Reflections on 30-years; Embodiment

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As many of you may have seen, my wife and I recently decided to close our Madison-based Mound Street Yoga Center. This decision has been a long time in coming, as the fortunes of our iconic, single-room studio have been declining for quite some time. I am nostalgic for its former glory, though honesty, I am also relieved to openly discuss the years-long decline that consumed more and more of our time and energy. A lovely chapter is closing, and in its wake, another chapter most assuredly has begun.

Embodiment: enjoying one of my favorite sweets following a run
on Pre's Trail in Eugene, OR
Part of this closing-of-chapters involves my approach to teaching Yoga. As my previous blog posting initiated, I’m reflecting on 30+ years of teaching Yoga. What does it mean to do something for thirty years, and how does this longevity inform future actions?

I’ve traversed many paths within the corpus of Yoga – from purity-of-essence-alignment, to the most vigorous of Vinyasa-flow; ultimately finding satiety within the midrange of the pendulum’s swings. The resulting body of work identified three points that remain essential elements of my approach to working with the body:

1.    Ground.
2.    Relax your palate.
3.    Exhale.

Within the corpus of work that I called Alignment Yoga, I struggled to identify the key pillars of the practice, itself. Yes, these Three Fundamentals seemed beneficial, though what was the bigger point? After almost two decades within the container of Alignment Yoga, I’m now exploring the key elements of:

Embody | Align | Breathe

While we are most assuredly embodied in terms of having bodies, many of us live in our heads. The body ends up as the head-conveyor, and often becomes that achy, irksome thing to be numbed, controlled and/or feared. Empirically, how has the human experience fared within the confines of this mass experiment? Identifying the seat of sentience is above my pay grade, though I have come to believe that fully inhabiting the here and now of the body is an essential part of the path.

As such, I’m interested in using movement and posture as the means to generate bodily sensations. Awareness of these sensations, in turn, is both the origin and destination of the practice. Rather than using sensation as the first step in adjusting, shifting, fixing, aligning, remedying, relaxing, soothing, etc… awareness of the sensations that organically emerge is the thing, and not the thing that leads to some better thing. Here. Now. Contentment.

We’re all inherently embodied, though how often do we fully settle into the here and now of this body, just as it is? In my future work, I anticipate more fully exploring this question, and in my next blog posting, will continue unpacking my thoughts and reflections on 30+ years of teaching Yoga.


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