It seems odd to me that, before I began practicing yoga, I didn't pay much attention to how my body worked and moved, and wasn't particularly interested in it. The awareness I did have was very crude - such as how close I could get to touching my toes.
Answer - not very close - which is one reason that I began yoga - to improve my flexibility.
After three years, a lot of movement and receiving a lot of information, how my body works and moves is becoming very interesting to me.
This past weekend, I went to two sessions of a workshop led by Maria Cristina Jimenez, a Los Angeles based yoga teacher and body worker. Her approach is to teach anatomy experientially, with individual and partner exercises so that we could feel and see the body working in particular ways.
She was very successful in leading me to new awareness. Fascinating how actions, connections and sensations can occur, but be outside of conscious awareness.
One example is the connections between the different fingers and different parts of the shoulder. Indeed, pressing firmly into the floor with the thumb is felt in the front part of the shoulder, while pressing with the little finger connects near the outer edge of the shoulder blade. This is very useful, I feel like I've been given a whole new set of fine tuning controls.
I remember in my early yoga classes, when the instructor would talk about the importance of the feet and how what happened in the feet affected the pelvis and even higher in the body, I was very skeptical. The truth was, at the time, I couldn't feel the connections, so for me, they didn't exist. Now, when a connection is made between pressing into the mound of the big toe and action in the pelvis, I think "of course, that is obvious."
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