Ever notice that some of the instructions you get from yoga teachers don’t seem to make any physical sense? Sure there are the big obvious instructions; put our left foot forward, turn your right heel out. But then there are the more tiny adjustments; drop your tail bone, lengthen the skin on the back of your hips, soften your eyes, or relax your vision out the sides. What exactly are teachers asking for when they say to sink deep within your ears?
On one level some of these cues are impossible, at least on a gross anatomical level. I remember when I first began practicing yoga, I would hear teachers say to lift the tailbone, but drop the sitting bones. With my rudimentary understanding of pelvic anatomy at the time I thought “those two things can’t possibly move separately! They’re attached!” Now truth be told they aren’t actually fused together, and there is a subtle bit of movement in the sacrum that I’ve since come to understand, but at the time I thought of the pelvis as a single unit, and I couldn’t conceive of how to drop the tail, but lift the sitting bones.
But the thing I have come to realize in practicing and teaching for over 20 years is that these subtle cues are not just filler embellishments to create a semblance of deeper understanding. These subtle cues are intended to put our focus in a particular area, and to invite the possibility that something beyond the gross physical movement is actually possible. The more your practice yoga, the more you learn how to pay attention and gradually what you are paying attention to becomes smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper inward, until you come to a place where you could in fact move your tailbone independently of your sitting bones, or soften the skin on the backs of your eyelids. Is there actually anything physically happening when we make these shifts? Possibly not. At least not that would be measurable by scientific instruments, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a felt sense and awareness that something occurred. Even if it was just the mental shift or noticing that I was gripping my pelvic floor (as one example)
If we think about the shifts and movements our bodies go through during labor, really these are also subtle movements. The opening of the cervix isn’t that far when we compare it to something like the movement of warrior 2, but of course it has a dramatic impact. It might seem that this action isn’t really something we can impact. How can we learn to relax the cervix? And yet that’s exactly what we might be able to access if we started paying attention to the subtle shifts in our body, or began putting our mind into the deep center of the pelvic bowl. HypnoBirthing classes use mental imagery to describe the cervix as an opening blossom, or the outer uterine fibers as blue satin ribbons tightening and then releasing. It’s images like these which can give access to the subtle sensations within the body. No we may never know for sure if what we are intending to release actually does it, but imagining the action can have as much a response as something like drop the skin on your temples.
I write this having just returned back from a week long yoga intensive in Jamaica. Which in itself was of course lovely, but as the week progressed I noticed that my focus more and more was examining the subtle rather than simply trying to stretch my hips. Exploring the inner experience, which I had largely been missing out on with the tasks of everyday life and class creation, and the day to day ups and downs of motherhood. I’m sure that this inward focus will inevitably be pulled to a more outward one as I integrate with daily life, but my hope is that I can maintain a subtle shift in focus. The nice thing about these subtle cues, particularly things like “soften your eyes", or “relaxing the skin on the sides of your temples”, is you don’t have to be doing a formal asana to try them out. We can do them anywhere, and that shift creates a change. Science has shown that thoughts produce physical responses in the body, even if we don’t exactly know what those responses are, they are measurable; blood pressure drops, mental activity changes, heartrate slows down. Why not pelvic muscles release to let a baby descend and be born.
So readers, I invite you the next time you step onto the yoga mat, sure follow the big physical instructions, but see where’s the subtle cues? Where’s the adjustment that can pull the focus inward. And yes it may mean that sun salutation needs to slow down for a while, because it’s hard to pay deep attention when you’re moving at the speed of one breath per movement. But do you really want to keep charging forward through yoga? Wasn’t part of the point in practice to slow down and to really feel and discover what’s true in your own body.
John Shumacher- one of the teachers on this retreat often said they were teaching “what if?” yoga. What if I did this? And what if I did that? And what if I shifted my focus to what seemed impossible? Might I discover the body is capable of far more than might have been originally thought?
A beginning practice in feeling the subtle movements:
Sit upright, with the weight of the body resting on the sitting bones. In the mind imagine the bowl of the pelvis. You don’t have to know anatomy, just sense the space contained by your hips, abdomen, and sacrum (the back of the pelvic bowl). Now imagine inside that bowl a spider web, running from the outer rim into a central point. With an inhale can you imagine the line the runs to the back of the pubic bone? Now could you soften it? What about the line at 3 o’clock? What about 6 o’clock? 9 o’clock? It may feel this is completely imaginary, that is just fine. having gone around the whole “clock”, come back to the awareness, do you sense more of the space? Can you feel the pelvic floor moving? What about your breathing? Is it deeper? More shallow? slower? Faster? There’s no right answer. The point is just to feel.