Our body posture and tensions reflect our life experience. Thankfully, these can change at any time of our lives with a modality like yoga therapy.
It is a fact that our posture, our body build up and reflect our life experience from our early childhood and throughout our lives.
Have we been touched, welcomed, supported, reassured during the first months and years of our life? Have we been able to find our place, to occupy it fully? Encouraged to express what we love, who we are? Were we allowed to explore the potential of our body? To play with gravity?
The need to connect deeply with another and the fear to be rejected make us adapt our posture. We each respond differently to critical remarks such as “Sit straight”, “Stop getting into trouble” . Some of us may have stiffened during childhood.
It is easy to see how these repeated negative emotions and stresses produce contraction or loss of muscular tone that gradually create a veered posture or a body tension.
Good news
I have good news for you—life is movement, and all of this can change at any time in our lives. Yoga therapy can help.
You can get in touch with the fear and sadness that have been locked in the body in the form of tension by getting out of the mind and into the body and with the conscient effort to breathe deeply. With the help of the therapist, you can then express these feelings and, ultimately, accept them.
Both the verbal work and the body work help you reach an expanded version of yourself–loosened up and more aligned. You can experience this feeling of expansion off the mat, in situations of the real life. The key is to go slowly on the mat, to let these new movements–and feelings–arise, eyes closed, instead of trying hard to go into a pose. In yoga therapy, like everything in life, nothing can be rushed.
Then, you can gradually find a new way to live and stand in the world, in the right posture for you, flexible and strong all at the same time.