Postural Yoga and the sense of sky

I took two months (April & May 2025) to practice a yoga exercise that I had tried before (February 2024) but with mixed results. The exercise consists in practicing yoga poses while being attentive to specific phenomenological insights that they disclose; insights which are handily listed in an amazing article by Hayden Kee¹. My first try with this practice was only half successful, but coming back to it allowed me to unlock what had eluded me: a sense of openness, of daringness… strangely, a sense of relationship towards the sky. The key was patience, discipline, and enjoying the journey. To be honest, enjoyment did the heavy lifting and carried the other two virtues.

On the importance of taking your time

If you recall, when last I explored the phenomenological insights disclosed by postural yoga, I only managed to gain insights related to the sense of earth: feeling grounded, bound by gravity, supported, secure. But the corollary sense of sky – the feeling of openness, vulnerability, audacity – was out of my reach. Though the results were mixed, this first experiment had a big impact on me, and so it felt very important to take the time to try again and get it right. So I put my time anxiety and productivity anxiety aside and I decided that I would train for two months (and if it failed, three, etc…). It’s only fair: things take the time that they take and there’s no sense in being scared about that.

To take your time and nurture your mind is very important. At the halfway point of this second try, I felt compelled to write on the blog about all the exercises, along the way, that helped me to fall in love with the sky. So as you can see, the passing of time and consistent practice was a significant factor in helping me succeed. A broad family of philosophical exercises kept me in touch with the sense of sky after my initial failed attempt. They warmed me up to the idea. They took something that I had a hard time treating as more than a poetic cliché – the sky – and they made it real and significant. No longer the abstract notion of sky, but the sense of sky. Something you can feel, something that makes sense.

If I initially resisted this “cliché” it is not because I was afraid of what people would think if I became a “naked sun worshipper” or something of the sort. Over the years, philosophical exercises have made me tolerant and appreciative of what others reject as spiritual platitudes or magical thinking. No, it wasn’t that. I think that if I felt silly “throwing my hands in the air and waving them like I just don’t care” (so to speak) it’s because I do care a lot, and way too much actually. I have an anxiety disorder that gives me a certain basic life orientation (I have written about it here and here ) and this basic life orientation is the exact opposite of the sense of sky. Kee writes “the openness before the sky stands for the body’s receptivity towards any possible object, its radical openness to possibility and the unknown”². My anxiety, on the contrary, gives me a “blocked horizon”. I am radically closed to possibility and the unknown. Trust me, this is no mere abstract speculation about my “unconscious” but a careful observation of how my body moves through space & how my imagination moves through time, in daily life. Having observed it for a while I can say with confidence that I have a surprisingly bad disposition towards “any possible object”.

Back to the senses themselves!

Thankfully, I got unstuck; at the very least in the context of yoga. As I said, I credit many sky-themed philosophical exercises for this. But I also credit Hayden Kee’s inventiveness. His article helped me by doing something very clever: it did not say much about the sky, and instead it developed another metaphor.

The metaphor in question is the metaphor of “dehiscence”. “Dehiscence” is a botanical concept that refers to the “splitting open of an external structure of a plant to release internal contents, as in the dehiscence of a seed pod to release its seeds”. Merleau-Ponty uses this metaphor to talk about a certain phenomenological feature of experience, and Hayden Kee takes on this Merleau-Pontian concept and then adds the idea that Yoga is a context where we are more likely to be able to spot this feature, which can be more or less explicit. Hayden Kee’s discussion of this is very precise, very well written, and so I find myself having no choice but to quote it in full:

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

    “Consider the exposure of the anterior line of the body in wheel pose: the line from the genitals to the chin, along which our most vital organs are most vulnerable, is radically lengthened and utterly exposed. Even the intercostal spaces expand as though the lungs themselves wanted to escape the ribs and inhale directly the surrounding air. The limbs are occupied supporting the weight of the body and hence cannot protect the anterior midline, while the eyes cannot even see to what the body is exposed.

This radical openness of the body before the world illustrates and perhaps helps clarify a concept from Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenological ontology: the dehiscence of the flesh (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 123, 2007, p. 375). [...] In Merleau-Ponty’s ontological appropriation, the term alludes to the radical openness of our sensing bodies to the surrounding world. My experience, my sensing and perceiving of the world is an “interiority” that inheres in a body that is itself a part of this world, an “exteriority.” This point can be illustrated in the morphology of our sense organs: the eye is the locus of my seeing the world (interiority), while at the same time that very seeing of the world is visible for other visions in the anatomical structure of my eye (exteriority).

