What is listening to your body? We hear it offered compassionately by so many of our yoga instructors and yet hardly ever do we stop to question or define what exactly it means to “listen to your body”.

Firstly, this is a practice. Let’s even go so far as to say that it is a practice that requires a brave degree of willingness, presence, vulnerability and buckets of compassion. It’s not easy feeling and being present to all of what our reality consists of, and you’ll see that reflected everywhere in society. 

So what is this practice exactly? 

It’s a conscious dialogue between your awareness, your internal experience and your external experience. It’s decidedly noticing yourself regardless of how comfortable or uncomfortable some parts of your reality may be.

Let me also say that it is a skill that requires attention and tender nurturance, often supported by a qualified professional. The first building block to this practice is a willingness to get to know oneself and for today’s sake, let us establish the context to be a mindful movement practice. The second building block to this listening practice is presence, which is firstly initiated by curiosity to better connect and understand what exactly is being felt. Perhaps the third building block would then be vulnerability to really allow one’s attention to meet with the sensations, the emotions, the information the body communicates. 

Picture this–

You are situated on an unrolled yoga mat, awaiting the instruction of your yoga teacher and this person vocally introduces a pose to you and follows up with a cue along the lines of “if this option doesn’t fit, listen to your body and take an alternative”.

It sounds easy to follow right? If the aforementioned posture does not feel aligned to what your body is able to create to feel cared for and provided for, then you just do it differently or not at all. Let’s consider that perhaps it is not, in fact, so simple. 

Listening to your body requires the mentioned building blocks before any actions or alternatives are to take place. There is the additionally vital component of feeling safe within yourself and the space you are contained in, before you can even consider deepening your attention towards yourself and choosing different shapes or ways.  Although yoga rooms appear and are assumed to be “safe spaces”, we all come from diverse histories that will dictate how easeful we do or do not feel in certain atmospheres and there are so many factors to consider outside of the atmosphere as well. 

Many yoga teachers do their best to have practitioners feel included and at ease but the truth is, group classes and unpredictable energies can trigger different people for a myriad of reasons. Listening to your body requires a baseline ability to be present to oneself and that is only accessible if one feels safe.

There is also the matter of being connected to your body anatomically and on a wholesome level. It’s not everyone in a yoga class that comes from a type of athletic background, able to feel their way around different expressions of postures and modifications. So when a yoga teacher says to a person lacking body awareness due to inexperience or trauma, that practitioner may feel discouraged, lost, inadequate or triggered.

And so, those are just a few reasons that listening to your body is simple to sound out and complex to execute. All of that being said, I would still invite the majority of the population to practice listening to their bodies. There are many benefits to deepening your sense of connection to your body and all of its layers, some of which include self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-compassion, healing, physical ease, resilience.

A note on body agency! Remember that you are the driver, the author, the decision maker of all things that happen and do not happen on your sticky mat. This is a principle derived from a trauma sensitive lens of facilitating and I subscribe to all people following this concept compassionately. What I do not recommend, is allowing the person at the front of the room to exclusively dictate the ways in which we move, shape, rest and exist. If your heart rate rises to a rate that feels dangerous, if your hamstring feels compromised to the point of unsafety or if your breath labours unexpectedly, it is your agency over your body that you deserve to listen to and be led from.

May we all be reminded that this is a journey of getting to know the self and it is not linear, nor easy. If we are to strive to listen to ourselves and our bodies, it can be most beneficial to be inquisitive and intuitive about finding a teacher or studio that resonates with your unique history and preferences. If you have ever shopped for a therapist, you might run a parallel to shopping for a mindfulness educator and space before settling in to make a purchase with your time and money. We are all created so differently and provide unique offerings that will align with any and all kinds of folks, so be choosy, be patient, be true to yourself and be brave! 

You certainly deserve your care, your attention and your freedom and listening to your body might just be the idyllic segue to you finally embodying the brilliance that you are.

Marlies is recognized by many as the “traveling yoga roadshow”, teaching mindfulness across several of Niagara’s communities. She is a 200RYT Certified Yoga Instructor, Usui Reiki Master, Holistic Health Coach and total sucker for all things love and coffee.

A little about my story..

Despite feeling that my “yoga story” is unspecial, it’s a story that stretches over the previous fifteen years.I had started practicing yoga as a teenager at the YMCA nearby, while still training somewhat competitively in figure skating- yet didn’t fall into sincere like with the practice until 8 years later. It was around my mid twenties that I directed my deeper intentions and interest to spirituality, holistic living and my yoga practice- which eventually led to me undergoing a yoga teacher training. My story is subdued in the way that it evolved organically into me becoming not just an advocate for mindfulness but a facilitator of it. Previous to starting work at lululemon (yoga based clothing company), I had been the people pleaser, the do-gooder and the peacemaker, which led me down the path of becoming a school teacher. Funnily enough and against all of my previously held beliefs, I still grew up to become a teacher, that of mindfulness instead!