Below is an interesting view of your awareness and your body, perhaps this will help us as we continue towards 50 more days of yoga. Our bodies are our partners, 100%!
(from Reinventing The Body, Resurrecting The Soul)
"Relating to your body calls for the same basic attitudes that go into any intimate relationship. Tending to them every day keeps the relationship healthy.
Trust
Consideration
Honesty
Mutual cooperation
Loving appreciation
These are all aspects of awareness. People focus too much on the physical choices that the body presents – whether to take vitamins, how many calories to ingest, how much to exercise. Without awareness these considerations tend to be fairly useless. Your body knows if you fear it; it rebels at being disciplined like a disobedient child; being ignored makes it grow dull and inert. The whole purpose of consciously relating to your body is to provide the kind of foundation that is really needed. After that, you can take any physical measures in the right spirit, and that will bring the best results.
Trust. Real trust is implicit. It doesn’t depend on shifting moods. It doesn’t need to be tested or proven. Most people only trust their bodies so far. They anticipate a time when the body will bring pain and the distress of aging. If you are on the lookout for what can go wrong physically, you are relating out of distrust, the opposite of what needs to exist. So reframe the situation. Think of the millions of processes that are being carried out perfectly in billions of cells every second. Compared to that steady, faithful, perfectly coordinated functioning, the few times that the body shows distress are minuscule. It’s far more realistic to trust your body than mistrust it. After all, you trust you mind even though it occasionally breaks out in irrational reactions and is susceptible to moods of depression and anxiety. Your body stands by you without asking for any reward, and its steadiness far exceeds the shifting winds of the mind.
Consideration. Your body doesn’t demand consideration, but it will reward you amply if you show some. It’s considerate to walk away from stressful situations. Stress puts enormous pressure on the body’s coping mechanisms, and that includes the stress of loud noise, congested work environments, excessive physical demands and emotional upset. You may consider it recreation to run a marathon, for example, but you should consider your body’s viewpoint. Another basic consideration is rest and regular daily rhythms. Instead of waiting until you are too tired to go on, provide rest several times a day to your body – all it takes is a few minutes sitting quietly with your eyes closed. A predictable routine for meals and exercise also shows consideration. If you are used to irregular habits, it may bore you to adapt new habits, but if you persist for only a week, you will notice a positive response from your body. It will be more relaxed and at the same time more responsive and energetic. Even the most minimal effort at exercise, such as getting up from your desk and stretching every couple of hours, injects a bit of personal attention to the body. Keep in mind that your attention is a basic nutrient that your body needs.
Honesty. In personal relationships, it’s a strain to keep up a false front, and the same is true for relating to your body. In both cases the falseness usually comes down to self-image. You look at your body and want it to match your ego’s desire to look good in the eyes of others. People spend thousands of hours in the gym, not for the sake of the body, but to satisfy an ego-ideal of beauty, vanity, strength, and security, and to fit in with someone else’s expectations. Body image is a huge problem for many people, and classically woman are the most distressed about it. You can reframe the whole problem by comparing our body to the person you love the most in the world. Do you really care what that person looks like in the mirror? Do you denigrate that person for not fitting the image of a supermodel, not being at their ideal weight, not having biceps or big enough breasts? Does growing older make that person less valuable in your eyes?
The reason those considerations don’t matter is that you are relating to a person, not to an object that must match an ideal image. Now think of your body as a person who is just as intimately related to you. You don’t even have to call this person “me”. By any name your body has been relating to you as the most faithful of friends, and once you regard it that way, ego image becomes irrelevant. In short, learn to personify your body, and they you won’t be so tempted to objectify it.
Mutual cooperation. You can’t expect your body to serve you if you give it nothing to work with. The body of a middle-aged executive isn’t out to sabotage him when the man decides to shovel a foot of snow from the driveway. But if he has ignored his heart for years, there is a danger in sudden hard exertion, perhaps fatal danger. The key to the body’s reliability lies in cooperation: only ask for as much as you have given. Compared with other intimate relationships, your body asks for a fraction of what it is willing to give in return. This is another area where it helps to personify your body instead of objectifying it. Think of your body as a willing worker who wants only a meager salary, but who cannot survive on nothing. The salary it asks for is paid in personal attention. If you genuinely want to cooperate with your body, paying it a little attention makes proper diet, exercise and rest easy – you will be providing those things because you want your willing worker to be happily employed.
Loving appreciation. Your body is going to serve and uphold your interests for a lifetime. It’s only fair to appreciate it for this service, and if possible to appreciate it with genuine affection. Most people are far from doing that. Instead they look on their bodies like old models of cars that will need more repairs and cause more trouble as they wear out. This causes a serious disconnect. What they want from life-a future that’s more comfortable and fulfilling-is mismatched to a body that grows more uncomfortable and disappointing. The mismatch isn’t the body’s fault, however; it’s the product of beliefs and assumptions born in the mind. We all relate to loved ones who grow older, and if we’re lucky, we relate to them better as they age. Familiarity breeds fondness in this case, and appreciation flows more naturally.
The same should hold true with your body. Being a familiar companion, you can grow fonder of it over time. The two of you settle in to a shared life, knowing things about each other that no one else can possibly know. If this sounds like a marriage, that is rightly so. The highest aim in life is the marriage of mind and soul, and since the body links the two, it deserves to be part of a more perfect union as the years unfold. This isn’t a fantasy that tries to compensate for the advance of physical aging. It’s a realistic way to approach you own awareness. If you aim to be more aware, wiser, and more fulfilled in the future, invite you body to join that future as an equal partner. When the body, mind and soul are matched, the results will be far different from when they are alienated from one another.”
Deepak Chopra
So, as you head into our studio for your next practice, just remember, you are not alone, but with your closest buddy ever, your body!
Imagine the attention, love and appreciation we are putting into our bodies each time we do our yoga.
It will respond in kind!
I M Perfect lady 