The Subtle Body in Yoga by Gabe Hopp

Chances are that 95% of the time that you take yoga, there is a quiet period at the beginning of class for you to start to settle in and prepare for practice. Your teacher might guide you in some centering experiences around releasing muscular tension, connecting to breath and starting to quiet the mind. As you move deeper into this period, you may feel yourself relaxing more, breathing easily and going internal. The more internal we go, the quieter we get and the softer we can become, the more likely it will be that we are able to connect to the subtle realm of the practice.

The “subtle body” as its referred to in yoga are experiences that we have in practice that are, for lack of a better explanation, hard to explain. They involve energy and feeling and perceiving and that way that you feel at the end of practice that is impossible to put into words. As the name implies, these experiences are more subtle than many of the practices that we do in the classroom setting.

Typically the order of events in yoga is from gross to subtle. It goes body —> breath —> mind  —> energy. This is why we typically start our yoga journeys by working with the body and the breath. The body is the most tangible and easiest to mold aspect of us. The breath is also very accessible and malleable for our intended purposes. Once we have learned how to calm and steady our bodies and our breath, the next stage is the quieting of the mind. The mind does not want to be tamed. It is usually going a hundred miles an hour, jumping around from thought to thought. The Buddhists aptly call this the “monkey mind.” Often, through the processes of yoga asana and pranayama (breath work), the mind naturally begins to quiet and settle. Once the body, the breath and the mind have been addressed, the final, most subtle layer then is the energy field or the “subtle body.”

You don’t have to know the specifics of the energy body in order to experience it. The ancient yogis gave these experiences names and ways to practice them. We sometimes do these things in class, maybe without ever specifying, or maybe you’ve heard the terms prana or vayus or chakras mentioned during practice. If you have a good teacher (which you do, if you come to OTY), they will sneak the more subtle aspects of practice into their daily classes.

More important than know the terms or the corresponding colors or anatomy, is that you are open to the deeper, more subtle layers of your practice during your practice and beyond. We should be open to new feeling states and the ways in which our practice affects not only our bodies and minds, but also our nervous systems and our sense perception. Sometimes the work of the practice doesn’t happen during practice, but rather later as you move through your day or even seemingly out of nowhere days later. When you feel amazing, or awake or especially alive, but don’t quite have the words to explain it, that doesn’t mean it’s not real. More likely, it means it’s beyond words. It’s deep within you in the internal space of quiet, calm and content.

(If you are curious about the Subtle Body and want to know ALLLLL about it, we explore it in a full weekend in the Teacher Training curriculum. We start in October!)