“Human beings are biological creatures all the way down. They invent, carry, and express their moods, what they care about, and how they understand the world in their bodies. If you would make sense of another human being, pay close attention to their body, and to how they attend to it themselves.”
- Chauncey Bell
Some kinds of yoga emphasize the willful, effort-full aspect of the practice, as if, by trying harder, we are going to gain some control over our body. This lies at the heart of everything we are doing.
In Soma Yoga we begin in a place of deep receptivity, with a willingness to listen to the intelligence that lives in every cell of our body, to listen and respond.
-TOP-What we’ll do...
Sometimes we are strengthening our core muscles, sometimes we are working with our flexibility, sometimes we are grounding our energy, sometimes we are working with the energy meridians, sometimes we are working with our brain patterns. But we are not trying to control the life force in the body. We are opening, creating a much wider container so that the life force can flow freely, spontaneously.
-TOP-How can I open to the life force?
How does that happen? It happens when you come back, in a very simple, easy way, to the simplicity of the moment when you are feeling your body. Just breathing, opening to this moment, this experience, allowing your breath to hold it all, and the next moment, and the next. A flow, an aliveness, that emerges out of stillness and comes back to it, again and again.
I can allow the energy that is usually entangled with the thoughts in my head to stream down into the body. I can feel the openness inside my head when I let the energy descend, down into heart, into belly, into earth. I can feel the difference between the direct experience of this moment and what my thoughts are telling me about this moment. I realize that the body is not what I think it is. I am not who I think I am. How fully alive am I actually willing to be?
The practice of Soma Yoga rests on 5 key principles:
An open space of awareness that is receptive, that listens and responds to what is happening in this moment
The full-body breath
Core Strength and Stability
Fluidity and Flexibility
Grounding, connecting with the earth
Each one of these principles works on the physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual levels of our being. For example, if our body becomes more fluid and flexible, this allows our whole thought-stream to become less solid and fixed, more open to new ways of perceiving and understanding ourselves and the world.
If we are strong and alive in our core, this strength affects the whole way we move and interact in the world. We can stand our ground, learn to say ‘No’ when we need to, discover how to think for ourselves.
If we learn how to ground down into the earth through our lower body, we discover a stability and cohesive power that transmits itself in the way we move, speak and relate.
If we are actually breathing with our whole body, everything starts to come alive-we feel our body as something that is flowing, transparent, and intimately connected with out environment.
Awakening to presence and ease in the body
The whole pleasure/pain response, that instinctual mechanism, is embedded in the body. We resist pain, and we hold onto what feels good. What could be more natural? And yet what could be more mechanical, conditioned and reactive? We cannot ask the deep survival patterns of our body/mind to disappear. They are very powerful, and quite essential on a certain level of our being. But if we allow this kind of conditioning to dominate us, then we cannot discover our deeper nature, which is presence-- completely open to everything as it is.
We can work with our conditioning in a much gentler way when we are already resting in presence, in an open space of non-judging awareness. This awareness is our foundation. It is simple, open, unstructured, innocent, natural, and right here. With this kind of awareness we can begin to become intimate with our own experience, with the totality of our experience. Not separating parts out and saying, “This is me, and this is not,” but opening our arms and accepting it all.
Accepting my body just as it is in this moment, listening, breathing, moving, and letting go. When I allow my breath to mirror the openness of my awareness, then the nature of my experience begins to change. I can approach the feeling of discomfort without pulling away or resisting. I can allow myself to open to this feeling, listen to it, respect it, work with it. Not looking to a book or a CD or a teacher, but opening to the wisdom that comes through the body, from moment to moment, that emerges and then disappears. Heart beating by itself, lungs moving by themselves, resting in the simple feeling of being alive.
