When my head runs on without me
Coming back to Asana?
There was a time when asana felt like everything.
I loved the sequencing, the creativity, the quiet challenge of shaping my body into forms that gave me a sense of order and strength. I loved how it felt to be chosen to demo, how it felt to “get” a posture after months, or even years of striving. For a while, I equated those feelings of clarity, control and capability with yoga itself.
Nonetheless, at some point, asana and I drifted.
Nothing dramatically and not all at once. There was an injury but no big fallout (though I’ve had my share). As my interest in the deeper layers of yoga grew, as life pulled me toward slower practices, as I learned how to listen to my nervous system rather than override it. The shift was slow.
I started favouring a practice that required lying still over my previously loved movements. I’d seek out rest in Yoga Nidra and realise how loud my inner world was, despite how calm everyone told me I was. I’d guide others through practices that had nothing to do with how flexible they were or how long they could hold a pose. Almost without noticing, I became, one of those teachers who rarely practiced physical yoga in the way people might expect.
It felt like freedom…
for a while.
And then… something strange happened.
I didn’t notice it at first. I was still moving, walking, gym, teaching, doing life. It wasn’t the physicality of Utkatasana I was looking for but something had shifted. A subtle thing. Without the regular practice of asana, I thought I started to feel a little less in my body. A dulling of awareness, that sense of “I’m here, in this body, in this moment”, started to blur at the edges. I had entered into a wormhole, like I do every now and then, chasing answers to open questions.
It was as though my head had started sprinting ahead without waiting for my body to catch up.
Without the regular practice of asana, I thought I started to feel a little less in my body. I think actually, in typing these words out, I was just not in a place where I wanted to hold the mirror of Asana up to myself. So there was an awareness, I’d shrouded in a logical illusion, that I didn’t need asana but peel back even the top layer and what Asana was showing mel, I didn’t like. So subconsciously, I avoided it. If I’m honest, I have toyed with just letting it go entirely.
In my case, when that happens, it’s not just physical:
I miss cues - hunger, thirst, being tired, aches and pains.
I make decisions I later have to unpick… regret.
I forget what I actually need in favour of chasing things I want.
My body becomes a background hum , not something I live in, but something I manage, or tolerate, or sometimes ignore entirely.
I didn’t let go of my mat entirely. I’ve learned some new things along the spiral of learning but I see now where asana fits in to the suite of yoga tools for me. So I’m going to started rolling out my mat again. I will allow myself to be a messy beginner. Not with discipline or lofty goals. Not to “get back into it.” Just an informal check in.
Where am I tight today? What feels surprisingly strong? What feels… not quite right? Where are these thoughts coming from? Are they real?
I see it now that I didn’t need the poses to fix anything. I need them to show me something.
And they have. What a peculiar kind of honesty that lives in asana.
It’s easy to say that things, like Asana, should “be awareness, not performance and then postures become less about alignment and more about insight”. I’ve done Yoga for decades and little glimmers like this still evade me.
They stick it to the man and say things like:
“You’re holding your breath again.”
“Choose the pose you always avoid”
“You’re skipping this side because it’s harder, aren’t you?”
I began to notice things I’d missed when I was all-in on the more subtle practices. To clarify, I love those practices, Yoga Nidra, breathwork, sensory meditation. They continue to change me in deep, meaningful ways but asana has a directness I had forgotten.
It brings me back to sensation. To the tiny tremble of fatigue or the stubbornness of a hip that won’t open on cue. To the tender way grief sits in my spine. To the way this body tells the truth, even when my mind has spun a different story.
Now, I don’t think asana is the heart of yoga but I do think it’s one of the doors back to yourself and I can see why it’s ever present. When life gets noisy, when stress makes us speed up, when you catch myself living in my thoughts and barely registering the skin I’m in: that door is a gift. Not a solution. Not a goal. Just a gentle nudge back to to a thought about what my body, this huge sensory organ, is telling me.
So here’s where I’ve landed:
I don’t need asana to be my everything.
But I do need it to be something, a part of my toolkit.
Not to perfect or perform, but to connect.
To live in my whole body again, not just my squirreled away with my thoughts.
To remember that clarity isn’t always a thought. Sometimes, it’s a stretch or a niggle.
A clumsy set of lunges. A shoogle (shake). A bunch of sighs.
And that’s yoga too.