Body is not stiff, Mind is stiff

by: Lucinda Leachman

I was never flexible as a child. I started horse riding at 5 years old which although built up a good grounding of bodily awareness, left me with fiery tight hamstrings and iron clad adductors. I could never touch my toes or do the splits as most of my friends could, and I remember distinctly the strong emotional reaction as I was moved to tears each time I tried to fold forward. For the main, I was physically pretty able but this lack of natural flexibility had a much bigger impact on me than seemed logical, even then, and thus I avoided any activity that triggered it, even though I longed to be able to do the simple, yet to my eyes, impossible, things my friends could do with ease. Flexibility then, from a young age, became something I both aspired to and feared. 

Over time of course, my hamstrings and hips have released and opened up and I can do almost all the things I once found unfathomable - my adductors remain tight (no box splits for me) but I can definitely touch my toes and beyond. More importantly, I now understand the intensity of my reactions to not only be a result of intense horse riding, but also to be a natural physical manifestation of the emotional trauma of an unstable home-life being stored in those sensitive fight or flight muscles activated in the hamstrings and the hips. Hence with progress in the body, the emotional responses have lessened too – I no longer reach for the tissues every time I attempt paschimattonasana, and I have, I feel, unraveled much of the trauma that was stored in that part of my body, both through physical practice and internal work. I imagine to most people (certainly those outside of the yoga world) I appear pretty flexible.  

Yet still now I can’t believe myself to be flexible. While in my head I know this is illogical, if I were to say the words ‘I am flexible’ out loud, or someone else said them to me, they would ring as untrue as me saying ‘my name is Fiona’. The belief that my body is stiff, that my muscles can’t move in the way they are ‘supposed’ to, that I am ungainly and awkward, that if I miss too many days of practice I’ll never touch my toes again, runs so deep that it feels intrinsic to my very identity, genetic even. In this way is the deepest of samskaras, woven into my being not only through my physical incarnation, but also my family history, social and physical experience and, perhaps, karmic past. Despite having changed my physical reality and being able to trace this pattern intellectually, the belief remains firmly implanted in my psyche that I am not flexible (and probably never will be). 

What I have come to realise, is that whether I shift it or not doesn’t really matter (enlightenment is not on my to-do list for this lifetime). What matters is that I don’t let it have power over me and prevent me from doing something that also brings me so much peace and joy and takes me closer to the truth of who I am beyond distractions of flexible/ inflexible. Getting on my mat every day helps me overcome the limitations such a belief has upon me. It shows me, that even in light of such strong inhibitions, I can try, I can strive, I can surrender, and I can say ‘yes’ even when the depth of my being is saying ‘no’. I can do things that I never imagined possible, and some of them I can do with ease. Immediately the belief shrinks in size and significance, and I can transfer that experience to other areas of my life. 

This brings to mind the phrase ‘body is not stiff, mind is stiff’. These days, quoting Pattabhi Jois is problematic. Not least due to his actions in later life, but also because of the appropriation by westerners of his limited English explanations as mantras to live by, the meaning of which so often seems lost in translation. At the same time, cancel culture is not a healthy form of therapy or healing, and to ignore the founder of our tradition and the gifts he bestowed doesn’t allow us to fully recognise and try to recompense the mistakes he made either. We have to hold in our minds the simultaneous truths that an intelligent, even gifted man, delivered a method that we love and cherish alongside the evidence that in later life he did terrible things within the system he created and we continue to endorse. This requires an honest mental flexibility, one that is often far harder to garner than the physical elasticity we all strive for. This mental flexibility, or having ‘flexible mind’ as opposed to a ‘stiff mind’, means having the ability to hold in one’s thoughts sometimes apparently dichotomous truths (as above), as well as having the ability to acknowledge, accept and understand different systems of belief, practice, experience and thought.

I think for many, as time and practice goes on (and on and on), these ‘tag lines’ lines we have been handed down and accepted with a sense of easy singularity, require a much deeper and complex consideration if we are to continue to value them. ‘Body is not stiff, mind is stiff’ is a perfect example of this. It’s easy to suggest that this is in reference to the well-worn fact that in an unconscious state our bodies are as pliable as a rag doll, and that it is just our ingrained neural patterns of the conscious mind that stop us from being able to put our leg behind our head, or from a more new age perspective, ‘if only you believed you could, you would’, itself a form of spiritual/physical by-passing. 

Of course, it’s not true. Just believing you can put your leg behind your head will not make it happen – it takes time and commitment and an intelligent physical process to get our bodies to do things to which they are not accustomed or naturally prepared for. And, if and when you do achieve said goals, your mind is not necessarily freed from all its limiting thoughts and processes. For me, the meaning of the quote ‘body is not stiff, mind is stiff’ lies in the fact that the mind can hold onto beliefs long after they have been proved wrong by, or released from, the body, and that it is these mental and emotional samskaras which really need to be stretched and worked out, on and beyond the work we do on the mat. So, rather than relating the effect the mind has on the body (and thus endorsing some kind of relationship between physical ableism and mental/ spiritual advancement), the quote reflects simply on the stiffness of the mind being our central dilemma, a stiffness that is endemic to us all, regardless of our physical flexibility. In this way, the quote also relates to our continued confusion of the practice of yoga with being flexible, and our community and wider society repeatedly placing (often extraordinary) physical ableism on a pedestal, setting impossible and unattainable aspirations for ourselves and equating them with spiritual ‘success’. This leads us to the work of yoga as Patanjali sees it, an activity not to liberate our mind for the purpose of physical flexibility, but to liberate the mind so that we are no longer deluded by the false reality of physical existence (prakriti) being our true nature, which is in fact, divine (purusha). Surely Pattabhi Jois, for all his failures, a scholar of Sanskrit and master of yoga, was trying to relay this message, and not one which placed the focus on our physical prowess. 

In light if this, I now try to use my garnered physical flexibility to learn more about the limitations of my mind, to seek out and bring awareness to the fears that are so ingrained and practice and live with them, in spite of them, and, one day perhaps, grow out of them. The Ashtanga system works so beautifully to support this exploration because a certain amount of decision making is taken out of our hands. We have a structure by which we can order our physical practice, and thus, order our thoughts around it. It takes courage and discipline to do this, to shut out the voice that says ‘you can’t’ and do it anyway, especially if we are to find a space where we keep doing it without attachment to the idea that one day ‘we will’.  The flexibility we require and seek to grow through a yoga practice is, despite common representations, a mental flexibility, one which is able to hold multiple truths alongside each other and move between them with equanimity and ease. This is the flexibility that I pursue in my practice, in spite of myself, and the one which I believe will bring far greater peace and joy.