Donna Farhi

“Everything that has ever happened to us—our birth, the fall from a tree at the age of six, our thoughts, feelings, what we eat, the climate we live in—is inscribed upon our body, creating a living archaeological record. When we develop an awareness of the interior movement that permeates the body, we gain access to the movement of our minds. Yoga is a means of revealing our connection to this natural wisdom.” (83).

84- objectification of the body. State of dissociation. “Physical fitness” – focuses on superficial appearance of body- armouring of the body “causes a numbing of the subtler sensations and feeling and, not coincidentally, dampens any possibly awareness we might cultivate of deeper body systems.” (85)

 

85-6 “Instead of directing the body as a separate entity, we relocate our minds within our body and begin to listen to the nonverbal, nonmental information contained within the soma. As we give our full attention to every breath, movement, and the subtlest of sensations, the body becomes mindful, the mind becomes embodied. In so doing, we directly experience the body as an opaque form of consciousness, and we start to see the intimate relationship between the contents of what we think, feel, and imagine and our physical reality. In this reconciliation between body and mind we begin to experience a unitive rather than divisive state. This is what distinguishes the authentic practice of hatha Yoga from mere stretching.”

–       imitations of the outer world  in asanas- creativity, discovery of origins of movement and original meaning of gesture (87).

88-

“when we first enter a posture we are met by our ability of inability to take on this new form. We feel all the palces where we hold tension. These areas of accumulated tension represent the repetition of our ideation process, that is, our thoughts, fears, tensions, and anxieties conalescing into distinct patterns of tension and form our unique individual posture or attitude of life.

… Our idea of how pleasant it will be to take a Yoga class often meets reality the very first time we bend forward and feel the excruciating pull of our hamstring muscles. If this were all that happened, there would be a high attrition rate indeed, but fortunately we have the opportunity to go a step further by entering into a dialogue with this tension.” 88. Learn to breath into tension…

“As we become adept at uniting our breath, body, and mind into one action, we become intimate with the natural rhythm of life as it arises out of stillness, manifests into form, and then dissolves back into stillness. We start to become comfortable with the fact that everything is changing and in flux and that we can ride this fluctuation skillfully. We also begin to understand that as sensations, thoughts, and feelings pass through us, they need not solidify. They need not bunch up inside us as knots of tension. We can be a person who occasionally feels tension rather than a tense person. That is, all of these passing sensations need not concretize and fuse our identity. As we become more accomplished, the body consciousness becomes more malleable, able to adapt and assume whatever expression most skillfully serves the moment.”