And also, why?

I’ve had multiple conversations this week about expectations.

How does my husband expect me to solve this problem?

Are my expectations for my team clear?

What are my students' expectations of me?

What do I expect people to know when they sign up for a retreat?

What do I expect from people once they get to a workshop?

Most importantly...

How are all these expectations being communicated?

Your well-being is determined by the difference between your expectations and your reality.

That means the closer your reality is to what you expected it to be, the safer you feel and the happier you are. When your expectations and your reality are far apart, you’ll feel constantly disappointed, unsafe, and eventually, you’ll just go numb. This internal relationship develops in childhood.

The Roots of Expectation

Think about this through the lens of a child’s need to be held. We’ve all been around babies, and we know that most babies prefer to be picked up and carried rather than left in a chair alone to fend for themselves. It’s not until the third chakra develops that a sense of independence and personal power begins to emerge, and the mind moves away from obedience and conformity.

If that transition never happens — if a child never feels safe enough to find their own way and wean from the path they’ve acquired — then the gap between expectation and reality becomes enormous. Or, conversely, they expect nothing at all.

So...

How do we workshop our own experience with expectations? 

Here’s how I would do it:

Start with your closest relationship, maybe a partner, parent or child. Make a list of your expectations of them. You can go in any direction, but if it’s hard, start simple.

How do I expect them to dress?

What do I expect them to eat?

How do I expect them to speak to you?

What do I expect them to do on my birthday?

How do I expect them to tell me that I hurt them?

How do I expect them to tell me that they love me?

You could spend an entire week doing this with just one person. As you start to explore this with more people in your life, you’ll notice patterns.

You’ll begin to ask yourself:

Are my expectations of others reasonable?

More importantly, you’ll start thinking about how you’ve communicated those expectations — and whether some conversations might be overdue.

Where This Shows Up At Yinsa

This came up most recently at a Yinsa team meeting, where we were reviewing feedback from our retreat in Bali.

Where, as a company, have we not communicated our expectations clearly?

I do this in a lot of areas of my life, largely because I expect people to be the way I am.

I think this is true for many of us. We see the world as we are, not as it is. We expect others to speak how we speak, to love how we love, to manage conflict how we manage conflict.

But the truth is, I am the only one who has lived my life experience.
It’s not reasonable for me to expect someone without my perspective to know or meet my expectations without guidance.

This is what you’re committing to.

This is how I want you to love me.

This is how I need you to show up. 

They can choose to come along for the ride, or they can decide that it’s not their path. It’s my job to provide them with the choice, and their job to decide whether my expectations align with their needs.

Why we hide our expectations...

We also talked about this during meditation on Sunday in the LiveYinsa Collective.  Sometimes we keep our expectations to ourselves because, deep down, we know they’ll never be met.

If I tell you that I expect something, and you tell me you can’t meet my needs, then what?

Now I have a choice to make.

Maybe I don’t make my expectations clear because I’m afraid of people not meeting them.

That is where the real work begins.

That is how we workshop

Doing the work together

This exercise is just one example of the work we do in the LiveYinsa Collective.  We choose a lens; chakras, Ayurveda, yoga, astrology, or spiritual texts, and explore a topic through that lens.

Here, we looked at the relationship between third-chakra development in childhood and why we keep being disappointed as adults.

Didn’t get all that from this exercise? Don’t worry — we’ll unpack it together on Saturday.

If you’re interested in doing this kind of work, you can do it for free, with me, in the LiveYinsa Collective.

We’re having our first meeting after a year-long hiatus this Saturday — you can join us here.  It's free forever.

I hope this gave you something interesting to think about this week.  It's Wednesday - Mercury's Day - so working on our communication is fitting.

See you in the collective,

Daniele