helped. Of course, as you might expect, I have gotten better at yoga. I understand the poses more, and my own body and mind has been introduced to many different points of view and systems of thinking. Some I can see merit in and some I am opposed to, at the moment, but hopefully I oppose them with reasoned argument and kindness, not the angry reactions that were so much a part of my past.

Sometimes during the training a person would say something and I would instinctively, internally shift away. But instead of leaving it there as I’ve done so often before, yoga invited me to confront my discomfort. I’d ask why their words made me feel odd, or angry, or cynical. Then yoga made sure I’d sit with them at lunch and ask them about their views, and also made sure I kept quiet as they explained.

I also learnt more about being a male in a male dominated society. There was enough good people talking of the privilege I have as a white, older male - even if it was initially hard for me to see it - that it seemed foolish of me not to examine the matter. I could always retreat into the usual corners, such as how I too have been subject to unfairness but really, yoga, my teachers, my class mates, asked, is this the best I could do?

My class was made up of ten females, or twelve if you included the teachers, and one other male. I’d been aware of how men can fill up way more space than their physical mass required, it was easy to see during my years at the studio. With certain men, they might be the only male in the class but they’ll still dominate the room even if they say nothing. Sometimes it’s something visual like them feeling free to take their shirt off when they’re hot, sometimes it’s the way they laugh more loudly, deeply and confidently than anybody else. Sometimes it’s nothing as obvious as that, but equally easily sensed. And often it's MY perception, not their doing anything, where the main issue is. I can see that now.

Being in a mainly female environment for a month gave me a great opportunity to really dig into this, ask about my privilege, and how to best deal with it. I was raised to respect women, to never take what’s not freely given and it’s a part of my upbringing that I’ve never tried to change, yet still, is this enough?

I can see now, no, it’s not. I noticed how I would sometimes finish a female classmates sentence, or talk over them, and that whereas if a female had done that to them they’d have likely resisted and spoken a little more forcefully to continue their point, with me they let me get away with it. I saw that it was possible that I was even using my age to my advantage, knowing that decent people will often defer to an older person, not because the older person is right but because they are older and, society tells us, worthy of respect. And being white, yes, it matters. I’m more confident because of what history and society has drilled into me, and non whites let me get away with things for the same reasons. If this bothers me, my training insisted, then I have to be part of a solution.

I have no wish to take anything from anyone, not their respect nor their attention nor their kindness. I'll accept these things if I am worthy of them but using what society and history claims I am to gain favour, even if I’m not consciously doing so, doesn't put me in a place I want to be in.

So my first attempts at dealing with this saw yoga help me trying to ensure I monitored myself during conversations. I allowed space after the end of anybody's sentence before I commented. I’d speak softly, not using force, consciously trying to remove any attempt to gain control. I’d ask for opinions and I’d watch for any sign that I was responding out of a need to be right. I’d take care not to put people in a situation where an instinct to please me might overpower their wish to express themselves. I’d not wait for anybody to walk through a door before me just because they were female but at the same time I'd help people if they seemed in need of anything I could offer. I admit, these are basic things and many would have far stronger ideas about how I should address my privilege, but this is what I could understand and act upon at the time.

At first walking away from centre stage like this felt like I was fading away. Then I understood that inaction was ok, that I didn’t need to have an opinion, or be right, or to even be part of the conversation at that moment, that it was more important to just stand there and listen. In fact listening is what I came to do a lot of. It felt like I wasn’t doing anything at first but the yoga training helped me there, to recognise when there is a need for action - like speaking out in public about issues such as the environment, animal abuse, personal health, etc - and when there is a need to be quiet. And that in fact, to listen is to act, every bit as much as talking or doing is.

The understanding of privilege is basic, but a step forward for me. And it’s a step I would have been unlikely to make had it not been for my yoga teachers.

I can go on, about how the teacher training has helped my personal discipline and my development of a clearer, five-fold path to running and how it has encouraged me to look for the truths that surround me right here, right now, and how yoga study is an ever moving web of techniques and wisdom that helps the human condition, and more. All that though is for another day. Today it is enough for me to talk about the stutter, and a little of my privilege, with a hope it might help you in some way and perhaps encourage you to delve more into yoga yourself, or even maybe take a teacher training course, or maybe decide that even though becoming a hermit or an outsider seemed the moral course of action to choose at one time, that maybe now is a time to reconsider that and re-enter the fray. 

For there is space in this human world, and we will not suffer it being a void. If good people do not speak up and fill it and turn it into something useful then misguided people will do with it as they will, as they have done so often in the past, and continue to do.