Postural Yoga and the sense of earth

 (The plan? To try one new philosophical exercise each month. This article is thus part of a series. January was all about Anti-Curiosity Exercises)

    I saw an amazing academic talk, which renewed my enthusiasm for Yoga, and which prompted me to try out a different way of going about my Yoga practice (which I had mostly abandoned, like I do regularly). The talk in question was given by Hayden Kee and was called “Embodiment, Disembodiment, Reembodiment: Insights from Phenomenology and Postural Yoga”¹ (available on Youtube, see footnote). I also read the corresponding article², which I thought was worth it to go slightly more in depth with some ideas. Now, to be fair, I was already enthusiastic about Yoga. Mostly because it does me a lot of good whenever I go back to it. Yoga allows me to break through the false sense that I am a little homunculus living inside my skull and piloting a machine of limbs, as a puppeteer would a puppet. As a practice, it cures me of a kind of subject/object dualism that sees my body as merely an object hosting my subjectivity. However, if this talk renewed my enthusiasm, it’s because it suggested that Yoga could bring you even more insights than that, all the while focusing only on modern postural yoga³, which I thought was very relatable and exciting.

    Hayden Kee highlights three phenomenological insights in particular: “(1) the grounding and openness of the body; (2) the reflexivity of the body; and (3) the illuminating awareness of the proprioceptive, minimal, body-schematic self.”⁴

1) The first one has to do with becoming aware of yourself as a “gravitational being”, pulled towards the earth by gravity (what I would like to call the “sense of earth”), but also as a being which is exposed to the world (what I would call the “sense of sky”). For the latter point about exposure, Hayden Kee draws on Merleau Ponty’s concept of dehiscence of the flesh (“the term alludes to the radical openness of our sensing bodies to the surrounding world”⁵) and to the fact that many Yoga postures seem to express a desire for exposing our bodies, even our insides, to the world, in a very vulnerable way.

2) The second point has to do with experiencing our bodies as both touching and touched, subject and object, which is crucial for developing a sense of intersubjectivity (others too are as much subject as they are object).

3) The third point has to do with cultivating an explicit awareness of the body which is nonetheless different from one’s body image (one’s conceptual understanding of, emotional attitude towards, and indirect feel for the body⁶). This is a controversial claim that runs counter the phenomenologists who think that explicit awareness of the body always has to do with body image, not body schema.

    You do not have to practice postural yoga, or any kind of yoga, in order to have those insights. However, I really like Hayden Kee’s suggestion that extraordinary experiences sometimes help. As he explains, touching your right hand with your left hand (and thus experiencing the reversibility of the flesh, the touching/touched nature of your body) is an experience so common that it might fail to elicit surprise and wonder. Whereas in some of those more extraordinary postures, you might be positively astonished to find that you come to grab your foot behind your ear. What is it doing there? Is it an object or a subject? Is it mine? Yes, philosophical wonder can be ignited by the most mundane of things, but it is also typically elicited by the most grandiose of things. The amazing quote (of doubtful origin⁷) “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence” is an example of how someone could marvel at something as common as a thumb. But throughout history, people tend to marvel at bigger things such as the starry night sky and the entire cosmos it shows⁸. I suppose, what I was in the mood to try out, was having a go at extraordinary wonder for a change. As a philosopher, I always try to cultivate wonder for the seemingly ordinary. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to experience my body as a place of extraordinary marvels and wonders. (while being very careful not to break anything, of course)

    One of the most wonderful things I found in this talk and article, is the way Hayden Kee talks about Tree Pose.

(an image, by Phoenix Li, depicting Tree pose, and found in Hayden Kee's article)

The description is so good that I simply have to quote it extensively, while highlighting in bold the passages I find most beautiful:

“Consider a simple posture such as tree pose (virkasana – see figure 1). The practitioner balances on one foot. The other leg is bent at the knee and opened to the side. The sole of the foot of the bent leg is placed firmly into the inner thigh of the standing leg. There are many variations for the hands and arms. The hands may be placed in prayer position in front of the heart, or the arms may reach up to the sky like branches of a tree. The gaze may be fixed straight ahead or at a point on the floor, or the eyes may converge on the tip of the nose, look up, or even close.

Even a simple asana such as this requires considerable awareness and education to be executed expertly. Though there is hardly a major muscle group of the body that is not involved in this posture, brute strength and flexibility alone are not sufficient. The body schema must be coordinated and cultivated. In the absence of this training, the novice wavers like a sapling in the wind. In response, he focuses attention on different regions of the proprioceptive body to stabilize the posture. Aspects of the sensorimotor body schema he had previously not attended to suddenly become salient. A precise activation of the standing foot is required to maintain a broad and steady foundation for the pose. However, as the novice directs attention to the standing foot to train its activation, he may find that the buttocks has gone soft. Weight shifts away from the midline resulting in an overall imbalanced posture. The tree wobbles. The correct degree of reciprocal isometric force between the bent leg through the sole of the foot and the inner thigh of the standing leg will help restore equilibrium towards the midline. But in focusing on this aspect of the pose, the practitioner may lose the correct activation of the standing foot, or the deep core muscles may become unstable, and now integrity is lost elsewhere in the body. To hold all of this together at once

demands experimenting and cultivating a new awareness – a kind of new body babbling through which we (re)educate the body schema. Eventually, once these local microattunements have become incorporated into an overall structure of bodily comportment, awareness may become less localized. For the expert, awareness may be more a general, monitoring field encompassing the whole balancing body rooted to the earth, balancing in space. She makes minute adjustments in any area where a slight loss of integrity might arise, but without losing awareness of the global integrity of the posture. She stands like a redwood, slow and stable in the winds, adjusting almost imperceptibly.”⁹

    After reading all of this, and being so moved by the tree metaphor, I decided that a significant part of my practice this month would be dedicated to mastering such poses, and to experiencing the sense of earth and sky, as well as the other phenomenological insights. While I initially planned to train for several such poses, I became instead uniquely captivated and intrigued by this one, Tree Pose. Its challenge was perfect for me. Everytime I started worrying about whether or not I would find interesting things to say for my blog article at the end of the month, the tree wobbled, as a penalty for my distraction. Everytime I became mindful of how much I rely on thinking about my body in a literally visual way (my body image), the balancing act was there to make even more obvious the price I paid for such a reliance.

