As a yoga instructor, I hear teachers que all of the time to “tune into your own body.” But what does that really mean and why is it important? When I refer to this que, I mean to connect the mind to the body letting the two flow together. I decided I wanted to explore this topic even deeper to truly understand why tuning into your body improves your fitness, mental health, and sense of self.

Understanding your body can improve your fitness. This is because knowing your body’s basic anatomy can help prevent injury and therefore hit your goals. One of my favorite examples I like to use is the neck. It is a bit of a controversial topic in the yoga industry but it is fact that the joint of the neck is a pivot joint and not a ball and socket joint like the hips and shoulders. A pivot joint is “designed to allow one bone to rotate around the surface of another bone.” Located at the base of the skull is the atlas, vertebra C1, this holds the neck upright. The second vertebra C2 the axis forms the pivot joint allowing the head to move side to side but not all the way around. So how are we able to look up and down? Well our cervical spine, vertebra C1 to C7, are connected through a gliding joint aka facet joint, or plane joint. This joint can be found more famously in our wrists and ankles, and adds more flexibility not only to our neck but our entire spine. All of this is just to say you shouldn’t rotate your head round in a full circle because it is not designed to do that and can cause injury and pain to these joints.

Moving back on topic, knowing your body builds awareness. According to the CDC in 2019 about 59% of adults were experiencing pain of any kind in their body and 39% of adults were specifically experiencing back pain. I like to use the back here as an example because it is a common place where people put too much stress on the muscles. We talk about it all the time in yoga to listen to what your body is telling you. I’d like to speak from personal experience and how I read my body. Powerlifting is another one of my many hobbies and deadlifting is my favorite lift. Deadlifting is a type of lift that we as humans use in our day to day, like lifting furniture or heavy buckets. After being at the gym for years and talking to lifters, I have heard so many horror stories of people tweaking their back because of this lift and pushing their body beyond its limits for ‘ego’ reasons. So when I perform this lift I shift my focus out of my mind and to my body, my feet, legs, back, arms, all working together, paying attention to every micro movement. The second my back rounds as I begin to pull, I let it go. There are other exercises, weights, and variations I can use to achieve strength without injury or pain. But because I am aware of my body’s movements and I am able to drop my ego, my fitness level continues to increase and haven’t experienced any injury due to exercise…yet.

This brings up another point of understanding your own bodies anatomy and its own physical limitations. The teachings of Yin Yoga instructor Bernie Clarke and his book Your Body Your Yoga has taught us about tension (when the tissues resist being elongated) and compression (when two tissues run into one another). When compression occurs in the hip, for example butterfly pose, the range of motion in that posture has reached its limits. Everyone has a different amount of space in their bones which is why some people can get both of their thighs to the ground and some can not, such as myself. Understanding this fact has helped me to love and appreciate my body more, and just because I can’t get my thighs down doesn’t make me feel any less, makes me feel unique.

Preventing injury is one thing but tuning in to the body can also tell us when we need to slow down or are beginning illness. If you know your body you can catch illness early and share signs with your doctor. Symptoms of fatigue, weight loss, change in eating habits, body pain, or headaches, are all signs of something wrong and you should talk to your doctor. That being said, the better you know your body the better you can advocate for yourself that something is wrong and you should be taken seriously by your doctor.

Once you begin to understand your body you’ll physically begin to feel better mentally. One practice I like to recommend is mindfulness and meditation. These two practices help the mind to tune inward and communicate with the body. Mindful eating, for instance, focuses in on the experience of eating, such as how the food makes you feel before and after and knowing where your food comes from. This allows you to not restrict yourself and eat happily in moderation. Sometimes with this practice it’s good to ditch the scale and focus in on how your current body feels in the moment and after consuming food and exercise. Side note, for woman mindful eating habits can change weekly due to hormones constantly changing in the body. But we will get more into that in another post.

I learned in my yoga training that emotions can manifest and get trapped inside the body. Though it made since, like I get intense neck pain when I’m stressed, I wanted to dive deeper into this concept. Dr. Bradley Nelson is the author of The Emotion Code. In the book he describes emotions as vibrations generated by the body. When we experience emotion or trauma, we go through stages of processing. First being the emotional vibration sent from the body. Second, is the physical and emotional sensations that may bring up thoughts or other experiences with it. Third is where we process, let the emotion go and move on. Dr. Nelson says that if the second or third step is interrupted than the emotional experience becomes incomplete and will likely become trapped inside the body whether we realize it or not. A trapped emotion can be conscious or subconscious. The book writes, “Sometimes we can consciously recall these challenging events, and sometimes we can not. Whether you remember a painful event or not doesn’t actually matter, because your subconscious mind does remember.” The book discusses first hand experiences from those who felt physical pain and did everything to find a cure. Suddenly they were pain free once these emotions were released from the body. This is more so something to think about and I will be diving into it more in the future but it is good to note that your mental pain can become physical. So again knowing your body well can make you a better advocate for your own health.

Ways to better understand your body

1. Movement

A Harvard study found a 26% decrease in odds for becoming depressed per major increase in measured physical activity. The study used tracking devices to calculate how much an individual moved throughout the day whether it was strict exercise or simply taking the stairs or washing the dishes. This study showed that a person does not need to be doing hard core exercise to be happy but just getting off of the couch can make a difference in mood.

2. Meditation

As stated before, meditation is a great way to tune into your body and really focus on what its trying to tell you. At the end of my yoga classes, right before our finale pose of shavasana, I like to do a full body scan. This is a type of meditation that shifts your focus to specific parts for the body. This can get has specific as the right second toe and the inside of the left forearm. Doing a full body scan or simply closing the eyes and listening to the sound of your breathe can improve anxiety, self compassion, self-awareness, and pain relief. I also recommend Yin Yoga and Yoga Nidra to focus in on sensations and emotions arising in the body.

3. Talk to someone

I am big on therapy and actually started when I hurt my foot. I felt so depressed and disconnect from my body and to be fair we were going through a global pandemic when I started. So talking to someone even if its a close friend, these people closest to you will notice shifts in your behavior if you don’t realize it yourself. It is just always nice to have someone keeping you in check.

That is all I got on this topic for now. There are a lot of little side projects here that I’ll be interested in learning about.

Until then keep learning