Just like a clock with rusty mechanisms, one’s body, if allowed to get creaky and stuck, may not give accurate time. Between yoga and Shintaido practice, I’ve experienced and observed that freed of kinks, relaxed and warmed up, our bodies can tell us more truth than active thinking. It’s a marvelous instrument with so many sensory modes for receiving data: eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue. And when the brain is well oxygenated, it can make better, speedier sense of all the information the rest of the body is perceiving.

Our connection to others and to our environment becomes better timed, more fluid and intuitively responsive. When the body is relaxed, its pathways open and unblocked, we can better perceive who we are and what we really want.