Reflections

You Are the Authority

Your body. Your practice. Your choice.

We spend so much of our lives in our minds.

We think our way through our days. We push ourselves. We tell ourselves to keep going. We decide what we should be capable of. And sometimes, without even realizing it, we allow the mind to override the information the body has been offering all along.

A practice like Yin gives us an opportunity to change that relationship.

When we stay in a shape for several minutes, sensation begins to reveal itself. Maybe there is tension. Maybe there is spaciousness. Maybe there is intensity, resistance, warmth, ease, or discomfort.

The practice is not deciding whether any of those sensations are good or bad, right or wrong.

The practice is listening.

What am I feeling?
Where am I feeling it?
How does it make me feel?
And how do I want to respond?

Maybe we stay exactly where we are. Maybe we soften. Maybe we reach for a prop. Maybe we come slightly out of the shape. Maybe the body is telling us that today, this particular shape isn't for us at all.

None of those choices means we are doing the practice incorrectly.

Making that choice is the practice.

In one class, a student shared afterward that the practice had helped quiet some of her ruminating thoughts. Not because the goal is to make thoughts disappear, but because bringing awareness into the body can create a little more spaciousness around them. Instead of trying to think our way out of thinking, we give our attention somewhere else to rest.

Another student told me she had chosen not to do the poses involving spinal flexion. Her back was already sore, and she knew those movements weren't what her body needed that day.

I thought: yes. That's it.

She listened. She chose. The posture wasn't more important than the information coming from her own body.

As teachers, we can offer a shape. We can provide cues, props, variations, and invitations. We can create an environment where exploration feels safe.

But we cannot feel another person's body from the inside.

The person practicing remains the authority on their own experience.

Toward the end of Savasana, I introduced the gentle sound of leaf chimes into the room.

Until then, much of what we had been noticing had come through the shapes we were creating with our own bodies. Now there was nothing to do. No posture to deepen. No movement to make.

Just sound.

Sound is vibration, and it offered another opportunity to listen. Not only to the sound itself, but to notice what happened within us as we received it.

Where do I experience this?
Does anything shift?
What arises when I am not intentionally creating it?

After class, someone asked about the significance of the leaf chimes. And I realized that small moment held so much of what the entire practice had been about.

We weren't trying to manufacture an experience. We were practicing receiving information and noticing our response to it.

This is why I believe so deeply in the mind-body connection. Not about getting rid of the mind in favor of the body. It's about allowing the two to communicate.

The body gives us information. The mind becomes aware of it. And from that awareness, we choose how to respond.

Notice. Feel. Listen. Discern. Respond.

The more often we practice that conversation on the mat, the more familiar it becomes when we step off of it.

Because our bodies are communicating with us all the time. Sometimes through movement. Sometimes through stillness. Sometimes through sound.

The question is whether we've created enough space to listen.

And whether we trust ourselves enough to act on what we hear.