The externally oriented senses of vision and touch (the seeing eye that can also be seen, the touching hand that can also be touched) provide clear illustrations of this point. However, there is an interiority of interoception (e.g., proprioception of my muscles and posture, visceroception of my internal organs) that is not so easily reversed into an exterior manifestation. And yet, in poses such as upward bow, it is almost as if the practitioner wanted to bare her most intimate internal sensing before the world, to put it on display, to be more vulnerable, more exposed, more dehiscent towards the world and others. It is no accident that postural yoga practitioners often refer to backbending postures such as wheel pose as heart opening postures. Against the defensive tendencies that lead us to close our posture and hearts to the world, postural yoga practice cultivates the strength and courage to be more open, more receptive, more vulnerable before the world.” (p.143, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness.)

Hayden Kee’s ability to ground the “sense of sky” in something so viscerally immediate and so delightfully intriguing (interoception, and the organs fighting a natural tendency that includes gravity and self-protection) really helped me to get into it. The same thing had happened with the sense of earth: gravity is an immediate reality that you can learn to sense more accurately in balancing exercises, and this immediate reality is a godsend when it comes to forgetting all the clichéd thoughts you might have about the “earth”. Once you have forgotten the cliché of the earth, then and only then can you reconnect with all the poems about the earth that sounded like clichés to your non-practiced ears. Well, here, the same method applies to the sense of sky: forget all that you know about the “sky” and focus on what you can sense immediately: your organs, and sometimes, the paradoxical urge to move onward, upward, the paradoxical urge to take a risk, to be upside down. Kee advised me to practice Camel Pose, as an easier alternative to Wheel Pose, and that also really helped me a lot to get into it. You don’t have to take all the risks in the world, though you might have to spice things up. Feel a little tinge of danger.

The moment that I truly said “I got it” is when I felt I had a little taste of being a “daredevil” and I was eager to “go back to it”, and perhaps dare more and more. And again, the risk that I took was very limited. It was just about having your head upside down for a little while. It was just about doing a “heart opening” pose and affecting a “come what may” attitude.

Tuning Up the Body

Once you have “gotten” the sense of earth and sky, alternating closed postures and open postures becomes a great way to practice. Moving back and forth, up and down, and swirling around is the primitive essence of playfulness, and so once you have figured out the two sides of the equation, you can connect them together in that way, and it feels wonderful. The relevant “insight” comes less as a “fortune cookie” kind of message that I could write down and more as a compulsion to get back to it, over and over again; a relationship to a place of nourishment.

By way of conclusion, I will say this: in some way my experience was the same as last time. I started out with some sort of disbelief about yoga. My usual way of meditating doesn’t require much from my limbs, and so I go to the mat with an attitude of “Isn’t it enough if I just think really hard (or rather, meditate really skillfully) about the sky?”. After an excruciating experience of overthinking all of it, I come to the realization that there is no avoiding the fact that I need to train my body over several days, in order to neither have an “overthinking experience” nor a “shaky experience” where I am exclusively focused on not falling and I do not have enough “ease” to peer through the telescope that my body is turning into. Because that’s truly what it is: you are turning your body into a telescope. However, in some way my experience was very different from last time, and this had to do with my relationship to stress and anxiety. When I feel anxious, my instinct is to burrow and hide, so to speak. This gives me some one-sided sense of earth. But here, it was less about emptying out the barrel filled with anxiety, and more about channeling its powerful stream. In the middle of the experiment, I was given a work assignment that made me buzz with stress, and somehow I feel like this event helped me to accomplish the exercise. I had vivacious nervous energy coursing through my body, a little bit of “thrill” that served as a good template for some kind of (very humble) thrill-seeking and thrill-channeling behaviour. This contributed to me feeling unlocked and unblocked.

I felt like a tightrope walker. This gave me a type of control I usually don’t get to enjoy in my life. I don’t want to overstate it since, as of right now, it feels like a very modest change. But a very fun one.

I am very excited to see where this all goes.

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, I practiced Jhana meditation for the first time and reported on its mind-blowing effects. Another time, I befriended ancient philosophers with a creative journaling exercise. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!)

(11/06/2025)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

1https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376336599_Phenomenological_Insights_from_Postural_Yoga_Practice

2 p.143. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness.