What is Embodied Yoga?
What is embodied yoga?
Embodied is a term that has become popular in recent years in the yoga, counselling, coaching and body work areas. What is it? Is it just another marketing term? Is all yoga not embodied?
Embodied yoga focusses on the internal rather than the external. The benefits come off the mat and seep into every aspect of our daily lives. It asks what is going on inside our body rather than what a pose looks like.
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Embodied yoga develops…
Agency - you are empowering your students
Trust - supporting your students to trust themselves ant their body’s needs
Somatic awareness
Freedom
Choice
Laura’s Introduction to it…
These are all the questions I had when I first enrolled on my first 500-hour Advanced Teacher Training in Embodied Yoga. I had already done a 500hr, had been practising yoga for over 30 years, I had been teaching from a therapeutic perspective forever. I always changed the pose to suit the body and was trained to teach the body in front of me. How is this different?
Here is some of what I discovered..
The main thing that changed is how I moved, my mobility, my fluidity and my inner connection. For the first time, I began to feel integrated, and notice when I was not. It was totally in keeping with and yet radically different from my previous 30 years of yoga and body work.
Why teach embodied yoga?
Embodied Yoga involves finding poses and adjustments that suit the student in front of you that day but WHY is that important?
There are an abundance of reasons why it is important to listen to the student’s body
Injuries both past & present - we may not know of them or may think they’re old news but they could have created weaknesses
Everyone has a slightly different bone structures - what suits one person may not be comfortable for another
Everyone has different muscle strengths & weaknesses - GAA players and their tight psoas will need different things to the builder and the office worker
Comfort - our students will reap the rewards of yoga by being comfortable in the poses - they choose to come to yoga. The old idea of “pain is gain” is not relevant here it is the opposite - pain is pain which is an indicator that something is not right. In embodied yoga we listen to the body