Embodiment

 

 

A long while ago, before I started practicing yoga, I was in an art therapy group where we were asked to draw ourselves.  I drew a big head at the top of the page and a small body at the bottom.  I couldn’t get them to come together on the page and upon reflection saw how this was true in my life as well.  Outside of some physical activities like running, hiking, or swimming I lived most of the time in my head without any awareness of my body.  It was as if I owned a huge mansion but lived only in the attic closet. 

 

Asana began to change this.  Before asana, I held an objective view of my body as if seen from outside from the head across the room.  By cultivating attention and awareness in the body, asana moved me from this outside view to an inner subjective experience where I felt my embodiment from the inside out. BKS Iyengar calls this “intelligizing” the body when the discerning mind begins to feel and sense the different parts of the body and to coordinate their movements and actions to create stability, space, and fluidity.  The legs become intelligized when we lift the ankles and knees and move the femurs into the pelvis.  The spine becomes intelligized when we roll the shoulders back and down and the sternum up.  As each part of the body is intelligized we can learn to bring the separate parts together into harmony.  Becoming embodied is not a static process where you bring awareness into the body and there it stays.  Embodiment is not a noun but a verb, a journey not a destination. 

 

Each part of the body has a dharma or purpose.  Dharma is defined as that which upholds us or stops us from falling.  When we bring firmness into the legs and use that firmness to lift the spine, the legs are performing the dharma of the legs.  In asana, the dharma of each part of the body becomes subjectively known to us as a felt experience of wellness, healing, and contentment.  We learn to use our intelligence (buddhi) to discern when we are using each part for integration and upliftment and when a part is straying from its purpose.  As we gain skill, our intelligence becomes more fine-tuned.  We learn to intelligize not only the thighs but the front thigh, the back thigh, the upper inner and upper outer thighs.  In this way, more and more of our embodiment becomes known to us, comes into being.  Overtime and with practice, we learn how to gather up more and more parts of the body into their dharma which supports integration and upliftment.  Our consciousness becomes intimately intertwined with our embodiment and this gives us a feeling of fullness, contentment, and ease.  In this embodying process we do not seek some fixed point of completion like a bronze statue. This is the moment-by-moment creation of embodiment like a jazz improvisation, a dance, a prayer.