bodily sensations Quotes

I teach that the foundation for our practice is being able to go inward and disconnect from the busyness of our thoughts, that focusing the mind on bodily sensations and breath will ground us in the present moment. Yoga is about realizing who you really are, aside from your persona.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

The eye— it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.

Stories can be a jumping-off point to access the emotions and the sensations in the body.

Things hurt me now. My knees hurt, my back hurts. But your head still thinks it's twenty-three.

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

Every emotion is keyed into some bodily location, and taken all together, they form the emotional body.

I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me — and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

It having been a very cold night last night I had got some cold, and so in pain by wind, and a sure precursor of pain is sudden letting off farts, and when that stops, then my passages stop and my pain begins

Use emotional awareness and pay attention to your body - look [and locate] concrete physical sensations - like stabbing, aching, throbbing - and [distinguish and define them] by saying things like, "it is the size of a golf ball or it is the size of a baseball" - do whatever you can do to find painful physical sensations.

Direct your attention inward. Have a look inside yourself. What kind of thoughts is your mind producing? What do you feel? Direct your attention into the body. Is there any tension? Once you detect that there is a low level of unease, the background static, see in what way you are avoiding, resisting, or denying life-by denying the Now.

The pains and pleasures of the body, howsoever important to ourselves, are an indelicate subject of conversation