How important is it to listen to your body, to be able to grasp its needs? In yoga, this is considered to be of paramount importance. More often we trust various teaching aids, instructions, ancient treatises more, but not our own body. And this is fundamentally not the correct position.
Maybe it is useful to follow the instructions thoroughly in some other areas and areas of our life, but not in yoga. The task of yoga is to make us freer. Including helping our body to relax, gain strength and make the most of our resources. And if we do not begin to focus on what our body really needs, then we will not be able to help it in full.
It is especially important to be able to focus on the needs of the body when we study at home, on our own, and not with a qualified instructor who would determine for us an adequate and necessary load.
When we practice ourselves, we should listen to the inner Teacher! When we hear and trust our body, then we can get the most out of the practice.
We do some yoga exercise and “ask” our body, is there harmony? If everything is harmonious, the body will thank us, we will feel that we are doing everything right.
But we get such hints only when we want to hear them. Therefore, it would be good to take it as a rule that we focus on inner sensations, and only then on how we look, on how we think we need to perform the exercise.
And when we master this not complicated, in general, mechanism, we will be able to say that "now I am really doing yoga!" Otherwise, it will be fitness, acrobatics, but not the practice of self-knowledge.
