28 Feb You Are The Pose
In the before times, when I taught in person, I would provide gentle, hands-on “adjustments”. My intention was always to offer students an external reference to what their body and mind were doing at that moment. Light touch provided little reminders to keep all the disparate pieces in their consciousness as they worked with the whole.
BKS Iyengar said, “When the body is one, the mind is in pieces. When the body is in pieces, the mind is one.
It takes some time to work out the mechanics of the poses. Each day your mind will have a different level of ability to focus on all the little things. The more you practice the more you can tease out the arrangement of all your body parts – and not just rely on the star players like the spine, the glutes, the shoulders, the neck. “Recruit from the bench!” one of my teachers would say. I like to remind you to engage all the fingers and all the toes – these little guys fill out the team, bringing presence to your whole container.
Hands-on adjustments can be seen as a form of “correction” or from deterring you from some sort of harm. This imposes a false hierarchical connection between you and the poses. The (dangerous?!) pose and you? No. There is no pose without you!
You are the pose.
Teaching on zoom has taught me to offer you references that you have inside you and with the use of props – whether they are formal yoga props or makeshift from around your home.
Receiving reference via touch through hands-on “adjustments” is just one tool to help you open the potential of your understanding of the pose within you. But it’s really not the most powerful tool.
The powerful tools come from your own senses. Listening to my cues, watching me on the screen as I demonstrate, feeling your body while making use of your own props are where the insights really come from.
My goal as I guide you is to help you learn to create your own body-based reference. The practice is in finding the steady and stable experience of the pose within your body-mind complex today.
We go slow. Inner quiet is the core of the action. Cultivating inner awareness plays a profound role in our actions.
One my teachers, Mathew Sanford, says, “When inner awareness and outer movement integrate, a better yoga pose is born…so is a better life.”
In my classes, we focus on active ways of developing inner awareness. Taming the senses, experiencing repetition of movements, using props helps us to reveal the inner subtleties of the outer poses.
The bones like this. They thrive in a calm physical-mental-emotional environment.
Join me in person at for Yoga for the Care of Your Spine
and/or
Join me for Yoga for Our Vital Bones on Zoom or watch the recordings in the library:
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