Autumn Lotus Yoga

Forrest yoga talks alot about learning to feel & live in rather than transcend our physical bodies.  Like a lot of yoga things, that can sound like an esoteric concept but it’s really very literal & I’ve been hunting for a way to convey that.

Currently I’m reading a fabulously accessible book on neuroscience called “The Body Has A Mind of Its Own.” It was featured on a Yoga Journal suggested summer reading list & it’s really helped me parse out some things.   (Go. Read. It. Now.  Or  stayed tuned & I’ll attempt to convey bits of the stuff in it.    

K, try this overlap of yoga & science on for size…  Our felt sense of ourselves is created in concert between the body & the brain.  The brain carries within it incredibly detailed maps of the body & the space around it that are present simply to enable us to function in the world whether we tune into them or not.  These maps are influenced by culture,  experiences, upbringing etc & also are constantly changing in response to our internal & external environment as well as through conscious training.   Yet again — we are infinitely changeable/plastic/labile/mutable etc.

Terms I like to describe these maps from the book are: 1) ”body mandala” to refer to the internal sensory & motor map of the body itself;  2) ”peripersonal space” for the area in close proximity to the body & 3) “extrapersonal space” for our wider environs, like a room or a playing field. 

Conscious awareness of these different levels of mapping within the brain shifts.  Like, we can be hyper-aware of our own thoughts & bump into things in the room or so focused on the sensation in our lips when kissing someone that a bus could drive by & we wouldn’t notice (helllllooo, Beloved Husband .   

The body mandala is not always in our conscious awareness, or may barely ever have been cuz we spend so much time living in our thoughts – but it’s there.  And to very minute levels of detail that with training allow us to become dextrous or sense what’s happening in our kidneys. 

So part of yoga practice is then to tune into the depths of information available in the felt sense of our body in space already mapped out in the brain & also maybe to fill in any holes or gaps.   We learn to feel from the inside out, bringing the unconscious body mandala in the brain into conscious awareness & enriching it & ourselves in the process.  And to also refine & wake up our sense of peripersonal/extrapersonal space where the subjective & objective sense of self get a bit blurry in both philosophy & neuromapping.

I  just think that’s cool.   Off to wander through my body mandala on the mat right now!

Tags: Yoga & Science, Yoga Books, Yoga Geekiness

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Yoga & Science, Yoga Books, Yoga Geekiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.