4 Lessons for L&D from Yoga

Image description: A Black woman practices yoga outside, her yoga mat in the grass. She demonstrates the idea of alignment while in the yoga pose Warrior 2. She has her hair half pulled back and is wearing a gray tank top, bright blue leggings, and a variety of colorful beaded bracelets. She smiles peacefully while looking straight out over her front arm.

Source: “Yoga” by Dave Rosenblumlicensed through CC BY 2.0

I’ve been doing a lot of yoga in 2023 — the rare New Year’s resolution I’ve actually kept up with! And with all this increased time on the mat, I’ve started noticing, in the middle of my downward dogs, “Huh. This is a lot like what we do in L&D.”

So let’s roll out our mats and explore four lessons that L&D can learn from yoga (or, more accurately, four elements of yoga that align with best practices in L&D).

1. Practice, practice, practice

Just as yoga is understood as a continuous practice, when it comes to skill development, what learners really need is structured opportunities for practice over time.

Yoga is described as a “practice,” never something that is complete. My favorite home yoga instructor, Adriene Mishler, often taps into this mentality by reminding her students, “Don’t decide where it ends,” whether in the flow from pose to pose or even as our practice shapes our lives off the mat. And experienced yogis tend not to take their expertise for granted; they, like beginners, can always find something new in their practice.

Image description: A series of four snapshots showing a person practicing yoga on the beach, facing away from the camera. Each snapshot shows her taking the next step to get into a yogic headstand. She is wearing a black sports bra, cargo shorts, and a rope anklet, with her blonde hair in a ponytail.

Source: “YOGA: Head-stand” by Freriekelicensed through CC BY-NC 2.0

The yogic idea of practice reminds us that learning isn’t a one-time event; it is (or should be) an ongoing process. In her book Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen acknowledges that too often learners might just be given “a single dose of training… with the expectation that that will be enough” (196).

2. It’s more about the process than the product

Just as the breath carries a yogi through the entirety of their practice, metacognition sets learners up to see how prior learning applies to novel situations in the future.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, thinking that yoga is all about contorting your body into poses. But at least when it comes to the vinyasa style of yoga, the most important part of practice is actually the mindful breath that flows continuously; a blog post on Everyday Yoga notes that in between poses, it’s the breath that “provides the connection.”

Image description: Two women of color close their eyes to focus on their breathing during yoga practice. They both have their right hand on their heart and left hand on their belly. The woman at the front is more in focus and is wearing a tan tank top and small gold hoops with her curly hair pulled up in a bun. The woman in the background is out of focus and is wearing a matching blue tank top and leggings.

When it comes to learning, I’m reminded of the power of metacognition, or reflection on one’s own thinking and learning. According to research, prompting learners to engage in metacognition has been “shown to increase the degree to which students transfer their learning to new settings and events” (12), as was summarized in the report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition.

In other words, it may be just as useful (or even more useful) to prompt a learner to reflect on why they made particular choices on a learning artifact, rather than just completing the artifact itself.

3. Decisions, decisions

Having choice creates engagement in a process and improves outcomes of that process, whether the process is an asynchronous course about leadership strategies… or a side plank.

In her home practices, Mishler offers students what she calls, with her trademark sense of humor, different “bus stops” to get off at in individual poses — otherwise known as “variations.” In the video “Reunite With Your Core Center,” for example, she offers students three bus stops in side plank pose: one with top foot planted, one with feet stacked, and one with top foot raised, in the full expression of the posture. She models all of them, and students can choose the version that feels good in their bodies on that day.

Gallery description: A gallery of of four photos depicting people of different genders and races doing different variations of side plank.

In his theory of andragogy, Malcolm Knowles emphasized that one of the things that set adult learners apart from children was the need to feel autonomous, while more recent research suggests that learners of all ages benefit from autonomy.

4. Take it easy (at least sometimes)

As learning designers, how can we mindfully build in moments of ease so that our learners can take a productive rest and orient themselves to the rest of the learning experience?

A yoga practice often begins and ends in sukhasana, or a comfortable seated position. The name, which translates to “easy pose,” can in fact be a little misleading, according to Mishler, who prefers to think of it as a “pose of ease.”

Image description from source: Young Asian woman listening [to] relaxing music and meditating doing the easy pose (Sukhasana) at home.

That ease comes from the reflection and alignment that it demands, which is what makes it so appropriate for dropping into and out of practice (from the rest of life). It can also be a restful posture to take mid-practice.

Likewise, learners need moments to pause and reflect on the learning that has already happened. Tasking them with a fire-hose of information is a surefire way to get them to turn their brains off anyway, as Julie Dirksen points out in Design for How People Learn.

A closing note on the colonization of yoga

Before we wrap up, an important acknowledgement: I’m a white person, and yoga isn’t part of my racial, cultural, or religious heritage the way it is for some South Asian folks.

To read more on the Westernization and commodification of yoga that has taken place since the 1960s, check out the excellent piece from The Sydney Morning Herald“Why white people need to stop saying 'namaste'“ by Kamna Muddagouni.

Rumya Putcha, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, offers further analysis of the relationship between yoga and white womanhood here.

Personally, I practice yoga for physical and mental wellbeing, and the observations I offer here are based on that experience of it.

References

Dirksen, J. (2016). Design for how people learn. New Riders.

Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., Swanson, R. A., & Robinson, P. A. (2020). The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development. Routledge.

National Research Council. (1999, August 23). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: Expanded edition. National Academies. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9853/how-people-learn-brain-mind-experience-and-school-expanded-edition

Nebel, C. (2022, August 17). Pedagogy vs. andragogy: What's the difference? The Learning Scientists. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2022/3/17-1