How To Actually Listen To Your Body

What the instruction leaves out

“Listen to your body” is the most repeated instruction in yoga and one of the least useful, because almost nobody follows it with any detail. Listen for what? And then what? Here is the version we teach, which is rather more specific.

What to do with what you notice

Once you can name a sensation, the decision it asks for is usually obvious. This is the short version we give in class.

• Stretch or effort, breath steady: stay, and count five breaths.
• Stretch or effort, breath ragged: come back twenty per cent.
• Sharpness anywhere: come out now, not at the end of the count.
• Anything near a joint that feels precise: come out and check the set-up.
• Wrongness with no clear cause: rest, and mention it to your teacher.
• Sensation that grows after you leave the shape: note it, and go lighter next time.
• Nothing at all: you are probably somewhere useful, so stay a little longer.

None of these decisions need to be made quickly. Taking one breath before you move is part of the skill.

There are four sensations worth naming

Most of what you feel on a mat falls into four categories, and telling them apart is the whole skill. Stretch is broad, warm and diffuse; it fades if you stay. Effort is muscular, local and burning; it also fades, but faster once you stop. Sharpness is precise, often close to a joint, and it does not fade. Wrongness is harder to describe and usually shows up as your breath catching before your mind has caught up.

The breath is the honest one

Sensation is easy to argue with. Breathing is not. If your breath has become short, held or noisy, you have gone past what your nervous system currently considers reasonable, regardless of how the shape looks. This is why teachers keep asking about your breath and not about your hamstrings.

It gets easier, and then harder

The first few months of practice are mostly about noticing anything at all. After a year, most people can read their own signals well. After several years, the difficulty inverts: you can now tolerate so much that you stop asking whether you should. Experienced practitioners get injured more often than beginners for exactly this reason.

Come to class with the question rather than the answer. What is this sensation, where exactly is it, and what does my breath think about it? That is listening, and it is a practice like any other.