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. I want to look a little deeper here, because 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. 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.

How does that happen? It happens when I come back, in a very simple, easy way, to the simplicity of the moment when I am just feeling my body. Just breathing, opening to this moment, this experience, allowing my 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?