What Yoga Can Teach Us About Innovation
Here’s a bold statement: I have learned as much or more about innovation from yoga as I have from all my decades of training and experience in business.
I took my first yoga class about 20 years ago at my local gym, not because I was seeking inspiration or enlightenment, but because I thought the occasional yoga class would help to stretch my sore muscles. You see, at that time the Type A, overachieving side of my personality extended into almost every aspect of my life…which meant, as far as physical fitness was concerned, that I ran 40-50 miles per week, lifted weights 5-6 days a week, went cross-country and downhill skiing in the winter and logged 500 miles a month on my road bike in the spring, summer and fall. I was in fantastic physical shape, but I had suffered a string of exercise-related injuries and my whole body just hurt, pretty much all the time.
I had a transformative spiritual experience in that first yoga class - that’s a blog post for another time, but it’s the thing that kept me coming back to this practice that seemed to me, at first glance, to be frankly kind of tedious…and thank goodness for that, because I have learned SO much about myself and about transformation on my yoga mat. “Yoga for Business” could - and should! - be the subject of an entire graduate-level course of study, so I won’t give you the whole dissertation here, but I will just highlight the top four things that yoga has taught me about innovation.
Awareness is the key to change. Until that first yoga class, I would say that the huge majority of physical activities I engaged in actually took me out of my body: I would get on the treadmill and just “zone out” listening to music or whatever until I hit my mileage goal, regardless of whether I was suffering at the time from shin splints, nausea, back pain or plantar fasciitis. The big challenge - and the big gift - of yoga for me was that it brought me back into my body by constantly asking me to turn my attention to what I was feeling and experiencing, in a nonjudgmental way. Putting my body into challenging or uncomfortable positions, confronting my own limitations (e.g., not being able to do a back bend or a handstand right away), and holding poses for seemingly interminable lengths of time all made me want to walk out of the class at first (“Why would anyone willingly submit to this sort of discomfort?” asked a resentful voice in my head). But staying with it and simply noticing my own resistance (“Wow, isn’t it funny how I always ‘need’ to go to the bathroom right when we come to the back bends?” or “This pose feels completely different on the left side than it did on the right side”), without needing to judge them or do anything about them, taught me to pick up on the subtle layers of information and experience that I had previously ignored. Similar to yoga, innovation and growth efforts put us in uncomfortable positions, force us to confront our own limitations, and try our patience. The natural human response to such experiences (especially for us Type A folk) is to reject them and keep on pushing through to the next achievement, but when we do that, we skip over some very important information. Yoga teaches us instead to just observe and notice, and the kind of clarity that comes from that sort of awareness is essential to innovation and growth.
Transformation requires not just striving, but surrender. My instinct in that first yoga class, as in everything about my life at the time, was to push, to force my body into new positions…which of course didn’t work out so well when it came to poses that required deep flexibility (case in point: I actually tore a hamstring while pushing to do a too-deep forward fold in one of those early yoga classes). Over time, I discovered that yoga is not so much about forcing or pushing as it is about figuring out where to let go and how to allow one’s body to take on new shapes. It’s the same with innovation: trying to force change never really gets us anywhere, because the resistance generated by that forcing always ends up creating more constrictions and therefore holding us back. Figuring out where and how to let go, and how to remove blocks (both internal and external), is a much surer way for any organization or individual to find true transformation.
Expansion doesn’t happen without contraction. Even though it is kind of a cornerstone of astrophysics (think Big Bang or Big Bounce Theory), this was always a tough one for me, and for my ego in particular – why couldn’t I just have the expansion without the contraction? But yoga taught me not just to accept that expansion and contraction go hand in hand, but to enjoy the dance of contraction and expansion. Think, for example, of the simple act of inhaling: taking a deep breath feels on the surface like an act of pure expansion, but (1) it can’t happen without an exhale and (2) the physical act of inhaling might expand our lungs and our belly, but it can’t be done without contracting some muscles. The same is true of many deep stretches in yoga: attaining a truly deep, safe stretch requires simultaneous effort (muscle contraction) and letting go (muscle expansion). So often in innovation work, the natural tendency is to want to embrace expansion while eschewing contraction – after all, contraction (which can show up in organizations in the form of fear, rigidity, passive resistance, land-grabs, infighting, etc.) is really no fun. But if we can understand contraction as a necessary counterpart to expansion and transformation, then we can watch it and experience it with less judgment, and actually harness that energy in ways that help us to expand exponentially.
“Practice, practice, practice and all is coming.” Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, was famous for spouting this phrase, Yoda-like, to the disciples who approached him looking for answers to big questions. What he meant by this, as far as the physical practice of yoga was concerned, was two-fold: first, any “peak pose” that one desires to attain (press handstand, full split, full kurmasana with both feet behind the head, etc.) is achievable with practice – kind of an Indian sage’s version of “practice makes perfect.” The second meaning of this phrase is, to me, much more interesting: the idea here is that the goal is not the peak pose itself, but everything that one learns along the road to achieving that peak pose, and (perhaps even more important) everything that comes from the willingness to simply show up on one’s mat day after day. It’s like the line from the Antonio Machado poem: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar (Traveler, there is no road. The road is made as you walk).” In the same way that showing up on my yoga mat every day has yielded innumerable insights about my physical body, my energetic body, my breath and my belief systems, so the willingness to simply “show up” and practice the postures of innovation (openness, curiosity, a willingness to embrace contradictions and limitations, etc.) in a regular fashion can yield untold riches for any organization or individual.
Are you intrigued by “Yoga for Business”? If so, contact us at Satya Rasa Consulting – we would be honored to guide you on that journey.