As a child, I loved reading books and listening to them. I had lots of books and audibooks – this included cassettes with lots of short German stories in which God comes to earth to test his followers. One of these stories started with a slim, kind hearten Tailor who had a big wife with a binge eating problem. She was so big that her legs could not bear her weight anymore and she could not walk. So God comes down to the house of this tailor to test him. The tailor shows kindness and passes God’s test. God decides to reward him and ask him what he wants. He says that he does not want anything for himself and ask God to ask his wife whether she wants anything. When God asks her, she starts complaining about her knees. God looks at her and says no, you do not need better knees you need to have better eyes. From that day, every time she wanted to eat, her eyes saw a hungry child, adult or animal and she felt sorry for them and shared her food. She lost lots of weight and she could walk again.
The story might first sound weird but I liked it. I have seen on a few occasions that people experience a problem and try to solve the problem by going directly where the problem is (or visually looks like it is) rather than stepping back and seeing what led to that problem in the first place. I give you an example – I started a few sessions of Thai boxing. Every time, we did lots of kicks, I had a real bad back pain on one side of my back afterwards. It was always on the same side. I did lots of exercises to lengthen that part of my back and work on it. It did not help. Then I decided to use my training as a yoga teacher to figure out the origin of the problem. I started to practice myself kicking and try to understand how I am moving and using my body and then I found the origin of the problem. One of my legs, when I lift the leg to kick, the quadriceps (especially its upper head) does not sit down on the bone as it should so my back muscles cannot get the required extension during the movement that supports the kick and after a few of these kicks, I get a back ache. As soon as I started focusing on the quadriceps, that pain never came back. I still get beaten up unfortunately so there is still pain.
I love short stories like this that stayed with me over the years – every other then I remember them and the underlying layers or meaning and messages that they have and they help me through daily events.
Metaphors, poetry and stories are a key part of the Persian culture. From the day, I remember my dad would use a line of poetry, a famous metaphor or a story to make a point (I wrote about him before). The beauty of those stories or lines of poetry was that they did not only taught me something at that moment but there were layers of meaning associated with those stories that I gradually discovered over the years.
I am recently revisiting how I organise my teaching and am reflecting how I teach and how I can improve it. I realised when am preparing educational material, I spend a lot of time finding the perfect example, the perfect story (either a real clinical one or speculative one) or a quote to convey the key educational points. A story or quote that has the ability to stay in the students memories during their clinical career and guide them at crucial moments. I would not claim that I found those perfect stories or quotes that convey all those educational messages but I am trying.
The Experimental and Speculative Lifestyle 