The Deeper Sense of Yoga: Part 1
In the 1970s a paper was written by a researcher at the Menninger Clinic describing the feats of yogis in India who could do seemingly miraculous things with their body, such as:
Control their blood pressure and heart function (atrial fibrillation) at will
Control their sense of pain (for example laying over a bed of nails)
Make parts of their body grow warm
Control their breathing and other physiological functions in remarkable ways
The author wondered at the ability of these individuals to control their bodies with their minds.
From a skills-based perspective, this work was just starting to scratch the surface of how mastering body awareness unlocks new levels of skill and the ability to shift states of mind and emotion.
The ability to significantly change the body and states of mind and emotion, seems deeply tied to the ability to identify, clarify, feel, organize, coordinate, and re-create sensations in the body.
This is the 1st in a 3 part series to explain this skills-based approach in more detail.
When I first started teaching yoga,
I had a problem.
I couldn’t do a headstand.
This might have been okay in day-to-day life, but as I had to teach students how to do headstands it was especially troublesome.
I started sneaking off to yoga workshops that taught headstands.
But, surprisingly, the skill still eluded me.
That was, until I took a workshop with a more experienced yoga teacher who did something different.
Rather than immediately focusing on the skill of standing on your head, she first had us do exercises that (to me at that time) seemed somewhat unrelated.
For example, she had us lay on our stomachs with a bolster and rolled up blanket under us.
Throughout the workshop,
she focused on having us feel different sensations.
For example, she wanted us to feel the subtle pressure the bolster and blanket exerted on the abdomen and the direction the belly moved in.
In another exercise she had us work with a partner. She had them hold out their hand so we could feel when our low back touched their hand with it as we walked our feet forward.
If you’ve ever read a detailed description of how to perform a yoga pose,
For example, in the old-style, in-depth, Yoga Journal articles - you’ll be familiar with how a yoga pose can be broken down into a dozen or more different sensations.
And all of these sensations have to be:
felt
organized
and coordinated
in the student’s body (and then their mind) to do the yoga posture.
As the senior teacher led us through her breakdown from sensation to sensation
- along with specifics, like a) what part of the head to balance on, and b) how wide the arms should be -
she began to have us perform the full position.
If you’ve ever seen someone new to a physical task you may have observed some awkwardness in their initial execution.
From skiing, to golf, to sewing, to surfing, people don’t find their balance, their groove or their swing right away.
In headstands you can sometimes actually see the body shake slightly as the brain gets used to positioning the hips upside down.
That day I started to get a shaky sense of a headstand doing it at the wall.
But with a little practice, I could balance in a headstand at the center of the room a week after I was introduced to the correct sensations, and shown how to organize them!
I was so excited to be able to perform the skill that had been troubling me for some time, and which I had tried to learn repeatedly, that I sat down and wrote the teacher a note of thanks.
Little did I know that this was an early lesson in a powerful methodology that had much wider application as I was to come to find out.
To be continued in: The Deeper Sense of Yoga, Part 2