Can yoga help you love your body? My story
Learning about anatomy and the nervous system during my yoga teacher training in 2024 completely changed the way I relate to my body. I used to practice yoga in a way that dishonoured my body – ignoring sensations and pushing through pain just to get the poses ‘right’. I now both practice and teach in a way that puts my body’s needs first. Read on for my story and for tips on how to practice yoga in a way that honours your body.
It’s amazing how a few short words can change the way you see your body. For me the words ‘lift your heart’ changed how I relate to my body, how I relate to other people and how I relate to God. Just three words changed so much.
I heard those words while standing in mountain pose during my yoga teacher training. Up until this point I was an advocate for listening to your body and practising adaptations when a posture is too challenging, except I didn’t ever practice what I preached – those things were for other people I thought. Perhaps I didn’t feel that my body deserved to be listened to, or perhaps I was so used to dissociating from painful experiences that I didn’t even notice. It was likely a bit of both.
I believed that the postures I did in my body had to look exactly like my instructor’s, and if they didn’t I was doing them wrong. If they made their hips align perfectly with the edge of the mat in warrior 2 then mine should too.
Unsurprisingly, my approach to yoga led to more than a few injuries in my 20s, some of which I still carry with me to this day. I don’t know whether my yoga practice caused the injuries or just exacerbated existing injuries, but either way I can blame yoga for a lot of discomfort and some pain.
Now, however, I’m learning that it isn’t yoga that causes injuries like mine, it’s that push-through-pain approach to yoga that’s rooted in shame. Shame that I can’t lift my leg as high as my instructor’s or tie myself in knots. Shame that I can’t force my shoulders back far enough in mountain. In my head the problem wasn’t the pose, surely it was my body being so inflexible.
What I’ve now learnt on my yoga teacher training, and through lots of online research, is that it’s our skeletal structures and nervous systems that affect things like how tight our hips are or how far we can lift our arms overhead. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being inflexible and out of shape, although that can play a part too.
All that time when I was trying to tie myself in knots and berating myself for not looking like my instructors, I never once considered that perhaps my bone structure is just different to theirs. Maybe I’ll never be able to twist as far round as other people, or get my knees anywhere near the floor in bound angle pose and that might be because of my skeleton or my nervous system and that’s OK.
This video clip shows how this can apply in someone’s body: In it he says the words, ‘this is not cheating’ when talking about someone externally rotating their arm in order to lift it above their head. These four words moved me to tears. How long have I felt like posture modifications were cheating but ended up cheating myself out of a safe, comfortable yoga practice? Yoga was never meant to feel like torture.
What I’ve also learnt, and am still learning from my training, is that when our bodies are in a position for a long time (such as sitting at a desk) our nervous systems see that posture as safe, even if it’s generally seen as a ‘bad’ posture. Because our nervous systems are always trying to protect us, certain, supposedly ‘easy’ postures can trigger alarm bells in our brains and cause our nervous systems to go on high alert and stop us from going into or leaving a pose. In fact, my anatomy teacher said that if someone is in a coma, their nervous system would be ‘switched off’ so you could lift their leg over their head with no resistance. It would seem like they’re really flexible but actually their nervous system isn’t kicking in to protect them from injury.
So our nervous systems are good. They protect us from injury. They keep us safe from threats. And they stop us from doing stupid things like putting our legs over our heads. But for someone like me with a lot of trauma stored in my body, sometimes it feels as if my nervous system protect me a little bit too much, and for me it’s led to a lot of shame as I mentioned earlier.
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Learning to listen to my body
Which brings me back to those three words: ‘lift your heart’.
I’ve always tried to force my shoulders back and down in standing and seated postures. Even when the teacher says something gentle like ‘relax your shoulders away from your ears,’ I’d think ‘Oo my shoulders are too high, I need to force them down.’ Because I always believed that as long as a posture looked alright on the outside then that’s all that mattered.
When my anatomy teacher, taught me that ‘shoulders back and down’ was like putting a sticking plaster on a posture problem rather than solving the root cause of the problem, and that this cue could cause injuries, it made perfect sense to me. Because I had an old injury from doing exactly that, while practising hatha yoga from a DVD in around 2010, and it often flared up when doing yoga. I hadn’t made the connection until this point. This always made mountain pose uncomfortable for me but I didn’t realise that it wasn’t meant to feel like that – I thought the problem was me and my body needed to learn.
When she later cued ‘lift your heart’, my body was relaxed because I wasn’t forcing my shoulders into place. So, for the first time, I was able to feel the full benefit of this posture. It was the first time that I was able to stand fully upright without pain or discomfort because I wasn’t forcing the back of my body straight but lifting the front of my body.
