Read a body of text and then measure your ability to retain and remember the information expressed. More importantly, give an honest evaluation of how much you internalised the knowledge enough to develop useful and insightful applications and interpretations.
Now read it again with the intention of conducting a lecture or a lesson on the topic to a group of people, and note how differently you begin to engage with the topic at hand.
Many of us would have probably already encountered this in our early years. When trying to help a struggling classmate in school, for example, we find that the more we tried to help them by explaining, the deeper was our own understanding of the topic. The process of verbalizing, reframing and implementing the ideas under such a context resulted in a growth of such resilient connections within our own brains that we became all the more knowledgeable for it. It was not a matter of us learning more, but a matter of our developing useable relationships and connections for our minds.
Perhaps the need to accomplish the goal of communication and teaching a piece of information presented a problem for your mind to solve, which resulted in increased motivation, understanding and comprehension.
When Howard S Barrows (1) pioneered the now popular Problem Based Learning approach in the 1960s, he leveraged this mechanism to develop extremely effective educational models that have become accepted and implemented in various mainstream applications. In a PBL based class, students are guided towards accomplishing an objective or problem, which require them to apply what they learnt, as a means of open ended and student driven learning.
Similarly, in the context of deepening your Yoga Practice, simply reading a series of texts, however relevant and detailed they may be, will be orders of magnitude less beneficial than if you trained to become a Yoga Teacher, where the challenge of applying what you have learnt and integrating the components of your learning together to find a coherent whole pushes you towards deep understanding.
“I just want to know more about Yoga, I don’t intend to become a Yoga Teacher. Should I join a Teacher Training Course?” is by far one of the most common questions I receive from prospective participants of my 200 Hour Hatha / VInyasa Yoga Teacher Training Course.
To which I have always said. “Yes, but on one condition. That you agree to Learn to Teach. Because you need to Teach to Learn.”
References
Barrows HS. A taxonomy of problem-based learning methods.
Med Educ. 1986 Nov;20(6):481-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.1986.tb01386.x. PMID: 3796328.
