After living with my body for many many years, after studying anatomy and physiology periodically, I must admit that I still am only now coming into embodiment, body awareness and deep understanding from the inside. I thought I knew what my body was capable of, what I could ask it to do in yoga, in life. And then I lost all of that somehow in the last several years. Some sort of disconnect, crossed wires, that I attributed to the rigors of childbearing, child-rearing, aging, any number of things.
Now I find that all of what I came to know about my body over the past decade was false - impressions placed upon me from external sources - doctors, psychiatrists, physical therapists, other authorities who I trusted to guide me and help me understand my self.
Deepening my yoga practice and study over the past two years has brought a level of embodiment that I did not know existed. I can physically feel things in a way that I never have before, and I have pushed my body well beyond anything it has ever done before - all of this on my fortieth birthday!
Part of this comes from a greater understanding of the mechanics of movements, an idea expressed so beautifully by Iyengar in Light on Life, that all movement is expansion from the core: "When you extend and expand, you are not only stretching to, you are also stretching from...Always try to extend and expand the body. Extension and expansion bring space, and space brings freedom. Freedom is precision, and precision is divine. From freedom of the body comes freedom of the mind and then the Ultimate Freedom. The Ultimate Freedom that yoga works toward can be tasted in our own bodies, as each limb gains independence, flexibility, and freedom from its neighboring limbs."
I feel like this is only the tip of the iceberg, but deeper body awareness has been building in me over the past two years, daily, step by step, but one big milestone was reached during the anatomy portion of my 200 hour teacher training this summer. The class was taught by Lou Benson, the most skilled and passionate bodyworker I've ever had the pleasure of working with (and I've known many and trained to be a rather unskilled one myself many years ago). Lou has a knowledge of anatomy and physiology that is beyond compare, and she has an enthusiasm for the topic that makes it surprisingly easy to understand.
Lou spoke about how the rib cage is misnamed - that it isn't a cage at all. And it seems obvious now, but I can honestly say that I never thought of it that way before. That little seed of knowledge planted in my mind made me realize through all of my movements over the past six month that my rib cage doesn't move. I can practice deep inhales and exhales in pranayama, and I'm still not breathing any expansion into my ribs. I'm breathing vertically, not in 3-d.
Knowledge and practice not being the same thing, I've been hammering myself over the head with wanting to bring movement to my ribs for the past six months. But last week, I went to Lou for a massage, and she worked on the spaces between the ribs, the spaces where the ribs connect to the sternum, and the pecs, which she discovered on a previous visit were always carrying tension. She spoke of how I stand up very straight, but that I'm actually standing up too straight. She spoke of how I'm doing backbends, heart-opening poses, and even pranayama with movements that approximate the real movements and look right on the surface but are really only reinforcing bad postural and structural alignments.
She spoke about how being embodied is scary for people because recognizing the body, meeting it where it's at in any given moment of any given day, this makes you realize that you are a body, that you are going to age, fall apart, and die. And many people prefer ignoring their bodies and living separately from them so as to avoid that knowledge on a daily basis.
And finally she spoke about not trying to fix everything all at once. And this is the biggest lesson. She says little lessons, practiced regularly, make the biggest difference over time. Iyengar speaks to this as well: "If you learn a lot of little things, one day you may end up knowing a big thing." Lou says you have to be okay with giving yourself a grade of "C" on your efforts, rather than always striving for the "A". "C" is good enough, and will be sustainable over time and won't knock you out.
This was the real meat of the lesson, now, wasn't it? Lou works in mysterious ways. Mysterious, calm, glowing ways. So, on the dawn of my forties, this is what I work on. Giving myself a "C" on everything. And knowing that is enough.
Good lesson
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