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.

can find ourselves triggered into inappropriate responses to particular stimuli by previous association. When this happens we need to re-notice our feeling states and slowly learn to dissociate them from any triggering circumstance.

paying attention to things we have previously left unacknowledged and that we take for granted – the sensations we have when we practise.

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

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

Our ‘guides’ for identifying functional movement come from three main sources: scientific research on human evolution, developmental research on how babies have to organise their movements to eventually rise up on to two feet and walk, and ethnographic material that looks at movement from an anthropological perspective across different cultures.

‘Bottom-up processing describes the way an organism responds to its environment through its senses.’

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

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