Intelligent Yoga: Listening to the Body’s Innate Wisdom

What I am actually feeling is the release of tension that this inhalation necessarily brings into the respiratory system, and the transmission of this release through the bones of the body and into the floor.

bending spine, extension is an inevitable consequence. This is because of something called ‘coupled motion

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

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

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.

I do have a problem with the conclusions many anatomists come to regarding movement. There is a tendency to indulge in reverse-engineering, trying to understand movement by looking at the parts rather than understanding that movement starts as an idea/intention in the cortex and is then carried out in the way we have rehearsed such movements throug

Longer legs enabled early mammals to move more easily over objects, and the up and down movements of the spine further developed. The diaphragm and soft belly developed firstly to enable respiration and movement to take place at the same time, and secondly to allow greater flexion and extension of the body – something necessary for swift movement o

There are three major components to our anatomy that are of particular interest to us as yoga teachers (and students): muscles, fascia/connective tissue and bones. In a very straightforward way we can say that muscles generate forces to move us, fascia resists tensile forces and shapes us, and bones transmit forces to take the burden off muscles.

When a movement is carried out in such a way it is considered to be compliant – the body complies with the person’s wishes in the easiest possible

every healthy human being learned to move without studying anatomy – as do all animals on the planet. While I have no