Page 17 - HERE AND NOW Dec 2022

BLHP Life-Asana

By PRIYA NAGESH

I attended the ISABS Basic Lab in September 2022, primarily because my
Reiki and energy healing mentor, Anuradha Ramesh, recommended it.

One of the descriptions of Asana in Yoga is “Sharira Samyama”, that is,
moving towards a better understanding of one’s body, what its feeling is at
a given moment, what it can do and can’t do, what it is evoked and provoked
by and how, its myriad sensations and so on. In my capacity as a Practitioner
of Yoga Therapy, I tell students that they need to put themselves / their
bodies into new positions, both on and off the mat. That new position and
the movement to it is the process of doing an Asana and learning something
new about oneself and one’s body.

The Basic Lab for Human Process was for me a life-Asana. Sitting with
absolute strangers and attempting to be part of an intimate group process
in a 5-day lab setting, was a back-bend, twist and forward-bend of the mind and feelings, all put together!
It brought in much needed fresh air - a new breath, stretching of muscles that I didn’t even know existed
in me, and the beginning of a healing process - a knot/wound that I had subconsciously carried for ages,
had begun loosening already and also started to heal.

I did not enter the ISABs lab-Asana with wondering eyes and breathless expectation. I came in a bit jaded,
asking myself cynically “Okay, so what’s going to be new in this!”, and carrying my ego of having done
“inner work” for many years.

Obviously, therefore, I experienced a block within me in the lab scenario. The moment we were ‘released’
for tea breaks and at the end of the day, I would be all open and perky with my lab mates, who were fast
becoming my friends now. I didn’t realise this until it was pointed out to me as feedback by my lab mates,
that I was behaving a certain way (closed) inside the lab room, and another way (open) outside the lab.
This triggered the process of unwinding for me. It further continued when one of the facilitators told me
during the course of the lab that he was feeling excluded by me in the group, and said he wanted to hear
from me and connect with me as I had been doing with others in the group.

The turning point for me came when, that evening, perhaps having had enough of my incongruent
behaviour, my lab mates started ‘pushing’ me to share more, and wished to see more of what they were
seeing of me. I was feeling cornered, bewildered. I genuinely wanted to understand what they were all
trying to tell me. That was when the facilitator intervened and said, “Hey, let's leave her a bit to process
it, we can see she’s trying, and she’s admitted that she can’t, nothing will come out of pushing her further
now”. That understanding of where I was, and the resultant space created for me was part one of the
turning point. Part two was when the other facilitator asked me one time what I felt, since I appeared
overcome with unstated feelings. I broke down and was only then able to see what the others had been
seeing in me. It then struck me that it was only when there was compassionate understanding from the

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