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Fall 1999

NAMASTE,

The next to last asana was done. Along with the rest of the class, Elizabeth lay in Savasana, the Corpse Pose, the pose of relaxation and introspection. She was an experienced student, so she took time to align and balance herself on the floor. Then she began consciously and systematically to relax her body, releasing the places where she found tension, adjusting the areas where she felt uneven.

I walked around the room, verbally guiding the students’ attention from peripheral attention toward more internal awareness. Occasionally, I bent over or squatted down to adjust a shoulder or correct a tilting head or move a crooked arm or leg. I knew that the better the students’ alignment and the more evenly balanced their bodies, the more deeply they would relax. In that deeper relaxation, some of the impediments to the free flow of energy in their bodies would be removed, and they would finish the class restored and invigorated, feeling good.

Moving to the part of the room where Elizabeth lay, I saw that her head was leaning to one side. Moreover, her pelvis tilted to the right, and one shoulder was higher than the other. There were fairly significant adjustments to be made, so I softly asked her to be still, so that she wouldn’t be startled, and so she wouldn’t complicate my work by trying to be helpful. It is always easier to adjust students in Savasana if they remain passive. I did the best I could to correct the imbalances I saw, took one last look to see if there was anything more I could do, and then continued to walk around the room.

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When the time came to end, I asked the students to roll to their sides. They rested there for a few quiet moments and then sat up. As I always do at the beginning and end of class, I asked if there were any questions or comments. Elizabeth was quick to speak up.

"Was I straight after you adjusted me in Savasana?" she asked, sounding incredulous.

"As nearly so as I could get you to be?" I replied.

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She shook her head, looking perplexed.

"I can’t believe I was that far out of alignment," she said. "I felt like I had set myself up in a straight line, that I was pretty well balanced. And after you adjusted me, I felt really crooked.

I reassured her that while there is almost always more that can be done to refine the pose, she was in much better alignment and balance after the adjustment. Sometimes students find it hard to believe that their own perceptions can be so far off.

At times such as these, I am often reminded of the New Age cliche, "Trust your body." This cliche was born some years ago, I suppose, as an increasing number of people became aware of how out of touch with their physical surroundings they and much of the culture had become. By the end of the Fifties, most Americans depended on processed and refined foods, synthetic clothing, over-the-counter bromides for every unpleasant sensation, and a host of products that separated them from the natural world and their own bodies. In the Sixties, significant changes in a small segment of the culture instigated by a variety of factors led to an attempt to counter this dismal trend.

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"Well, then, how should we eat, dress, take care of ourselves?" a few folks began to ask. Some suggested that instead of following the advice of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, that we would do better to look to the natural world for guidance, that we should “trust our bodies” to guide us as to how to alter and improve our lifestyles.

This seemed and still seems like a pretty good choice since our bodies are primarily interested in staying alive and growing, and Wall Street and Madison Avenue are primarily interested in making money. Our bodies, like those of other living creatures, have an inherent process called homeostasis. What this means is that natural organisms, us included, have a tendency to maintain a healthy balance and, when not disturbed, an inclination to act in a manner consistent with fulfilling that tendency.

The problem is that most of us are not undisturbed. In the process of getting to where we are now, we’ve eaten a lot of weird stuff, worn unnatural and restrictive clothing, and developed lots of habits and patterns that throw us out of whack, physically, emotionally, and mentally.

For example, if you carry a heavy shoulder bag around for years, eventually your torso is apt to lean to that side; your body will tilt. And not just when you’re carrying the bag. After awhile, that tilted posture becomes your posture all the time. As the years go by, that’s what feels normal, natural.

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Then when you lie down in Savasana in yoga class, you arrange yourself in what feels like a balanced posture. Of course, you tilt toward the bag-toting side. That’s what your body recognizes as balanced. When I come along and even you out, to you it feels completely crooked, unnatural. You can’t believe that such a distorted posture could be evenly aligned. The problem is that distortion has become normalcy: crooked feels straight and straight feels crooked.

So, as you can see, "trust your body" is not always the best advice. You can’t always always trust your body, as Elizabeth was finding out. As an aside, I must confess that these kinds of things, these tidy, profound-sounding sayings, drive me crazy. They sound sweet and true and wise. And there is truth and wisdom in them, many of them, anyway. That’s why they come into being. What there also is, is plenty of room for foolishness.

There is an inborn wisdom in the body, but often it is dulled or hidden by the patterns and tastes that we have acquired in our lives. We need to begin to clear the slate so that we can receive and understand the information that our bodies can reveal to us. We need to unravel the habits and distortions that we have accumulated so that this inherent intelligence can bubble up into our awareness and provide us with the guidance that it was intended to provide. And that’s where yoga comes in. Yoga, in all its many forms and disciplines, was developed specifically to purify our bodies, balance our emotions, and clear our minds. Ancient yogis and modern practitioners have realized that beneath the layers of misperception, misconception, and the residue of misguided living, something wondrously intelligent resides. We have but to do our practices to begin to remove these obscuring layers.

And even then we may err, misread the signs, receive faulty information. Culture, karma, genetics - these and other factors may muddy the waters in spite of our best efforts to see ourselves clearly. So, although we can be guided by the knowledge we discover within ourselves, information more trustworthy than much that comes our way, we should, in the words of one of our illustrious presidents, trust but verify; check our perceptions, consider our instincts, review our ideas in the light of new information, be willing to abandon what is proven to be false, and take up what we find to be true. And that is yoga, too. To overcome viparyaya, false knowledge, and dig deep within to uncover for ourselves that which is right and real.

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