First session

My yoga teacher is master of the annoying question. They make me want to groan out loud — but he slightly tells me off for doing that, so now I try not to react so obviously! 🙂 And secretly I love these questions! They open my eyes a little wider to the world, hinting at some new way of seeing. I turn them over in my mind for weeks, wondering what my answers are, or when some answers might come to me. After all they’re not questions with any immediate resolution, or perhaps any resolution at all. I’m coming to love that too!

One of his latest questions came to mind today. We’d been talking about bodily tension and the need I feel to hold myself together physically. “So what would it be like to find space from within instead?”

What indeed!? I had no idea. I wondered how I might begin to recognise this space, if it could ever exist within my body. It’s beyond imagining — what it might feel like, what potential it might offer… But the question to me suggests that this is a possibility where I had perceived none previously.

And perhaps I made a small enquiry in this direction today. I had my first Rolfing session and the vocabulary was very interesting. ‘The body as a resource’, ‘availability’, ‘internal organisation’, ‘the support of gravity’ and various other phrases that suggest a whole different way of experiencing the body other than my habitual experience, the one I currently recognise or allow myself to have. Perhaps the idea of internal organisation might come to reveal some space I’d not perceived previously? Perhaps the work we did today to release the breathing parts of the body might contribute to this? There were certainly many new sensations in my body.

Although this was my first session, my Rolfing practitioner knows me a little from teaching me asana and philosophy in the past. She certainly knows me well enough to put me at ease by talking about Sanskrit ( 🙂 ), introducing me to the word kavaca, body armour, picking up something from my comments about how I felt in my body. Yep, my body as a defence, the protective layer. I turn this over in my mind as I lie on the table, feeling her fingers probing, gently stretching my tissues. I feel like a load of loose apples being moved around in a stretchy plastic bag. I’m amused by this sudden creative picture in my head, unlike my more anodyne habitual way of describing things. Maybe there’s some space opening up between my ears!!