A somatic approach to yoga asana

How present are you within your body, and how do you measure, understand and relate to the connection that you have? Do you try not to pay attention for fear of what might be going on, or are you hyper vigilant to changes within the body, perhaps somewhere on the continuum in between?

When we’re in good health and have good mobility it’s easy to take the body for granted. It’s also the case that we may we even take advantage of the body by overlooking its needs for rest, sleep, movement, hydration or food. Depending on our mindset and the power of our psychological drivers, experiences, or innate will, we accept these habits as normal and expect ourselves to function well regardless.

Often, it’s when we’re ill or injured that we understand just how precious our mobility and physical health is; it’s during those times that we may be more present for the ways in which we recover, sensations of pain resolving or increasing mobility. We may even find a sense of awe for the healing body and feel appreciation for the everyday ways in which we move through life. Through this appreciation and awe, we might resolve to eat, drink and move more consciously and take better care of ourselves in general or reassess the ways in which we take risks or expect results.

A return to good health and mobility after a short illness or injury can feel like coming back to ourselves again, but it can also be a return to the patterns and habits that contributed to injury or ill-health in the first place.

So how do we engage more deeply with our bodies? How do we cultivate more presence for the habits and patterns of daily life which lead us towards discomfort, illness or injury and how do we re-pattern our approach?

Simply taking a moment to understand that we have a relationship with our bodies highlights that our thinking mind and awareness are interdependent aspects of the self. There’s a lot of buzz around ‘somatics’ at the moment, especially within the yoga world, but is it just a way of repackaging something that already exists? Or does it serve its purpose by bringing a fresh perspective to something already known?

The capacity we have as humans to be aware of our surroundings through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch enables us to respond, modify, amplify and adjust for our comfort and wellbeing within the environment. During meditation, we turn this capacity inwards to meet the inner, more subtle landscape of our being, our thoughts and feelings and the stories which run through our minds relating to memories and fantasies. But meeting the subtle space of the mind isn’t possible or suitable for everyone in a group class situation.

Somatic approaches to yoga offer the body itself as the object of the mind/ body connection. Instead of meeting the mind, emotions, thoughts or breath as the anchor for awareness, the meeting point is between awareness and the sensations associated with laying, sitting, moving and sound making. In many cases, meeting the sensations of the body, such as the ways in which the feet feel whilst connected to the earth, can lead a deeply curious exploration of the interactions of fascia and its effects on sensation, offering a powerful point from which to soften tensions, observe discomfort and find ways to cultivate comfort. In turn, the ways in which we can explore the body and find comfort can inform the mind, leading us to new ways of being with ourselves without necessarily understanding why or how we came to hold the tensions we did.