Intelligent Yoga: Listening to the Body’s Innate Wisdom

What we want to find out is whether the body adapts the breathing to the pose effectively or not. What we do not want to do is to try and control the breath in some supposedly idealised way while we practise.

To develop fully compliant movements, our body needs to be well differentiated,

Information flows into us through our senses, is processed in our brains and then responded to through our muscles, cells and glands. How we process the information will vary from person to person and culture to culture. Consequently, our responses to information will also vary from person to person and culture to culture.

To help it to survive, the nervous system is partially ‘hard-wired’ at birth, with breathing and the heartbeat occurring automatically, but this is not enough to ensure survival. The baby also needs to eat, and so it arrives with a rooting instinct: an ability to nuzzle in search of the nipple and, once it finds it, to suck. In fact, the instinct t

‘The whole point of the sensory nervous system is to inform us how we need to modify behaviour to maintain homeostasis.’

‘mereological fallacy’. This describes a way of thinking about things where we wrongly ascribe a value to a part of something that is properly ascribed to the whole. In

has become more and more clear to me that bodies are shaped by the way we feel, by the things we do regularly and by conditioned ideas about the way we should look. All of these things are organised at a neurological level, not at a structural one, as I shall seek to show in the following chapters.

‘mereological fallacy’, a concept used to describe the tendency to ascribe to a part of a thing the quality of the whole. In

What previous researchers had noted as a discrete muscle twitch was in fact the tip of a movement iceberg. It was the pursuit of an anticipated concept – direct neuron-to-muscle relationships – that had stopped them seeing the overlaps they were getting for what they really were: