Intelligent Yoga: Listening to the Body’s Innate Wisdom

makes the point that when rotation is brought into the side-bending

certainly developed as a result of the early lizards having to twist their way over obstacles in their path.

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

‘The whole point of the sensory nervous system is to inform us how we need to modify behaviour to maintain homeostasis.’

an improvement in the responsiveness of the respiratory system, enabling it to meet the needs of changes in effort, emotions and posture; and finally a greater sense of wellbeing that has something to do with the way we engage with the nervous system – both in the way we respond to our internal, physical promptings (hunger, thirst, tiredness etc.),

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

To develop fully compliant movements, our body needs to be well differentiated,

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