The body is our temple, yet sometimes it seems we forget about its existence. For heaven's sake, the cultural system of which we are imbued constantly bombards messages about its external pleasantness, but having a deep and intimate contact with it is a completely different matter.
On the contrary, creating a constant and fruitful dialogue between one's mind and one's body is of fundamental importance to build a dimension of psycho-physical comfort that is also useful for deepening one's self-knowledge.
Disciplines such as yoga (especially some types of yoga ) start right from the body to embark on the path of realization and spirituality.
Even at a more general level, learning to "live" in the body with harmony and ease can only help us identify ourselves as conscious and totally centered people.
Use asanas to improve body awareness
From a merely external point of view, the yoga asanas are of statuary beauty: the practitioner enters the warrior, the divinity, the animal that the position evokes thanks to physical plasticity.
Very appropriately, the photographer Robert Sturman speaks of " Poetry of the asanas " by combining postures with figurative art tout court .
Beyond the aesthetic value, the positions are an opportunity to immerse oneself in the body, feeling its limits, possibilities and potential. They offer us an opportunity for extraordinary knowledge of the material that constitutes us and of its state of elasticity, tone, and general efficiency.
The depth of yoga, however, does not stop there and goes much further: each asana should be performed in the name of that unity that contains one of the ultimate senses of yoga (from the verb yug, to unite, to adjourn).
Therefore, any position must be practiced savoring the unity of the body, which is one, unique, an inseparable nucleus. An asana is not the set of body parts that pose in a certain way, but is born of the union of those parts, otherwise it becomes just a gymnastic pose.
In fact, during the yoga class we are called to feel the body like a unicum from the foot to the head and to stay tuned to this unit.
We are called to descend into our organs, muscles, apparatuses to perceive their sensations, their weight, their capacity for adaptation and abandonment.
Far from being futile, this knowledge constitutes an important personal baggage because it helps us to decipher the messages of the body, to listen to it and, possibly, to implement the right strategies to solve its problems.
Mind and body: a constant dialogue
We often care about the body only when we get sick or if we want to change it to adhere to today's aesthetic standards. In reality, learning to become familiar with it, to decode its language and to listen to the messages it sends greatly increases the depth of our personal awareness.
The body is the envelope that our soul lives: it is desirable to have care and awareness of it constantly in a silent, but very profound dialogue.
Thinking with the body, how?
