Just Stand Naturally…

harry on 8:11 pm November 29th, 2011 / Be the first to comment! »

“Just stand naturally,” Kim said the first time I met her. So I stood naturally–as naturally as I could in front of a room full of strangers. Strangers, and one person I knew.

I’m not sure what Erin and I were doing when I decided to ask her if I could be a Seeing Bodies subject. A cursory check of old emails confirms that we were out for dinner–or maybe coffee. At any rate, for some reason I decided that attending Seeing Bodies was going to be important. It turns out it was.

If I have a yoga practice today, it’s because of Seeing Bodies. It’s because the Yoga Therapy students who observed Kim observing me were so welcoming and kind, but it’s also because being seen is just incredibly valuable. The observations and suggestions that Kim, Kelly, Layne, and others made for me guided my practice for the next several months. Knowing that my teachers had such a deep sense of how I stand and move through the world—from the way I pick up my son, to the fact that the pain in my shoulder is related to my lower back—gave me a huge amount of confidence as I immersed myself in asana. Old aches and pains cleared up. I stood taller. But more importantly, my practice deepened as the lessons and stories my body told gave me insight into my emotional and energetic lives.

Having that starting point gave me a baseline so that my teachers could watch my progress–and so could I, not just physically, but on so many other levels, too. Now that Seeing Bodies is becoming a standard part of a membership at Boundless, the already amazing teaching that goes on here can be even better. I think that we’ll see people accessing a lot more of their potential and gaining an even better understanding of all of our connections to each other, and everything else.That’s what yoga is all about. Learning the more that we can access physically. And, of course, toning our abs. Seeing Bodies can help with that, too.