The Gift of Somatic Particularity in Iyengar Yoga

 

 

 

What in the world could that mean?

 

It’s a term I made up and just now started using, to describe what we are doing when we say we practice Iyengar Yoga. To say Iyengar Yoga is about “alignment” is both too narrow and too vague. Narrow, because usually folks are referring to the physical body only, and vague, because just how do you align the body with the mind, and the mind with the soul, as we are urged to do?

 

When we say Iyengar Yoga is about precision, that is also misleading. Yes, we frequently engage precise, incisive actions. Not just “stand on your feet,” but perhaps “join the feet and lengthen the big toes forward, while pressing the outer edge of the feet down and the inner heels together.” Why? Is it just to be bossy, dogmatic, and controlling? Precision itself is not the goal; it must serve a larger purpose.

 

So, what if we define the practice of Iyengar Yoga as a methodology to somatically understand and heal ourselves, by developing sensitivity to the particularities of our complex body/mind/breath matrix, through the technologies of āsana and prāṇāyāma? ie Somatic Particularity.

 

BKS Iyengar gifted all of us with an entryway into the body/mind/breath matrix. He taught us how to pay attention, feel, and come into relationship with the particularities of our bodies: Is the weight more on my right foot or the left foot? Why is one foot turning out? How does that relate to the hip pain, or to abdominal cramps? What about tension in my temple when I sit at my desk, or feelings of anxiety?

 

Through the somatic particularity of Iyengar Yoga, we learn to pay attention to ourselves. We start with the basics, the placement of the arms and legs, and how they relate to the trunk. With practice we become more observant and more detailed: how do the actions of my arms and legs affect my spine, my physiological body, and my emotional state? In āsana, we start to connect the observation of the physical body with the state of the mind, our feelings, and thoughts.

 

Through our individual practices of somatic particularity, we also learn to pay attention to social and cultural conditions and patterns. We become more sensitized not only to our own state, but also to the “energy in the room,” in our neighborhoods, in our cities, and beyond.

 

This is where the gift of somatic particularity comes in. Iyengar Yoga gives us specific tools to shape these observations into actions of healing and transformation. We learn not only how to heal the tweaky knee or aching neck, but also how to regulate our nervous systems, lower our blood pressure, calm the breath, manage trauma, and much more. Perhaps we can also apply somatic particularity to shift the dynamics in relationships, at home, work, and beyond.

 

How does this happen? There are no easy recipes or universal remedies. Sometimes the healing can happen in a flash, with one well-timed and attuned āsana. But usually the transformative healing evolves over years and decades. Through somatic particularity, we begin to understand how an action in one body part has a ripple effect through the entire organism.

 

Often the particularity is important. We move, as we are taught, from the gross to the subtle. The more particular and granular we become in our awareness and our actions, the more we access the subtle body. Abstraction does not typically bring about transformation. Abstraction usually happens in our minds, intellects, and imaginations, but the body functions concretely. No ideas but in things! as poet William Carlos Williams insisted.

 

This concreteness, this “thing-ness,” is the profound gift of Iyengar Yoga and somatic particularity. I have not experienced another somatic practice which consistently awakens this level of concrete sensitivity. Iyengar Yoga gives me the specific tools and techniques to engage the complex and magical instrument of the human body for the purpose of transformation and healing. We press this, we pull that, we turn this way and that, we invert, we extend, we compact, and all the while we are reshaping our minds and souls, always coming back to the body and its particularities.

 

May our devotion to this practice of somatic particularity be a transformative tool, to liberate ourselves and our communities, to expand our minds, hearts, and imaginations, to create the world we know is possible.