Learning Your Body - the value of a physical practice
When I was a writing teacher, one of my favorite things to teach was the idea that everything is a text. Not just books and websites and social media, but also clothes, body language, building architecture, room design, ambience, lighting, your dinner plate – everything.
We are constantly reading and scanning and interpreting our external world without consciously thinking about it, and this is where many of us honestly spend the majority of our time and energy, which means we are lacking attention for our internal environments. We don’t devote the time to body literacy, so we don’t know what our bodies are really experiencing on the inside. But all the while they’re still beating, respirating, circulating, pulsing, tensing, contracting, lengthening, dilating, and so on and carry on and life on.
When we experiment with yoga and mindful physical movement, we have the chance to shut out that noisy outside world for a while, and this allows us to step into a better state to learn the nuances and subtleties of our bodies, which is critical to establish a strong connection with yourself (check out my body awareness post). Essentially, making time for yoga and movement gives us the container we need to make the text of our physical body accessible to read and know.
Yoga postures, or asanas, provide us the opportunity to experience our bodies in a variety of purposeful shapes, and the presence they require makes it absolutely necessary that we focus on what’s happening inside our bodies so we can sustain the poses. And this is no easy task! Especially when it’s foreign to you. It’s not all just deep breathing and honeysuckle vibes (I’m not really sure where that phrase came from, but I like it and will keep it). It’s also constantly scanning your body and observing and recalibrating and redistributing and finding balance between effort and ease. It’s so much all at once, and it has the power to stretch your perception of time to incalculable levels of slowness. Have you ever noticed how long 8-10 breaths really are? But we need that time to practice and bring our attention back to our insides.
And this sounds daunting as I type and reread and reread and reread what I’ve written. And it kind of is. Especially some days. But it’s the right kind of hard. We stress ourselves out everyday about getting to work on time, what to make for dinner, paying bills, and generally just trying to live in some standardized way, and I think most of us would agree that these are difficult stressors we would cut out if we could. But yoga and movement? These are stressors that are actually good for us (like the good fats in your diet) because they help us grow, become more resilient, regulate, and learn about ourselves at a deeply intrinsic level.
Daunting still? Maybe. But hella badass.
And so we have this yogic gateway that helps us slow down and turn inward, and when we take this even further by incorporating mindful transitions, exploring mobility, or building strength, we can make some intense magic happen! We can learn where we house strength, what asymmetries we have (we all have them!), what muscles we’re using to compensate for weaker areas, or where we might benefit from expanding our mobility. And then (as you might have guessed) we can make a plan! We have a foundation that we can build from because you were able to read your body in movement and stillness.
And all of this doesn’t even cover how we can learn about yogic philosophy and energy and chakras and all the things that enrich a physical practice (more on all these things to come later).
But one last thing – using yoga and movement as a means to explore our bodies also provides a new framework for agency in our lives. It’s one of the earliest benefits we can reap. We can learn that we control our own bodies. Not the instructor or the person beside us. Not our children or our partners or anyone else. We control our own bodies. We can move or find stillness. We can dive in or back out of any posture. We can explore our edges and mindfully choose where we want to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. We can sustain a sense of empowerment and self-love. and we can grow – by showing up for our practice and actively choosing what we want to get out of it.