    Indeed, because I wanted to stop relying on sight so much in my thinking, I decided to close my eyes while I was doing Tree Pose. To my great surprise, I started wobbling and falling pretty much as soon as I closed them. I couldn’t believe how quick it was! But then I remembered why that might be the case. Though the sense of sight might not look like it is contributing all that much to the act of balancing, it is actually contributing quite a lot. And so if you’re not relying on your eyes, you’re entirely relying on your inner ear or on something like that, to achieve balance. It’s very difficult! So difficult that I took it as a challenge.

    I found it near impossible to regain balance with my eyes closed once I started wobbling in Tree Pose. The trick, then, was to not start wobbling in the first place. As much as possible, to remain steady while entering the pose, and to stay that way. Right entry into the pose was crucial. Interestingly, what that looked like concretely was a sort of stronger relationship to the earth. I had to anchor myself down. Bending the knees more, gripping with my feet, as if I were taking roots. I also found it helpful to use the kind of breath that is located in the throat, and which sounds like the waves of the ocean. That kind of breathing brought a sort of steadiness and resoluteness to my whole body.

    The exercise was quite stimulating. After doing it for a bit, I was surprised to find that I spontaneously developed some habits that are strikingly similar to my mindfulness practice. First of all, I started to enjoy falling and coming back to the center. What I had experienced as failure and frustration at first (wobbling and falling) now was the surest sign that I was trying, a completely legitimate part of the exercise, as enjoyable as the other half of it, which consisted in not falling. Secondly, something that developed almost without any conscious decision on my part, is that I started falling into a rhythm of performing Tree Pose with my eyes open, and then gradually closing them down, as if to gradually increase the difficulty. This was very cool, as it was strikingly reminiscent of how I’ll regularly test myself during meditation. When I meditate, I try to achieve a state of non-duality where the distinction between subject and world falls away, and whenever I achieve that state somewhat, I gently test it out, putting pressure on it to test the strength of it. It feels like throwing a little wrench into the exercise to see how I cope: I think about something which is usually unpleasant, or I think about the uncertain future, or I ask myself “Who are you?” to see what answer first comes to mind. All those things test out my equanimity. Here in Tree Pose, I felt drawn to giving myself a little challenging push from time to time by closing my eyes and seeing how I fare.

    In the end, here’s the result of that little experiment:

- I did manage to experience surprise and wonder in circumstances that are not ordinary for me. Circumstances requiring discipline, micro-adjustments in service of a goal, not in service of comfort. A Yoga practice that is more ambitious than I am used to.

- I did manage to challenge my reliance on visual thinking. The “body image” does not have to be literally visual for other people, but it is for me, and it is something I wrestle with in my spiritual life. Any challenge to it constitutes a welcome change. A relief, in fact!

- I did manage to get in touch with a certain sense of the earth. Feeling gravity, feeling support against my body, even the pleasure of falling. The clichéd poetry of it was revitalized and replaced by a poetry that moved me, through the metaphor of the swaying tree, through the idea that one can intensify and refine one’s body schema without overthinking it. I don’t know what connection this sense of earth could have to other phenomenological theories.. let’s say, Husserl or Heidegger’s sense of earth for instance, but at least now I am curious about possible parallels or divergences.

- However, I did not manage to get the sense of the sky. Of what Hayden Kee calls the sense of “dehiscence”, of opening yourself up to the world around. I tried the most “aggressively” open poses while my visual thinking was still overwhelming. Therefore the “sense of sky” was completely covered up by vague concepts, clichéd poetry, and a relentless dualism. As for Tree Pose, I did not master it enough to feel any openness in my upper body. If anything, because of the challenge I had chosen for myself, my shoulders were hunched, and I was facing the ground exclusively ; holding on for dear life as the wind blows violently against the tree. A month was not enough to feel secure enough in the sense of earth to develop its correlate ; the sense of sky.

    All in all, since Hayden Kee has such cool things to say about dehiscence (in truth, it was originally what I found most inspiring about his talk) I vow to come back to postural Yoga another month and to write another article, this time about the sense of sky.

1https://youtu.be/FbyOWqwOL2k?feature=shared&t=1553

2Kee, Hayden. 2023. “Phenomenological Insights from Postural Yoga Practice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, edited by Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou, 138–51. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003350668-12.

3“Most of the dialogue between phenomenology and yoga thus far has occurred between the classical yoga of Patanjali and transcendental phenomenology, or between the Buddhist Yogacara tradition and phenomenology. Little attention has been paid to the more bodily focused practices of hatha yoga and its descendent, modern postural yoga.” Abstract of the article ; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376336599_Phenomenological_Insights_from_Postural_Yoga_Practice

4 p 141

5 p 143

6 p 146

7https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#:~:text=47%3A%20%22In%20the%20absence%20of,convince%20me%20of%20God's%20existence.%22

8 see "Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think" by Helen De Cruz https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232126/wonderstruck  

9 p 140-141