Yoga: Listen To Your Body Talk, by Parvati Devi

We live in a noisy world. When we want to simplify our lives and shed excess, we learn to learn to tune out outside chatter and turn on within. As we do so, we may find that our inner world has a lot to say.

As we go within, we will likely come up the ongoing thoughts from our personality and ego that are like busy little workstations on the go. Once we allow this internal noise to settle, we find the wisdom of the body and our soul that provides essential teaching for our spiritual path and our evolution as yogis.

Several years ago, at the end of teaching a yoga class in my Montreal studio, a student came up to me and asked, “Who is your yoga guru?” My immediate answer arose spontaneously. “My body,” I replied. I went on to explain that by listening to the wisdom within my body, I was able to go deeply into my yoga practice by allowing knowledge from within to rise into consciousness. I found that the learning I did through respecting my body’s innate voice was much more potent than externally imposed, cerebral or textbook learning.

As a practicing yogini and meditator, I know that the body is intelligent. If we try to move into a yoga pose “from the outside in”, thinking of what it looks like and trying to replicate “over here” what we see “out there”, we can experience inner resistance in the form of tension, discomfort or even pain. But when we allow a yoga pose to flower from the inside out, we learn to honour an already present, natural intelligence.

When practicing, we learn to quietly and lovingly witness where our body holds tension, which becomes our humble teacher showing us where we store unconscious thoughts and energies that no longer serve. When we give our body intelligence the respectful space it needs to be heard, we let go of the illusion that our egos are in control. We become guided by a most potent, natural, divine force, which then has the room to express itself through us.

If we are willing to listen, we will see that our bodies talk. We hold memories within our cells of past experiences, unfulfilled desires, painful events, wishful hopes and soul-directed dreams. Our bodies are like archaeological sites that reveal the stories of our lives. When we listen, we can see that our bodies are full of hidden treasures, stories that are held from the past or yet to be born in the future.

Parvati Devi is the editor-in-chief of Parvati Magazine. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed Canadian singer, songwriter, producer and performer, she is a yoga teacher and holistic educator, having studied yoga and meditation since 1987, and developed her own yoga teaching style called YEM™: Yoga as Energy Medicine. Her current show, “Natamba”, brings forward a conscious energy into the pop mainstream.