Intelligent Yoga: Listening to the Body’s Innate Wisdom

The experience may be slightly different from practice to practice (and lesson to lesson), but the essence revolves around discovering (or rediscovering) the wisdom of the self.

idea. The physical nature of many traditional yoga practices gives an unusual visceral understanding of the interpenetration of all aspects of life, which can be uniquely clear and profound because it is a direct experience of the interpenetration of form and idea within our own body.

yoga is essentially about continuity and connectedness. It is about what the parts can multiply up to, as unified, rather than what they divide down into, as fragmented. As much as we love to identify the fragments, identification must inspire or enhance our experience rather than reduce it to functional data or anatomical concepts. Body factions o

But where subtle anatomy is most useful is in shedding light on levels of alignment and form that govern obscure aspects of the practice, such as Mūlabandha, and whole-body patterns that connect us from top to bottom. By practicing āsana with some of these patterns in the nervous system, the poses are enhanced, and perhaps more important, the affe