What are we listening for?

How sufficient is the instruction/warning “listen to your body” in āsana classes?

It’s a rote phrase in many āsana classes. Is it really that effective? What does it really mean?

How can we expect students to listen to their bodies without teaching them how to listen or what to listen for? How can we expect students to protect themselves based on what their bodies tell them when they are caught between deafness at times and a cacophony of signals at others — the cacophony often drowning out feedback that could potentially save them?

As repositories of every experience we’ve had in life, our bodies have a lot to say. But, like any form of communication, what is said by our bodies is not always what is heard by our conscious minds. While our bodies speak a very clear language, it’s often one that we are not as adept at interpreting as we often like to think. When we do interpret this language, it’s rarely just our bodies that relay the message — these messages are filtered through our desires, shame, goals, and confusion; through outside influences and recordings of our inner voices and of those around us, whether those voices are considered “important” or not; through all of our past experiences and the emotional marks they have left on sensation. So in listening to our bodies, it can be difficult to tease out what is sensation and what is all the other voices entangled with sensation that long to be heard, and are vying to be the loudest.

More often than not, what we “hear” — and what most students hear — when we “listen to our bodies” are not just the sensations and the valuable information contained in those sensations, but rather our interpretation of those sensations. Remember, it’s never just the body speaking or the ego, or recordings of outside influence, or desire, or shame, or confusion… it’s ALL of those things, and it comes all at once!

So how do we listen to our bodies effectively?

How do we hear the messages our body has to deliver without all the other noise getting in the way so that we can practice not only safely, but intelligently?

And, do we ignore that din of emotion and reactivity and thought in favor of sensation above all else? What value are the other layers and voices, and when & how should we listen to those?

These are complex questions that would take far more than a blog post to answer, but practicing with these questions in mind may be more enlightening than any cognitive answers contained here or other sources. Nonetheless, let’s look at sensation a little more closely.

First we must recognize that sensations — at least the unpleasant ones — are warnings of potential danger. These warnings must of course be heeded. However, not all unpleasant sensations are indicative of danger, nor are all pleasurable sensations indicative of safety. For instance, there are plenty of foods that taste [a sensation] great, but are not good for us, and some foods that are good for us — especially those that are medicinal — do not taste very good at all!

Other physical sensations, all feedback from the senses, can contain the same paradoxes. Also just like taste, we can be conditioned to interpret sensations that might otherwise be warnings as pleasurable, and sensations that indicate healthy or safe actions we can be conditioned to interpret as unpleasant. With taste, this is often called an “acquired taste;” it just as complex when it comes to other sensations, especially sensations associated with physical actions and posturing — these have not just personal ramifications, but social and cultural ones too: our physical safety is not solely dependent on personal avoidance of danger, but also by our place in society, how we are viewed and accepted, how we interact and fit in or stand apart, and these in turn have an effect on our self-image.

It’s no wonder that the social context of āsana classes is a significant component in yoga’s popularity, risks, and benefits. This greater social component is greater than the scope of what I want to cover here, but it is an extremely important consideration whether in self-practice or in group classes.

Considering this complexity, while we must recognize potential warnings that sensation provides, we must also be careful not to react too abruptly to these potential warnings. Often, injury occurs not at the moment of warning sensations, but in the way we react — such as coming out of a pose too quickly and without adequate mechanical advantage, or veering away from sensation to avoid more pain by twisting or veering away from sensation, but in doing so causing compensatory strain. Sometimes this is not an immediate cause of injury either, but becomes cumulative as avoidance patterns of going in, sustaining, or coming out of poses develops inefficient and potentially harmful habits.

We must also be careful not to indulge ourselves too much in pleasurable sensations, as some movements and actions that “feel good” may potentially be doing us harm, either in the short or long term. The yoga term for this is “bhoga” meaning pleasure above all else, or pleasure for the sake of pleasure — sounds good, but it’s without acknowledging the potential harm these indulgences can cause. It’s often not common in yoga classes to recognize that what feels good may not always be healthy or helpful to the body, some classes may even emphasize only seeking out and experiencing pleasurable sensations, and avoiding all unpleasant sensations — this is sometimes what is meant by “listen to your body,” and I think often what is understood by this phrase even when that’s not the intent.

In āsana practice, we are often looking for sensations — both pleasant and unpleasant — and when we don’t find them, we seek greater intensity but going to further extremes in āsana practice. While extreme āsana can serve to awaken stubbornly insensitive areas, they also create extreme sensations that become “too loud” for even the best of us to hear anything else. Extreme āsana needn’t necessarily appear extreme by outside standards, either. Sometimes what appear to be “mild” poses can be experienced very intensely!

What we often don’t recognize it that we needn’t go looking for sensation: sensation is always already there. Sometimes those sensations are too subtle to notice, or our reactions are to sublimate the sensations as uninteresting, unimportant, or undesirable. At the same time, one of the best ways to sort out the body’s messages and our reactions to those sensations is to reduce the intensity rather than heighten it. This way we refine what we hear and how we listen.

So often in āsana classes, we are ramping up intensity, or even establishing a high level of intensity from the outset and then sustaining that intensity throughout the practice. Rather than training us to increase sensitivity, this approach can have the opposite effect: it conditions us to always seek intensity, and it can train us to further ignore or sublimate unpleasant and painful sensations in favor of performance.

Not only does this potentially increase the risk of injury in practice, it numbs us to the subtleties of what our bodies are saying to us. In other words, it inhibits our ability to “listen to our bodies” — at least insofar as listening as a tool for not only safety, but yoga’s greater intent of self-realization.

āsana is a fantastic tool for increasing sensitivity, awareness, and consciousness. With that sensitivity, āsana reflects all of yoga’s limbs as facets of self-realization. It’s all there, we need only to use the tool of āsana well, and not waste it. Let’s pair sensitivity with subtlety, where extremes become unnecessary… or at the very least approach extremes with utmost care and refinement, while appreciating the great wisdom we can embody by listening with an attuned and sensitive ear to the limitless intelligence communicated by our bodies every moment of every day.

Enjoy your practice and listen well.