HealThy Self Blog: Momentary Masters of a Fraction of a Dot

I've said it before, and it's time for me to say it again:

I'm taking a break from updating this blog.

That said, you can continue to follow my and now many others' "Yoga Doses" and "Heard in Class" posts via LA YOGA Magazine's twitter (here) or facebook page (here). If you take a look around this blog (click here for some of my favorite posts), you can find ample resources related to bodywork and yoga, what it means and what it can mean to those of you who are curious or seeking a deeper source of healing than what you might have already tried.

When I started this blog over a year ago, I did so with the understanding that the words I heard and meditated on during my own yoga practice, if carefully considered for the meaning behind them, could make a meaningful and positive impact on my own life and by effect, on the lives of others. This understanding came from the yogic perspective that the words we use have real power in our own lives and the lives of others and that we are all connected, to ourselves, to each other, and to this world. To me, this has also come to mean that the more I practice yoga, the healthier, happier, more connected and better I become at handling challenges thrown my way. This, in turn, leads me to be better prepared to help others along the same journey. (After all, it's all the more challenging to do anything positive for someone else if we ourselves are in a negative physical, mental or emotional state.)

On a side note, the practice of bodywork has also made me come to understand the human body in a different and more connected way. There is just something profound about the body-mind connection that cannot be articulated with words and can only be experienced through our senses and feelings; bodywork is all about cultivating that sense of awareness and connection - to ourselves and to others.

Allow me to reiterate something I've said in previous posts: anyone can practice and benefit from the practice of bodywork, including yoga, regardless of age, shape, fitness level or even spiritual belief system. All it takes is commitment and work. (Ok, and also a healthy diet, since food is our fuel and the foundation for optimum health.)

Why body-work? I think it boils down to this:

I read an interview recently of famed astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson. Someone asked him what was he most looking forward to in science in the next five to ten years, and one of his responses was for, "Physics [to be] recognized as the foundation of chemistry [and for] chemistry [to be] recognized as the foundation of biology." As a new student of the sciences and only because of my yoga practice, I now understand these words to mean that, basically, when carefully considered, everything comes down to movement and identifying, understanding, and one could even say, attempting to control (or at least work with) the forces that push and define us. By everything, I mean health. I mean healing. I mean happiness. I mean progress. I mean letting go. I mean the body. I mean the way the world and life works. I mean yoga. I mean science. I mean our politics. I mean everything.

The answer? Body-work is a fundamental source of healing because it is based in movement, connection and work. Move, use and connect to your body. The body is the source, our connection to this world and the foundation and very vessel of our individual experience of life. As this 93-year old American Woman Yoga Master says, "Inside of me there is the creation of life and if I can awaken that inside of me, then, there is nothing that I cannot do."

Here is yet another relevant artistic interpretation of the body, connected: