Sarah Court

 After spending several years looking at people’s bodies, yoga teachers often see different people doing the same kinds of thing in class over and over again. One of the most endearing behaviors that I see is the student who looks at the teacher demonstrating a pose, and believes they are replicating that pose in their body, only to discover when they look down at themselves that they’re in a completely different position. Instead of their arm being shoulder height, it’s down by their side, or their knees are bent when the teacher’s legs are straight. The other morning I was demonstrating a pose with my arms crossed over each other and my elbows touching, and it took several repeated instructions to one student in particular before he realized that he was just holding his elbows with his hands. Until he actually looked down at himself, though, he was convinced that we were doing the same thing (and clearly indicated this to me with his impatient facial expression!).

Proprioception is the body’s natural ability to know where it is in space, communicated to the brain through specific nerve endings, many of which are buried deep inside our joints. Here’s the dictionary definition of proprioception: “The unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself.” In other words, or in a yoga context, you can feel what your body is doing, and make minute, precise adjustments to your pose, without having to look down at yourself to do it. According to A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana by Mel Rubin, it is as satisfying to the body to propriocept its location as it is for the eyes to look at a beautiful picture, or the nose to smell delicious food, or the ears to listen to pleasing music. It is a sense that we can develop with practice, but it is also one that many of us lose over time through disuse (our modern, technology-driven world doesn’t offer many opportunities to play with the anterior/posterior tilt in the pelvis). You don’t have to go to a yoga class to see how people have lost their proprioception; watch a few people walk down the street, and you’ll see limps, twists, and weird head positions that are entirely unconscious. The good news is, you can get it back: I’m working with a client who recently had hip surgery, and as we refine his new ‘walk’, he’s becoming an expert in feeling where his body aligns and where it doesn’t, and making the necessary adjustments.

But the greater metaphor at work here is the very goal of yoga: to realize and discover for ourselves where we are. So many of us spend countless hours pining for moments, possessions, or loves past, or dreaming of a perfect future where everything that is wrong with our present will be fixed. Yoga tells us to come back to the present, and to sit in that present place in order to understand, come to terms with, and eventually let go of everything else but the now. We will never move forward out of our idealized memories and start living in a peaceful present until we see how that past has led us to where we are. And we’re not going to make it to any idyllic future if we don’t know where our starting place is and what we’re working with. It may involve forgiving ourselves for past mistakes, or even mistakes we feel like we’re making in the present. It may require taking a good hard look at our own habitual behaviors and recognizing what we keep doing to prevent that idealized future from ever happening. It will certainly take practice, but just like proprioception for the body, with practice, we will undoubtedly improve our ability to know where we are in our lives.