Your Experience Has Value

A few weeks ago, back in June, I participated in a Compassionate (yoga) Teaching workshop. Taught by Sue Jones, the founder of yogaHOPE, with my long time teacher Alex Amorosi assisting, I walked in excited to be exposed to the material, but not necessarily expecting to garner too many profound insights. Clearly, my ego was a bit, well, in front. To be entirely fair, I was the most experienced teacher taking the workshop, so I suppose my self-inflation wasn’t without cause.

But after a few minutes of the witnessing the process the other teachers / recent teacher training grads went through, I was actually fearful that I’d have a full fledged melt down in front of people I had mostly helped train. Then I was fearful of losing their respect, if I had it in the first place. Then I was afraid I’d have nothing worth sharing or a perspective to offer in this group of peers and practitioners.

Sue was incredibly clear while nudging folks towards confronting their crap. She asked each of us to list out a few of our universal truths. And after folks got through the shame, blame and whatever else usually obscures the true, raw emotions back there, every single one of us arrived at a universal truth that could be shared or used as a perspective to offer a class. What was mine? Fear. My universal truth in that moment was that I was afraid.

But the biggest take-away wasn’t the universality of fear.  It was something Alex said to me after I had that moment in fear, trying to teach in tears.  He said, “Your experience has value.”  And I didn’t hear him at first.
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We have a lot of walls around self value.  For some, there is an inflated sense of self worth that usually masks a sort of deeper unease; for others, there is a profound respect for the collective that minimizes the role of the individual; and for still others, there is simply a disconnect between doing, acting, being and self worth.

What I’m slowly integrating into my consciousness is that in addition to the value of the experiences I’ve had in the past, which are significant, the present moment experiences of gut feelings, emotions, sensations also have great value.

Your experience has value.  Hear it.  Repeat it.  Reflect on it.  It just might take that long to set in.  And when you get it, share it.