The Original Body

Primal Movement for Yoga Teachers

John Stirk

• Publisher: Handspring Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781912085200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Physiotherapy, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation

The Original Body addresses the physiological experience of yoga. The soft tissue, skeletal, fluid and spatial sensations experienced in practice are considered in sequence and collectively as the reader becomes drawn into a depth of feeling and understanding that lies beyond practice. Yoga teachers are shown how to use a deeper 'feeling' to unveil an innate powerful physical wisdom. This includes bringing together anatomical visualisation and imagination, the development of awareness as a movement, and the management of sensation. This book focuses on honing and harnessing the practitioner's essential experience in order reveal a more profound style of teaching from within. Teachers are invited to consider the impediments to a deeper practice and will be taken through the common factors inhibiting sensory pathways. These include conditioning, habit, trauma, anxiety, non-essential thought and the effect of technique and methodology in teaching. Teachers will learn about the principles of mechanical freedom in postures and movement and they will find out about the parallels and differences between yoga practice and the osteopathic approach to bio mechanics.The Original Body invites the reader to put aside Sanskrit terminology and well - trodden paths and dig deeply into themselves and discover the unconditioned body at its deepest level.
This book supports its reader through the understanding that group work thrives on their inspiration. This book inspires and provides an essential addition to the library of all teachers of yoga, movement and bodywork.

SECTION 1

1 The Original Body

2 Reduction

3 Unfolding from the Ground

4 Tension: The First Feeling

5 Common Denominators

6 Integration, Expression and Feeling

7 Exploratory Tools

8 Impediments to Feeling Deeply

9 Doors

10 Breathing: The Ultimate Tool

1

The Original Body

Something Within

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There is something deeply within us, a movement, a rhythm, an energy that through lack of acknowledgement and habitual conditioning lies dormant. Its elusiveness may prevail in spite of yoga practice but it awakens when conditions are favourable. The awakening is initially physiological but then spreads into other areas of our experience.

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All movement is an expression of life. Heartbeat, peristalsis and other organic rhythms are considered involuntary and more or less beyond the control of volition, while the movements we use in life are voluntary. Life’s essential experiences are also involuntary. Childbirth and orgasm are prime examples of involuntary forces at work. Physiology, if encouraged, takes over. We are taken by the body, and surrender to its process.

There is an involuntary potential within us that seeks powerful expression. It is physiologically potent, intelligently mobile, its release affects us on all levels, and it surfaces in the absence of volitional control. We may be familiar with the spontaneous elongation of the spine, yet a potential exists for the emergence of an activity that is particularly deep and strong. It spreads throughout the entire system, places the feet firmly on the ground, activates the soft tissues and opens the articulations. Primal movement reveals an intelligence and strength that goes beyond spinal elongation. It releases an activity that lies beneath personal patterns, methods or ideas about what we should or should not be doing.

Involuntary movement of this kind has expressed, or attempted to express itself, long before the advent of yoga and similar activities, long before body-mind work of any kind was thought of, before thought itself. We can bring this movement to life. We can realise a skeletal, soft tissue, articular and fluid way of moving that underpins, informs and enhances all postures. Retrieving involuntary action involves deep inquiry, but then we can allow it to happen. Primal movement provides an original experience during active or restful practice.

Self-Evidence

Scientific inquiry confirms that yoga works. Science became interested in yoga because of individual experience. The apparent beneficial effects to yoga practitioners triggered studies highlighting the value of traditional practices. Positive physiological responses to hatha yoga and meditation practice have been well documented (Funderburk 1977). Research is ongoing, and evidence-based research has led to yoga’s inclusion in school curricula, hospitals, and a variety of institutions and associations concerned with the health and well-being of their members and students. The current global attraction to yoga has been stimulated for various reasons. Yoga feels good, has the potential for changing how we are on several levels, and has a spiritual dimension. Whether practised in groups or alone, yoga involves each practitioner ‘going inwards’ and doing the work. For many centuries yoga’s efficacy has been self-evident. The effectiveness of yoga as an experiential science is self-evident to those of us who practice it. Scientific confirmation of its efficacy is supportive. But discoveries arise because we go inwards, on our own and by ourselves, sometimes in spite of ourselves and the system. We practise, and usually teach what we practice. The deeper we go, the deeper the experience and the results.

Science has monitored and wired practitioners, analysed their blood samples and studied behaviour to good effect. But science cannot measure the yoga experience. It cannot follow beyond subatomic particles into the actual feeling. This can only be felt, understood and described by the practitioner.