I’ll be honest that I always found standing massively triggering and came close to fainting countless times while standing. My heart would race and my breath would catch. This was just from standing still and doing nothing else (I used to have a diagnosis of POTS). It started to become a problem in my job in care, there was one part of my job where I had to stand for long periods while supporting someone on his work placement. I started to find this part of my job traumatic and hated standing for long periods.
Lifting my heart felt different. It was soft and didn’t seem to trigger me in the same way. I now know that when we force our bodies into positions that our nervous systems deem unsafe (like me forcing my shoulders back and down), it can trigger us into fight or flight mode and affect so many of our bodily functions, including our breath. That’s why I now use my breath as a helpful indicator – if I’m breathing shallowly or holding my breath, that’s a sign that I need to back out of that posture. This is why I like slow, explorative yoga flows the best. I personally don’t register that same level of self-awareness when I’m changing posture with every inhale and exhale.
Discovering that I can feel comfortable in a basic yoga posture has made me realise that I don’t have to put up with feeling discomfort in postures. It led me to discover that I was arching my neck too much in cobra and trying to force my body into twists that hurt. I also noticed that I force my knees towards the mat in bound angle pose and didn’t even realise I was doing it.
The cue ‘lift your heart’ also brought things to the surface that had remained hidden since my childhood. In lifting my heart in front of others, I’m standing out and not shying away. As a child who was the second tallest in her year but also probably the shyest, standing tall felt unsafe. I was desperate to blend into the background in any social situation but my stature caused me to stand out. Hunching and rounding forwards was my only defence. So lifting my heart in public has felt uncomfortable. I do so nowadays as an intentional practice to embrace discomfort and take up space where I previously believed I had no right to do so.
Those words also led to a bit of a spiritual breakthrough. I was reading the verse in Matthew 5 ‘in the same way, let your light shine before others’ and had a strong negative reaction, which I realise came from one incident of extreme sexual abuse in my childhood. I thought ‘I let my light shine and look what happened to me’. Then when worshipping in church that Sunday I still had those verses in my head and realised I was rounding and hunching again. I felt the prompt to ‘let my light shine before God’ and lift my heart in his presence. Again it felt extremely uncomfortable and exposed but I really sensed God in it. I feel like letting my light shine before God has set me free in some way from some of the effects of the abuse.
You can try mountain pose for yourself:
How I practice yoga in a way that honours my body
Learning to notice discomfort and pain in my own body – and not push through it – has changed how I now practice and teach yoga to others. I always put safety first and cue myself and others to listen to our bodies and back out of a posture if we feel pain, discomfort of if we’re holding our breaths (a sign that our nervous systems are telling us something). I will never force myself into a posture and never encourage anyone else to do so either.
I find it really important to start each class with a grounding technique so that you can become more aware of your body and what feels good and what doesn’t. For people like me who dissociate a lot, it can be hard to even notice discomfort or pain at times so this is why grounding is so important. You can do this yourself if your teacher doesn’t incude it in the class by noticing all the places where your body touches the floor or mat. Your yoga teacher will normally also ask you questions during the class to help you notice how different postures feel in your body, but if they don’t, you can try asking yourself questions or draw your attention to the places where you can feel your muscles working the hardest and notice how that feels.
Giving myself permission to let the postures look different in my body than in my instructor’s body has been challenging, and I still sometimes revert back to my old ways. What’s helped me the most is practicing trauma-sensitive yoga where the instructor only uses invitational language (like, ‘you’re welcome to…’ or ‘if you want to, you can…’). Another thing that’s helped me with this is focusing on how a posture is benefitting my body. This helps me to see the postures as existing for my body and not my body for the postures, and shifts my focus away from how the posture looks in my body towards how it feels in my body instead. I also tell myself that there’s no hierarchy of pose variations and that I can try on each variation to see how it feels in my body.
I never let anyone tell me how I should be feeling in my body. It’s my body and my experience and that’s unique to me. If I feel anxious during savasana then that’s just as valid as if I felt relaxed. I remember taking a yoga nidra class when the teacher said I should be feeling peaceful and feeling the presence of the divine. I was feeling neither. I was triggered and feeling unsafe at the time and that was why I was taking the class in the first place. This made me feel shame that I was doing it ‘wrong’. I’ve since learnt that I was actually doing it right (there’s no way to do it wrong) and that sometimes you will feel difficult feelings and that’s normal.
How do you practice yoga in a way that helps you honour your body? Let me know in the comments.
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