You think it's easy ?!

It's a tricky thing to teach someone something that has so much potential inbuilt resistance to it, and Yoga by it's very nature is challenging to the one thing it needs for it's beginning, the 'ego'. We may think "OH I think I'll do a bit of yoga I'm a bit stressed". Then once we start to undermine our outer mask and our aches and pains, we may begin to see (maybe) what we are really like underneath, or at least what we think we are like.

Wilhelm Reich whom I have mentioned before, discovered through working physically using deep tissue massage into the 'muscular armouring' of the human body as he called it, three layers of experience. The outer layer is the 'mask' we present to the world. The middle layer is the part of us we may think is the 'real' us, the angry part or the part that feels secretly guilty or resenful etc. Then there is a third layer which according to Reich was our authentic layer, what has been called recently the 'inner child'. This is a more sensitive layer, and therefore buried away to protect us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or life as we know it!

Of course in an imaginary world that encouraged natural expression of emotions etc, there would be no need to bury this layer. Just to think back to school as I experienced it in the 50' and 60' it would have been suicide to show any sense of feeling. School was a tough experience in self-denial and pretending. You were caned for minor offences and hit on the hand with a ruler for talking in class. Well that's the way it was and I'm not going to cry about it now, but as an example of layering and armouring against the world here it is, right at that young age, the beginning of pretending to be ok when you really weren't.

So of course unless you had a healthy up-bringing (?) in the sense that you were encouraged to express emotions freely etc, then you are more than likely to have 'stuff' buried away in your 'muscular armouring' in the form of chronic tension and/or numbness. So, as we begin yoga Asana practise and a bit of Pranayama, we may feel what a great relief it is to have found a way to relax. But as we move/struggle through the gross physical muscular tensions and go deeper perhaps into the secondary layer where we store our anger or grief/sadness for example, it becomes a bit more interesting.

Memories can be stored within the muscular memory structure in the same way that it is stored in the mind memory. A 'triggered' feeling can remind us of past hurts, and a backlog of feeling associated with particular triggers is stirred up. All of this 'stuff' is stored away in what we politely refer to as the unconscious. Where do you think the unconscious lives? Well to be honest it's everywhere, in the muscles and soft tissue, the nervous system and heart.

If we become too hypnotised by our outer layering (ego) we may start to believe that this is who we really are. But as we move deeper into our feelings we may also start to believe that 'this' is who we really are. It's no coincidence to me that in some Health clubs I have worked in the yoga students complain the most about everything, why? Because for most of them they are starting to feel, and when that happens there is a great semi-conscious urge to make it somebody else's fault! It's a luxury I no longer have, blaming someone else is so nice, and to take it all out on somebody else and never have to own to the fact that it might just be you that is doing this to yourself is great temporarily but ultimately frustrating arrrgh! Of course that's not to say there is never anything wrong 'out there', it's just if we choose to make it our business, now there's the rub.

Now what is important here (I think), is that if you don't make some kind of commitment to the practise you may just keep being angry and overly sensitive all the time by staying stuck in the second layer of feeling (Anamaya). You may get through the first layer and stay there and keep re-traumatising yourself over and over. You may become all feeling with no grounding through the mind (Ajna, Manomaya), you may become hyper sensitive to everything and everyone, this happens to all of us from time to time, but getting stuck in it is not too good.

Unless you become committed to going through the deeper layers, you may stay in the superficial layers, until one day you give up yoga because (you think), it doesn't work, it's too hard. There is a perverse sense of relief in hurting yourself just so you can feel the relief of it when you stop, I think it's called masochism.

I say get on with it, go to as many classes as you can and try and stick with one or two teachers at the most, any more than that is just confusing. You may be the lucky one though, and just keep it all on the surface and skim around to various teachers to suit your mood, another way of avoiding going deeper in my opinion.

'It's all an illusion innit'? Sam Canardly.

'Do you know the way to San-Jose'. Burt Bacharach.

'Beauty's only skin deep, yea, yea, yea.' The Temptations.

'Ouch' Vincent Van Gough.

Om Namo Narayanaya.