Erich Fromme writes: ‘My faith in myself, in another, in humankind, in our capacity to become fully human also implies certainty, but certainty based on my own experience and not on my submission to an authority that dictates a certain belief’ (Fromme 1976).

An Experiential Experiment

Past experience is useful for comparative practice, but there is no substitute for being in your experience as it is during practice. Past experience enables us to ‘set things up’ for immersion in the practice, but ‘right now’ experience is the guiding light as we observe tension, flux, texture and so on. Our experience is the practice as we meet sensations, feelings, ideas and insights. Immediate experience cannot be held, captured or taught. You cannot do anything with immediate experience other than let it guide you. Our own direct and immediate experience has always been and will always be the fundamental key to progress. Can we believe our own experience? To do so is the foundation for self-belief and authenticity. Students may be unsure of their own experience if the suggestions made are elusive. If feeling is ‘sleepy’, or well hidden, there may be confusion concerning what or how to feel. If conditioning is well established, it can take time for sensation to surface. For a while it may be necessary to take someone else’s word that ‘the feeling will come’.

For each of us our experience is our reality. Experience is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition. The ‘yoga experience’ is on when it is currently felt, and is in time with time. Experience flows as a movement. Experience is now; even when we refer to past experience, the reference is current.

The words experience, experiment, and expert come from the same Latin word experientia, meaning ‘knowledge gained from repeated trials’, and also stems from the word periri, meaning ‘to go through’. Our expertise comes from going into and through our experience.

T.K.V. Desikachar, writing about his father in The Yoga of Krishnamacharya says:

‘One of the striking things about his teaching is, whenever I ask him “Father, how did you get this information; where did you discover that, is it your own experience?” he will say, “No, it is my acarya; it is from my teacher.” If someone asks where I [Desikachar] learnt something, my inclination is to say, ‘This is my practise.’ Now I know many things he [Krishnamacharya] tells are based on his own experience, but he will never acknowledge that. In fact, I asked him one day, “How is it you are able to say so much spontaneously?” He said, “I don’t say those things; I close my eyes and it is the guru in me who says those things”‘ (Desikachar 1982).

Krishnamacharya’s past experience served him well but this account from his son Desikachar implies that his spontaneity was founded on the movement of his current experience. The impersonality of his insights came through his direct experience of them.

If our perception of reality depends upon the quality and reliability of our own experience, it is preferable that the reality should be ours as opposed to someone else’s. Our own reality is the authentic starting and finishing point; anything in between is, as Ramdass put it, ‘Grist for the Mill’ (Baba Ram Dass 1977).

R.D. Laing writes, ‘It is not easy to say, even, what experience is. All experiences are instances of experiences but experience itself is not an experience’ (Laing 1983). Laing suggests that there must be a stimulus to create an experience. We might interpret this as meaning that if there is no sensation to experience, there is no experience.

The fact that we are our experience provides us with the essential tool for deepening practice, i.e. our own irrefutable, immediate experience of what is happening takes us inward. Personal history may affect the clarity and sensitivity of experience, but if we get on with ‘experiencing’, it will enhance itself. The most advanced or most recent practitioners can only find it in themselves at the time. In this respect, there is no distinction between us.

We can, however, through certain practices, move beyond the experience of the practice and experience the phenomenon of experience. Some spiritual guides (Krishnamurti and others) refer to the possibility of having no experience at all, the ultimate emptiness. In this light, experience is seen as an addiction. But we need to experience something in order to anchor ourselves; it gives us security, even an unpleasant experience may be preferable to no experience at all. Chasing experiences is nothing new to yoga or life. We may spend considerable energy in trying to get back to where we were. The original experience of primal movement invites an experience from a pre-experiential time before conscious registration. Spontaneous movement is not guided by previous personal experience or modified by conditioning. But we do have the faculty of registration and recognition to evaluate and celebrate the experience. It is something we like to repeat; we are only human.

Experience is Feeling

Experience deepens as primal sensation awakens and we are given access to our origin. The experiment deepens as the body lets us in. All experience is felt. Everything that we are conscious of is felt, because consciousness itself is experience. Feeling is the bedrock of experience and the primary tool in practice.

Feeling is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a fact or state of consciousness’ and in reality it is the fundamental tool of life because feeling is perception. Consciousness, feeling and experience are part of the same movement in time and combine to provide our sense of being that is often referred to as isness. ‘Feeling’ is physical, psychologica...