The stories we tell others… and ourselves

By Andrea Neil

They told us it would happen. They told us we would notice it wherever we went, whoever we looked at, whatever we were doing.

They were right.
When I went through training to be an RY®200 yoga instructor, we studied a lot of anatomy. We studied how different parts of the body move, and we studied the proper ways to move the different parts of the body. We focused on alignment in yoga postures, and more importantly, how the body takes up space in the world. We read from books, we listened to lectures, and we also practiced a whole lot of yoga. We practiced, and practiced, and practiced some more, and we became aware of our own bodies in ways we never had before. Because in order to teach the subtleties of movement to someone else, we first had to understand them in our own bodies.

Our instructor told us, with a smile on her face and lightness in her voice, that we would start noticing people’s alignment and posture and areas of tension – while at the grocery store, in a restaurant, at the beach – everywhere. She told us that the more we understood about the body, the more we would start seeing the bodies around us differently; that it would just happen. She was right.
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Now I see misalignment, or asymmetry, or the results of long-ago injuries that went unattended far too long. Often times, people don’t even seem to notice these things about themselves. 

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