Are you listening?

I’ve been thinking a fair bit recently about one of those really commonly used yoga phrases - ‘Listen to your body’. 

It’s usually said as though to imply, ‘ah yes, just simply do that and everything will click into place’. And it’s become another of those beliefs/sayings connected with the yoga world that you’re assumed to understand, to just ‘get’, or hey what’s wrong with you? You mean you can’t hear what your body’s saying? Oh, you’ve failed yet again at something ‘yogic’. 

I’d guess that, although any native speaker would understand the actual words in the phrase, probably at least half of us (and I’m being conservative here) would struggle to really connect to the meaning behind the words and what our body is ‘saying’. 

We spend hours and hours in one position at a desk, ignoring our legs and back screaming at us to move, disregarding our eyes’ repeated blinking, irritation and dryness. 

We accept our society’s obsession with being relentlessly busy all. the. time. We refuse to stop and rest because it’s seen as weak, or ‘cheating’ or undeserved. And if we stop, well, how will we get everything done? Even though we know, if we think about it, that we’ll get everything done better and more efficiently if only we could allow ourselves to be in a more rested and refreshed state. 

I know some of you might not be dog people (what is wrong with you??) but for a moment, I’d like you to think of our doggy friends. This topic was partly inspired by a time recently when I was sitting on the seafront and some people walked past with their two hot, panting (but very happy-looking) dogs. They’d obviously already been walking a while and the poor dogs must’ve built up quite a heat under their thick furry coats. 

And I could very clearly imagine what those dogs would do as soon as they reached home. Can you see it? They get in the door, their leads are taken  off, they maybe first find water, gulp it heartily and then they find a cool floor and FLOP. I can almost hear and feel the thud of their grateful bodies collapsing to rest. No distractions like their human friends, of things to do, what’s next on the agenda, the next thing to do, always doing, doing, doing!

I realise it could be argued that a dog’s life is simpler than our own; they don’t need to do anything other than eat, sleep, poo, and exercise, so it’s far easier for them to listen to their body. But is it? We still share that same, deep, animal instinct and ‘chimp’ part of our brain that derives from a time loooong before jobs, the internet, social media and our 24/7 society. We do have an innate sense of what we need. It’s just that we’ve just become SO distracted and removed from our natural instinct and intuition that we don’t hear it or realise it’s even there. But it is. 

I like the idea of reinterpreting the phrase ‘listen to your body’ as ‘STOP. Do nothing. Wait. Wait longer. Keep breathing. Just exist. Be. If it’s difficult to let go completely, at least for a moment release the feeling that you need to be doing something.’

If we can just pause or stop often enough to connect with it, our body is always there, in its wisdom, telling us what we need. Whether on a yoga mat or otherwise. 

Maybe if we stop striving and trying and trying to listen to it, and then ‘failing’, we could instead commit to allowing ourselves to stop. And then, rather than active, struggling, unsuccessful ‘listening’ we might just allow space for a more natural, passive state of being, where we HEAR the body instead.