What is your relationship to your physical body? Parts you hate, parts you like? Parts you love? What prevents you from loving it all and continuing to embrace all aspects of it?
Reflecting upon my own history of not embracing my body, through injury / trauma, and the ongoing changes of aging, I have realized that women carry profuse ‘issues in the tissues’. I used to hate my ‘thunder thighs’, and wanted lovely, long, sleek legs. Now I believe my thighs to be strong: they keep me grounded and moving boldly in life. What ideas about your body do you need to turn around?
The reasons we dislike and disown parts of our body is a complicated amalgam of socio-cultural programming, familial/generational patterns and personal experience that has created the (mostly) unconscious beliefs and feelings in your mental & emotional bodies. These ‘programs’ continue to keep you in a negative cycle that emerges as poor self-care.
Relating to you physical well being, this likely manifests as not engaging in regular activities that: keep your body strong and flexible; help you maintain balance and be resilient through the physical demands and desires of your life. Whether you sit at a desk for 6-8 hours a day, or are engaged in demanding physical tasks throughout an average day, or want to engage in rigorous outdoor activities into your 90’s, your body requires a variety of movements to release the tight, strengthen the weak, bring balance and improve resilience.
Yoga postures are so excellent in achieving all of these benefits, as well as increasing range of motion in the joints, including the backbone of posture, the spine. This in turns helps the other organ systems function more optimally. For example, twists improve digestion and elimination; inversions improve immune, endocrine and cardiovascular functioning. Yoga as posture/asana is a beautiful, intelligent system.
Perhaps you have tried a yoga class or two, and figured it is not really for you. If so, I beg you not to give up until you have tried a variety of classes and teachers. You want to feel safe and inspired, and engaged throughout the class in a way that you are a pushed to an edge that you learn to work with, and afterwards, feel accomplishment and better in your body, heart and mind.
Perhaps you attend a class regularly, or even do your own home practice; that is simply wonderful. But could you use some personal attention to deal with an issue in the body, whether it is from injury, what we think of as natural aging, or unknown sources?
Our physical body is a temple through which we interact with our environment and relationships. It is essential we treat it with loving care, through nourishing practices, from what we consume, to physical based practices that honor its unique history and challenges. Understanding alignment, prop use and the benefits of various pose types (standing, twists, inversions….) helps you engage in the most effective postures for your body temple, where it is, right now.
Sometimes it is best to engage strong demanding postures (Yang), some times a practice that helps to structurally realign (Yin) and sometimes a practice that nourishes through stillness (Restorative).
I hope you will consider joining me in a 6 week pilot course designed to assist you in understanding and engaging the best posture based practice for you: one that improves your physical state, and dissolves internalized negative perceptions.
Embrace your physical form as a vehicle to engage and express wisdom. Nourish, love, respect and honor your body temple.
Please join me in a 6 week online course May 9 – June 13, 2017 to:
Be Strong, Flexible, and Resilient in Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit through a Personal Yoga Practice.
There are only 15 spaces available; Access information at: https://yogaoasis.biz/online-course/
If you are a woman, and would like to join my mailing list for Women interested in Yoga Lifestyle Wisdom and online course offerings, please click on: http://eepurl.com/cK7ran
It will take less than 20 seconds of your time. I will send a monthly newsletter to inspire, and keep you advised as to upcoming offerings to support you in choices that inspire joy, wisdom and well-being on your life’s journey.
Blessings on your journey,
And thank you for your time in reading and reflecting…
Debbie