‘So do flux and reflux- the rhythm of change-alternate and persist in everything under the sky.’ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Emma Lovell Yoga
This content shows Simple View
Category Archives quote
Centre
via here
reaching the centre
in yoga practice
you try to reach that centre inside your body
from which it is possible to expand…
in yoga, with listening, with attention
with the clarity that comes from the practice
slowly slowly slowly
you touch the spot from which you can expand
into the ground and into space
Challenge your centre
‘To stabilise your body around neutral, and in particular your core, limits movement in the spine whilst also limiting…full movement potential.
How can we know where centre is if we don’t know where the boundary or limits to our centre are?’ Gary Ward, What the Foot?
Handstand images from Natural Handstands.
‘The environmental crisis has deep attitudinal roots. To restore our environment we need to heal our relationship with it, and that means healing the split in the psyche that cuts us off from the material world. It means revisioning the relation of mind and matter. The bulldozing of nature and the abuse of our own bodies reveal the depth of this separation, the fear it engenders, and the need to control… Matter itself, if we attend to it mindfully and gracefully, can help liberate us from delusion; for it is mind, not matter, that is in bondage.’ Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self
- Categories:
- bodies connection disconnection environment mind nature quote
Proprioception
‘Close your eyes and touch your nose. If everything is working properly, this should be easy because your brain can sense your body, as well as its position and movement through space. This is called proprioception.’ Full article here
Interoception
‘Proprioception is when you hold your arms out, close your eyes, and you can touch your nose. If you just hold your arm out and close your eyes, how do you know you have an arm? The internal subjective experience of an arm: that’s interoception. It generally goes along slower pathways.
Interoception connects differently in the brain, it’s much more associated with consciousness.’ From here
Dissociation
‘There’s a real skill to be in the body and it’s really hard work and it’s often our mind likes to do things quickly and there’s this quick default assumption that our body is there, and often it’s not often there as much as it could be.’
Click here to listen to the full podcast with Steve Haines.
“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” John Lennon
“I let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange
- Categories:
- connection quote
Take a bath
‘Our bodies spend their days dwelling between waking tension and sleeping peace. It’s uncommon for them to reach equilibrium with our conscious mind, but in these rare respites when our intellect stops churning, we can begin to look, listen, feel, bask and relish in our immediate surroundings. In the seeming weightlessness of water, the mind forgets its faculties and experiences what it is to simply be.’ Taken from ”The Solace of Soaking’ essay in Kinfolk magazine.
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Margaret Atwood
Images from here
Disconnection
‘Disconnection from the body is a cultural epidemic. We are taught to control the body by way of the mind, which is considered far superior. But the body has an intelligence whose mysteries the mind has yet to fathom. We read in books how to eat, how to make love, how much sleep to get, and impose these practices on the body rather than listening from within. Without the body as a unifying figure of existence, we become fragmented. We repress our aliveness and become machine-like, easily manipulated. We lose our testing ground for truth.’
Anodea Judith Eastern Body Western Mind.
- Categories:
- bodies connection disconnection practice quote