09/19/2024
Reimagining Your Body, Deepening Your Practice
(Reflections from Clearlight)
Is my yoga practice in service to my body, or is my body in service to the practice? This question may be more relevant than you imagine, and may shift how you experience your body, your deepest sense of self, and what kinds of inquiry become enlivened and relevant in your practice.
I had been practicing yoga for many years before I asked the question, and I found that the question helped open the door to not just a deeper practice, but to a more profound, lived satisfaction.
We might first think about what we really ask of our bodies. We insist the body denies her inclination to skip, play, stretch like a cat, or even to nap – all so that we can sit for hours, days, weeks, years, hunched forward over phones, slogging through endless repetitive movements required by whatever work task is at hand.
It’s not much different when we’re at home, as caretaking and parenting can be physically demanding but offer very little variety, and most exercise and leisure tend to be linear, repetitive, mechanical and predictable. Yet, the spine and the body are born to move and bend like a poplar tree – to lift, jump, squat, bend and climb – to bump up and down on uneven ground in different environments and reach into all perspectives of space. The body never hides its truth, so no wonder she gets stiff, sore, imbalanced and a bit cross at her lived experience… how could she not? Remember though, she’s always doing her best, and really does try to comply with your wishes.
So of course, it makes sense that we’d assume yoga and meditation would offer an opportunity for a little taste of well-deserved freedom! Yet, we may inadvertently simply carry over the same demand on body to comply with our wishes… ‘Okay body, time to get more flexible!” or “What’s wrong with you, body, why can’t you do this posture, everyone else here finds it easy!” or “Okay body, whatever you do in this meditation, stop complaining!” Other times the approach or instruction we encounter embraces the belief that there is something the body (or some other aspect of ourselves) needs to improve or acquire to find ultimate happiness or wellbeing.
This question, who the body is in service to – her own wisdom and wellbeing, or a set of ideas and beliefs – all came to a head for me around 20 years ago when I attended a week-long yoga program led by a well-known teacher.
I remember the group being told in a very solemn tone...
[Read entire article here: https://clearlight.ca/musings-and-reflections ]
