Home again
Discovering an approach to yoga philosophy that emphasises the wholeness, enoughness and fullness in everything that we already are has completely changed my attitude to being in my body. From non-dual tantra perspectives to daoist texts, I’ve found immense reassurance from the belief that the body as home is a place we innately know, and can return to again and again.
We can consider this journey home not as new territory, but as familiar (if forgotten) terrain. The path may become overgrown and less well trodden but with patience, steadiness and a certain amount of discipline it can be cleared, making it easier to walk again in the future.
We find this place of home in the glimmers of connection, in the pure flow state of present experience, in the sheer miraculousness of our own breath cycle.
Of course there are barriers to feeling at home in embodied practice. Trauma, tension and discomfort sit deep in the body. As Bessel Van Der Volk so resonantly says - the body keeps the score.
Capitalism thrives from our disconnect. The less whole we feel, the more we consume to feed the distraction. And the cycle continues leading us further away from ourselves. I feel the pull of the screen, the inbox refresh and the Instagram dopamine hit and the consequential distance from the body it creates. But I also feel a call to presence in the light between the leaves, the power and potential of my body in motion and the joy of being in connection with others.
This journey home is the theme we’ll be exploring over a retreat in Cornwall this October. Here are some of the ways home we’ll be playing with.
The two way touch of the skin
We immediately see, touch and feel through the skin. The skin is an open door to deeper tissues, connected by fascia to our underlying muscles, bones and their constant gross and subtle articulations. Skin enables us to know both our environment and ourselves. It is constantly sensing both inner and outer. In itself, miraculous!
Rather than being a barrier, we could consider the skin a gateway. Especially when using self touch and assists to sense our own aliveness. This may be through brushing, massage, tapping or simply a kindly placed hand to our own heart.
BKS Iyengar encouraged his students to feel every pore of the skin as an eye. How much detail we could sense through those approximately 5 million eyes!
Time, patience, discipline
The journey home isn’t always easy. In the act of being with ourselves we feel it all. That means the discomfort, the awkwardness, the shame, the guilt and all the bits of us that we’ve hidden deep.
Although home is a place we deeply know, it’s also a place that we can so easily forget. That’s why these practices accompany our lives - as a reminder to keep coming back again and again and again.
The breath
Each cycle of your breath is an embodied experience of wholeness. The first thing we do when we are born is take a breath in, and then soon after take a breath out. It’s a pattern that every cell in the body knows and a pattern that we see replicated time and time again in the world around us - from the flowers petals blooming to the cresting wave.
The breath is a doorway into a wholeness that has always been there, but may have been forgotten. A homecoming.
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Within the body you are wearing, now
inside the bones and beating in the heart,
lives the one you have been searching for so long.
But you must stop running away and shake hands,
the meeting doesn’t happen
without your presence . . . your participation.
The same one waiting for you there
is moving in the trees, glistening on the water,
growing in the grasses and lurking in the shadows you create.
You have nowhere to go.
The marriage happened long ago.
Behold your mate.”
Robert Hall