life makes shapes

"Life makes shapes. Life is a natural, evolutionary process in which series of shapes are continually forming. These shapes are part of an organizing process that embodies emotions, thoughts, and experiences into structure. This structure, in turn, orders the events of existence. Each person?s shape is his embodiment in the world. We are the body we inherit, the one that lives us, and a personal body, the one we live and shape through voluntary effort. We are citizens of two worlds, rooted in the animate, immortal and timeless. Molecules and cells organize into clusters, which further organize as layers, tubes, tunnels and pouches. These give structure to liquid life and set the stage for embodied human consciousness. Through the act of living, a personal human shape grows, one that is changed by the challenges and stresses of life."

-- Stanley Keleman

there are only relationships

"The body is not like a machine, an assembly of various parts put together to create a greater whole, and we must stop thinking of ourselves like that.

We are organisms that evolved in complex ecosystems, with layers of interdependence. There are no units that act alone or have any sense autonomy - there are only relationships."

- Peter Blackaby 

rebecca horn

Rebecca Horn body extension pieces

life's work

My body is accustomed to compromise.

I learned at a very young age how to 

negotiate space.

How to apologies for the way that my 

body fills all the places that it

occupies and all the places that it 

doesn't.

Teaching my body to grow free, 

and wild, 

and to not be afraid to exist, 

has become my life's work.

-- Key Ballah
Preparing My Daughter For Rain

dorothea tanning

found here

Neck

1. the part of a person's or animal's body connecting the head to the rest of the body.

2. a narrow part of something, resembling a neck in shape or position.

Bert's Lost Paperclips

gif found here

"With asana I felt there was a desire to create perfect lines that I question in their straightness. Why if our bodies are so rounded, and our muscles wrap around everything so fluidly, why the attention and determination to become a straight line? It felt like something was crooked. Something was not serving the way my body is."

--  Andréa de Keijzer 
from a conversation with Matthew Remski.

Don't forget

"Don’t forget that you’re a real, living person. Try to feel gravity holding onto you, try to feel the water and the bones in your body, try to feel the ways you’re held and anchored in your own world."

-- Madame Clairevoyant 

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."

-- Simone de Beauvoir

Practice

Your Yoga practice, if preformed intelligently, is a self exploration. You can learn about the way in which you inhabit your body. You can learn about muscular habits and patterns that you have laid down in your life and you can start to find out what these patterns mean for your body. You can also start to re-write the script and change the patterns that are not helpful.

YOUR BODY REPRESENTS THE LIFE YOU HAVE LIVED THUS FAR, YOUR HISTORY.

image from here

"When I teach now, I no longer look at a posture as something to do, nor at the student as someone who should do it. I see the posture as something to try, and the student as someone who might find it interesting, with or without the potential benefit of my experience, which may or may not apply to them. However they engage the posture, it will be with their body: the body that they are, the body they live through, a body I am not, a body that does not exist as I experience it but as they do, in a way that I will never fully know.

Realizing that you can never fully know someone — because you are not their body, which means you can neither possess nor change them — is at the root of being able to love them while glimpsing your own strangeness, and while keeping the bullshit to a minimum."

-- Matthew Remski

Quote taken from the blog post 'I am not (what you need) from my body: Expanding-on-a-yoga-meme" . Worth a read!

“The art of yoga is creative, rhythmic in practice and individualistic in nature."

-- BKS Iyengar (The Art of Yoga)

Although there is rhythm to this practice, there is no formula. Tailor practice to your body and don't let the attention become dull.

I feel, therefore I am.

In the middle of the 17th century, Spinoza took on Descartes and lost.

According to Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. Spinoza disagreed. In ''The Ethics,'' his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance.

As for Descartes' view of the mind as a reasoning machine, Spinoza thought that was dead wrong. Reason, he insisted, is shot through with emotion. More radical still, he claimed that thoughts and feelings are not primarily reactions to external events but first and foremost about the body. In fact, he suggested, the mind exists purely for the body's sake, to ensure its survival.

For his beliefs, Spinoza was vilified and -- for extended periods -- ignored. Descartes, on the other hand, was immortalized as a visionary. His rationalist doctrine shaped the course of modern philosophy and became part of the cultural bedrock....

Read the full article by Emily Eakin in The New York Times.

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."

 

--Nietzsche

Bodies

Bodies
are less like temples
and more like biographies
they carry all the
broken hearts, false hopes and cobwebs
neatly mapped in your veins and tendons,
a whole history
tucked away in the spaces in between
your ribs and collarbones. 

-- Annalise Gill

(Source: vacants)

"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."

- Simone de Beauvoir

This!

The Body Is Not an Apology

'Movement increases endorphin's in our bodies. Endorphin's are the chemical that make us feel good! The road to radical self love is paved with doing things that make us feel good! So get out and move today! Your body will thank you for it, RADICALLY!'

Found here.

Beautiful. Thanks Carly for the tip!