Driving Lessons for Your Body

The following set of exercises was driven by the desire to help my students learn to feel their body.

A lot of the people I was dealing with were beginners and some had difficulty with using their arms in strength based moves like push ups and wheel pose. But some didn’t know even more basic actions like twisting and bending the spine.

So I worked on ways to make learning (and teaching) these actions easier.

• Part of that involved using instructions to direct awareness while doing these exercises.
• Another part involved isolating and clearly defining actions that could be put together to make doing the poses easier.

It is the sensitivity and control developed during these exercises that are the essence of learning to drive your body.

As an example, while driving, you look at the road to see where it is going. And you also look at the road so that you know when to turn and when to stop.You also sense what is on the road.

And that is perhaps the most salient point.

What is on the road is constantly changing. Cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, buses, trucks, taxis, roller-bladers, dogs, cats, birds, construction, low flying airplanes, ambulances, fire trucks, police officers, school children, nude models.

Any of these can make an appearance on or near the road and affect the flow of traffic.

The more aware you are of these the better chance you have of being able to respond as required.

Being able to control the car, slowing down, going faster, steering around obstacles, is what allows you to respond.

With sensitivity and responsiveness you can get to where you are going.

And it is also sensitivity and responsiveness or control that can get you there faster, (and more efficiently) if that is your desire.

Enjoying the Journey as well as the Destination

Driving lessons for your body help you better feel and control your body so that you can get it to where you want it to go (or do) in whatever manner you like.

If you take these lessons to heart you might just enjoy the process of learning to drive and you might actually find that you enjoy your body while actually driving it.

You can become the equivalent of an F1 driver and drive it to its utmost, or you can develop a similar skill level while enjoying the drive at any speed.

The focus in these driving lessons is on feeling your body and controlling it.

And what ties those things together, what unifies them is knowing what you are trying to do.

Practice Knowing… Little Bits at a Time

With the exercises in this drivers manual, you can practicing knowing what you are doing little bits at a time.

It’s a little bit like when I learned to ride a motorbike. Not the first time where I crashed, but the second time when I actually took lessons. The first thing we did was push each other around while we learned to steer and use the brakes.

Then we learned how to clutch control. Then we practiced steering and braking while in first gear.

Eventually we put all those skills together, but only after we could do them without having to think about how to do them.

This ability to do without thinking can lead to a state of mind called flow. And that is actually a large part of the reason for learning to feel your body. The more you can feel the less you have to think about. Instead you can just respond.

Take Your Time Learning

Take your time with the exercises.

They don’t have to be perfect but you should be able to do them without wondering what it is that you are trying to do.

When you know what you are trying to do then you can focus on doing it while at the same time feeling your body.

Then you can slowly start putting these individual actions together in the context of a yoga pose or any other action that you choose to do.