Consent From The Inside

I roll my mat out on the stone floor. In the mornings, it is the coolest place to practice, outside on the shaded terrace. I have electric blue dancing butterflies for company and wasps and hornets, the latter of which I’m not too thrilled to see hovering over my stick mat. It is the only space that offers a gentle breeze and carries the scent of warm lavender. It’s beautiful, but I have not quite settled yet; it always takes time to get used to practising in a new place, even one as idyllic as this. The first few days of practise, underneath it, I was holding on to this nervous caution, and a quiet question began to run through my mind as I moved through the asanas my body knows so well: “Is this all right?”

It took three days for that to stop. Nothing about the outdoor space had changed, but something in me was slowly unwinding.

A few weeks ago, I wrote to you about the four-minute mark in Yin. That moment, somewhere in a long hold, when the shape stops being something you are doing and becomes somewhere you are, when the body stops deciding, and actually begins to find its way towards a sort of acceptance.

In that piece, I was writing as a yoga teacher, and it was about observing that shift in students. But what I didn’t say or have the words for until now is what that shift feels like from the inside. It is so much harder to describe, mainly because it is so subjective and usually because it’s hiding, like a low-level caution, that is only noticed once it has left.

From the outside, it can be seen: it’s in the muscular effort, the belly that stays rigid and doesn’t find its easy rhythm with the breath, the jaw that’s slightly clenched and held, sometimes even the whole body; holding on, but from the inside, it doesn’t feel like anything at all. It is just how things are, how you feel in that moment, you in the posture, sensation arising and finding its way through, and that low-level brace just doesn’t fully register until something lets go, and you discover it had been there holding you tightly all along.

There are small signs that come as you release, and it’s worth being curious about your own. It can be as simple as the exhale that arrives without being taken, the tongue slipping away from the roof of your mouth, the belly releasing its quiet duty of holding in. Your weight moves ever deeper into the floor, sensation present, but your awareness sees it, feels it, takes it all in; the questions fall away, and instead information arrives.

None of this belongs only to Yin. I notice it in my Ashtanga practice most mornings. There are now postures my body can find and get into long before my body has agreed to them. The getting in is a technique, years of repetition, and capacity building over a long time. My body’s agreement sometimes takes a little longer, often a slow and deliberate breath, but sometimes it doesn’t agree at all, or at least not on that day. I know now the difference between the posture achieved by the body through technique and the posture accepted by the body because my body has decided it's ok, and as much as they look the same from the outside, I can tell you that from the inside they are not even close.

Have you ever felt that inhale you deliberately take and an inhale that arrives all by itself? Most people who have practised for a while know the difference, even if no one has pointed it out to them.

And in savasana, when you lie down, but you are not ready for it, the unsettled feeling and that moment when the floor fully receives your weight, your body yielding to that support on its own time, or perhaps not at all. Sometimes rest simply does not come, and I think it’s better to know that than to pretend that savasana is always restful.

One thing these years of practice have taught me is that you cannot ‘do’ consent. The trying, the effort to release, is a brace all of its own. Because we can’t try to rest, we are either restful or we aren’t, and cueing to ‘just let go’ has never once produced that result in anyone I have taught, including myself.

So what can we do? What can we offer ourselves in practice? I think it is as simple as deciding to stay, and to create the conditions that offer us time and warmth, and postures that ask questions such as… “what do I notice?” “What would happen if?” to be curious and open to what information, stories and myths our bodies are trying to tell …

This, in and of itself, can create a subtle shift in the balance; that protective autonomic tone can dissolve, easing off as our own agenda releases. You already know the difference between staying in a posture and being in one.

I also believe our own practice can give us so much information that all the teaching and courses in the world cannot. I think everything we ever read in a student’s body begins as literacy in our own; reading that student who is bracing in savasana can only be fully seen by a teacher who has felt it dissolve from the inside, many times over, and, most importantly, has paid attention in their own practise. This alone, I think, is reason enough to keep practising, and it has nothing to do with demonstrating your postural prowess on the mat. But understanding your teaching from the inside.

Here is a wee somatic yin yoga practice that asks questions.

It is in the free library of classes here.