What if there is no perfect blue print pose for your body but a number of them. What if the perfect way of doing a pose for your body is dependent on any number of factors including the weather, the season, how you feel, the position of the moon, the people your are with etc.
Would a set of alignment points help you find your perfect pose given all of the above?
Maybe they could, but what if instead of learning alignment points (or as well as learning alignment points) you learned to feel and control elements of your body, learning the potential of each part and each relationship and how to realize that potential.
Now imagine that in any pose you knew the basic relationships of all the parts of the body.
Instead of striving for a particular alignment you could instead feel each part and how they relate and based on what you sensed you could find your alignment from within.
You could focus on parts or single relationships at a time, making adjustments and then moving on to the next part. You could scan your entire body in this way, continually making adjustments and continually moving towards a pose that makes your entire body feel good.
Basic Elements of the Body
Scanning our body, feeling bits at a time, we can adjust those bits that we are feeling one at a time. What are those basic elements that we can learn to feel? In general we can learn to feel our bones and how they relate. We can learn to feel them by moving them slowly and rhythmically.
By moving slowly we give ourselves the chance to notice the changes that are happening in our body. We get the opportunity to learn to feel our body. We also develop control since it takes control to move the parts of our body slowly and smoothly.
Having learned to feel our bones we can then use them as references for learning to feel our muscles. Moving our bones in particular patterns designed to activate particular muscles we can fine tune our awareness of where particular muscles are by noticing the sensations that occur when said muscle relaxes and contracts.
As we practice feeling the elements of our body we can fine tune our awareness of how everything relates. This can be an ongoing process. We can continue to grow and continue to learn our body and how we relate to it.
Specific Elements
Of our bones, the pelvis is a key element connecting our spine to our legs. We can learn to feel it by slowly rocking it back and forwards. At the same time we can learn to feel our lumbar spine, allowing it to bend backwards and forwards as we rock our pelvis. Once we have a sense of our pelvis we can then move onwards to sensing our ribs, moving them with our breath so that we can practice feeling them and controlling them.
Since our ribs attach to our spine, at the same time as we are learning to feel our ribs we can also be learning to move our thoracic spine at the same time learning to feel it.
So that we can feel our entire spine we can also move our head with our breath, pulling it upwards to lengthen our cervical spine and then relaxing it to curve the cervical spine. Learning to move and feel our pelvis, ribs and head we can thus learn to feel our entire spine as well as the elements that make it up.
The slower and smoother we make our movements the better we can get at sensing the parts of our body and controlling them.
We can learn to feel our feet by rocking on them forwards and backwards. At the same time we can learn to feel and control our center since the way our center relates to our feet has an affect on how our feet press down into the ground when we are standing.
Muscular Elements
Once we’ve gained awareness of some of our bony elements, we can then use them as references for learning to feel and control our muscles.
We can learn to feel the muscles that attach to the bones that we know by feeling when they are active and when they are relaxed. Again, we can use slow, smooth rhythmic movements. The differences in sensation between muscle tissue activating and relaxing can help to tell us where the belly of our muscles are. We can fine tune our awareness by trying to pinpoint muscle attachment points to bone. With this awareness we can then learn to activate specific muscles by drawing one end point towards the other.
Learning to feel all the muscles associated with a particular action we can learn to feel under what circumstances particular muscles activate and we can learn to control when particular muscles activate.
Our overall goal can be muscles and bones that work in harmony towards whatever we are trying to do.
Connecting to Our Body
Learning to feel and operate our body in such a way we can then apply that ability to connect to our body to any situation that we are using your body in. We might then find it easier to learn anything that we wish to learn. Practice would still be required but because we understand the elements of your body that practice time would be a lot less than if we didn’t know.
Learning basic body elements and how they work together is like learning the letters of the alphabet and how they go together so that we can write (and read) freely.
Learning how to read music and how to play notes on a guitar we can learn to play any piece of music. Learning basic elements of driving like steering, breaking and speeding up we can drive a car while handling what is going on around us on the road.
Learning the basic elements of our body and how they relate to each other (and the earth) we can learn to freely drive and express our body.
List of Basic Movement Elements
Neil Keleher is a yoga teacher, engineer and artist. He lives in Taiwan. He created the website yoga4smartpeople.com as a resource for helping people learn their body intelligently. He is also the author of Understanding Consciousness, designed to help the reader understand what consciousness is so that it is easier to be more conscious. It includes a set of Basic Principles that can be applied to any aspect of life. Yoga4smartpeople is aimed at showing how to apply those same principles when doing yoga. Feeling the Body is a way of connecting to it. Connection is one of five basic principles that can be applied to being present.
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