Intelligent Yoga: Listening to the Body’s Innate Wisdom

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:

Somewhere in this thinking is the notion that a hamstring has ‘become short’, a hip has ‘become stiff’ or the core has ‘become weak’, as if these areas have an independence from the rest of the human being and have decided to behave in an unhelpful way. This is nonsense. If an area of the body appears tight or weak or stiff, it is generally because

metaphysical one that is difficult for many people to ‘get’. This nuance in language may seem a small point but it is based on an important concept: the more powerfully we assert abstract, metaphysical ideas, the less chance we have of allowing people to have their own experience, derived from their own personal

How we learn to habituate movement is a process called ‘body mapping’. Anything we do regularly will become ‘mapped’ in the somatosensory part of the brain (a process that has been understood with the help of the advent of FMRI imaging of the brain over the last twenty years). It is useful to remember this when we practise yoga – that when we repea

Functional thinking is concerned with how we move as a whole when we carry out an intention. The intention may be straightforward – simply walking, sitting or picking something up off the floor – but these will be whole body movements, resulting from a flood of nervous impulses permeating the musculoskeletal system. The impulses initiate a sequence

The postures are a concentration of mind and movement in which the breath undoes the stiffness and tensions of the body, strengthening its weaknesses and restoring health.

again as the work subsides. It might be the feeling of contact with the floor through a foot or hand, or any other body part that is in contact with the ground. Other things we can notice are the fluidity of a movement, the acceleration and deceleration of the body in transition from one place to another, the sense of weight through bones, and the

We now know that the motor cortex ‘maps’ movement patterns that are frequently used. Nowhere is there a one-to-one relationship from motor neuron to muscle. As yoga teachers, this should make us think. Is there any point in trying to target specific muscles when the brain is not adapted for

shut down the part of the brain that helps us make sense of internal feelings. In effect, we try to hide from our feelings. Although this may be useful in the short term, because those feelings may threaten to overwhelm us, in the long term it means we become unable to interpret our ‘gut feelings’ accurately.