July Theme — Binds, Self-Adjustments & Feeling at Home in Your Body

This month in class, we’re exploring binds and self-adjustments as ways to feel more connected to our bodies.

A bind can be physical: your hand reaching for your foot, your arms wrapping behind your back. I also like to thing of them as something that can be more be subtle, an internal action, like gently hugging in through the midline, or drawing the low belly in to support your spine. Props like straps and blocks help a ton here, to help you meet yourself where you’re at.

I think binds offer a really useful way to deepen the practice on all sorts of levels. They can provide internal alignment cues, stability, and so much feedback to work with. Emotionally, they can feel intense, sometimes even claustrophobic or stuck. Energetically, they can uncover tension we didn’t know we were holding, especially around the heart, hips, and belly. But this is exactly why we practice with care, with breath, with support.

Self-adjustments help with this too. This month, we’ll be using techniques like gentle tapping, intuitive touch, and simple self-massage to help bring awareness to the body in a loving, non-corrective way. A hand on the ribs, a brush across the thigh, a gentle press of the thumb on the hip flexor, these small gestures can unlock surprising insights. They remind us: we are allowed to tend to ourselves and I believe they can help you feel more at home in your body. 

What it means to inhabit your body…

I’ve been thinking lately about this idea of what it means to be at home in your own experience. In a culture that treats happiness like something to chase, as if it’s always somewhere just ahead of us, it can be hard to know what feeling good actually means. What does it feel like to be at home in your own body? In your own experience?

This line from Willa Cather (an early 20th century American author I recently got into), really resonated with me. She described happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great.” This feels very relevant in the context of much yogic philosophy where we explore dismantling the barries that allow us to step out of self-consciousness and into something wider.

And as paradoxical as it may seem at first, I think this starts with feeling at home in our skin. Not trying to escape it or transcend it, but to inhabit it. That’s what this practice is about.

It’s not always comfortable. Some binds bring up resistance. Some self-adjustments reveal a tender sot. But over time, these techniques have helped me understand myself better, both in regard to the mechanics of a pose, how I respond to challenge, and how I can soften into support 🙂 

So, in short! This month in class, we’ll work with:

• Traditional and modified binds

• Self-adjustments to increase awareness and support

• Props to make everything more accessible and intuitive

• The emotional and energetic layers of the practice, what binds stir up, and how we can move through that with curiosity rather than judgment

I can’t wait to explore this with you!