As I have been moving into what feels like a more embodied yoga and asana practice, I have been equally contemplating the value that my previous alignment focused practice has given me. For years, probably 2 decades, I practiced in such a way that I committed to whatever pose I was given and no matter what kind of discomfort I felt or how I wanted to get out of the pose I just stuck with it. Over the years I did develop a lot of kindness and compassion towards myself and I would not stay with anything that was actually painful, if I could detect that. It’s not always so easy to detect and that is part of the practice.
But I think one of the big insights and skills I developed over this longterm practice of staying with uncomfortable sensations like shaking, burning, exhaustion, fatigue, tightness, tenderness, and just a general agitation that sometimes starts to come even when there is no identifiable physical complaint, is that I quit letting my mind control the practice. By giving control over to the teacher, my mind was given at best a supporting role. It was no longer in charge. So I really learned not to trust the impulses of my mind, which very frequently are all about maximizing pleasure and minimizing discomfort. The mind – well, my mind anyway – can be very short-sighted. And learning to hear the mind with its complaints, admonishments, and excuses and yet not give in to its generally petty desires, was a really great life skill I learned on the yoga mat.
At the same exact time that was happening, I mean simultaneously on the mat in the same yoga practices, I was also ignoring any other feelings that might arise. I had given total control to the teacher. So, even as I was being instructed to listen to my body, at the same time I was being given cues by the teacher and other students in the room, that I should be basically doing what that teacher was doing and what the students around me were doing. “Listening to my body” meant doing child’s pose if it got too intense, or skipping a pose or doing some modification if a pose was aggravating to an injury I had. And those are great options to have.
But look at that again. Listening to my body = child’s pose, or skipping the pose, or doing some variation on the pose being taught. That is a very narrow view of what the body could possibly be communicating to me. So if my body was telling me to do happy baby when everyone else was doing downward dog, that was generally not encouraged by the teacher or students. If my body was telling me to writhe around on the ground, or dance, that was definitely something that didn’t feel like there was permission for.
And the body….WOW! It does speak in those languages. It speaks in movement, in stillness, in sounds, in undulations, in subtleties, in big stomps. What I’ve learned as I’ve been exploring the embodied practice of asana is that listening to the body is a huge task. And if you only give it a few cards with a few words on them, you’ll get very little information from the body. But if you give it complete freedom, the body will guide you on the most amazing journey and frequently leave you in complete awe and wonder.
A part of me sometimes thinks, dang, if only I had learned how to listen, to REALLY listen, to my body in the first place. But I think this is misguided. If I had started off by trying to listen to my body, would I have been able to hear her? The mind is so loud. And in the beginning it’s really hard to hear the body, it’s so quiet, and soft, and it’s there plain as day yet our ears, our inner listening is not attuned to it. And when the mind is still in complete control, prior to the practice of basically ignoring the mind, we don’t even known the mind is in control but it is. It can take years of arduous practice to begin to disbelieve everything the mind tells us and learn to listen to something that arises from a deeper place. And we all do have a will or an intuition that comes from a very deep place that is there to hear if we can get quiet enough to hear it.
So I don’t wish I had come to the embodied practice first. I might have mistaken the voice of my mind for the voice of my body. At the same time, if I had been trying to cultivate that listening and discernment from the very beginning, maybe I could have learned to hear the two. (And it’s not that the mind should not get a say in anything. It’s just that for me, and for most people I think, it’s got 100% say currently. And it needs to step back to at least 33%, with 33% for your essence, and 33% for the body. We need some affirmative action here for awhile.)
I don’t have a control group to compare and contrast how it would have gone. I’d love to hear from people who start off with this listening to the body. What I imagine is that it could result in obeying every inner impulse in an indulgent way without cultivating any equanimity or ability to stay with discomfort. I think those are very important skills that develop by sitting still in an uncomfortable experience and not moving, and seeing what arises. I think we can dissolve samskaras that way and build a strong energy body. And the practice of embodiment is a different and equally important practice where we learn to listen to the body, learn to listen to a will that is other than the mind, and move and act freely without second guessing or doubt or self-judgment. These are equally valid approaches and are different practices that both deserved to be practiced.