Over the years working 1-on-1 with people or teaching a class, I often get asked the question, “Where should I be feeling this?”. In the past, I would make a suggestion that if we were stretching our hamstrings that you should be feeling it in the back of the upper thigh, or that if we were doing a spinal twist on our backs, that you should be feeling it in the lower back.
What I’ve come to learn over these many years is what I project or anticipate what someone will feel often isn’t the case. Just the other day I was teaching a semi-private yoga class to four people. We were doing a pose and I asked everyone, “where in your body are you feeling this?”. Each person expressed a different sensation and location on their body for exactly the same pose. “I feel this in my shoulder”; “I feel this along the outer hip”; “I feel this in my hamstring” etc.
It no longer surprises me to have that response from students. My theoretical knowledge was different from my experiential knowledge. Nowadays, my answer to the “where should I feel this” question is, “I don’t know. I’m not in your body so I don’t know where you should feel it, only where you might be feeling it”. And I’m not trying to be a sassy pants as I say that. My “Jayne theory” is that we feel the pose, stretch or exercise in the part of our body that is the tightest or weakest and offers us the most resistance. Following my shoulder surgery, many twisting poses aimed at stretching the back were strongly experienced in the tissues around my repaired shoulder.
On another level of experience, the tribe of Off The Mat fundraisers who were on the trip to India had a post-trip follow-up call describing how we were doing with our re-entry. Some people were having the experience of isolation and lacking motivation. Others were already gliding back into their to-do list and ramping up for what’s next. Although we all had shared the trip, our reactions to it have been so different. How are any of us supposed to feel upon returning from such a journey? To that, there truly is no “right” answer of how we should feel.
It’s an opportunity to simply be with whatever the experience is. It’s a chance to sit in a place of not judging and become a witness to where we feel things, whether it be a yoga pose or a yoga trip. This is what makes all of us human beings who have basically the same design yet such incredibly diverse and interesting reactions.
So my thought for the week is to release the should in our day and sit in a conscious space of observation…with no guilt and perhaps an insight to wisdom.
