Imprinted Wisdom
Working with tWhere ancient yogic wisdom and modern science collide.
By Lauren Bloxham
Memories can leave lasting impressions on our bodies and minds; lived experience can shape us. Think about the last time you went out with a friend, maybe for dinner, to a show, for a walk or a weekend away. Can you remember how it made you feel? Can you feel that same feeling now when you think about it? Perhaps it was a joyful experience, perhaps you laughed together, felt seen and heard together, maybe the meeting fired up future plans. There are all sorts of ways in which our experiences become embodied without us really thinking too much about them.
It's a useful exercise to bring the experience to the front of the mind though. To remember it and to recall what it felt like. It’s here we begin to discern whether it’s an experience we’d like to repeat, one which we consider life enhancing or nourishing. When we do repeat the experience… ‘let’s do this again soon’ we might say…then it becomes something that shapes the course of our lives. It becomes foundational to the ways in which we experience the world around us, and we have the memory as a touch point to comfort and bolster us or as a signpost towards meeting our needs.
It's useful being able to bring memories forward. It gives us something somewhat tangible to work with in developing and refining our discernment for life experiences or for yoga practice, for the places we want to be and the people we want to be around; the teachers we want to learn from and the information we’d like to acquire.
What about our pre-verbal childhood experiences though? From conception to around age three we were experiencing the world around us, although few of us will have any real memory of this, and pre-birth we have the lived experience of our embryological development. These experiences, although intrinsic to our being, can be hard to connect with. Maybe they’re visual or relate to scent, maybe they’re with us as a somatic memory – something felt but less understood.
As yogis, it’s helpful to understand that the beginnings of our nervous systems form as early as 21 days after conception…and earlier still the primitive streak, the first structure that forms on the surface of the embryonic disc, which gives rise to directional form. From this central line front and back can be differentiated for the first time, left and right, up and down as well as side to side. As cells around this central axis develop, they begin to rise and fold, creating a pit and then a tube-like structure which becomes the neural tube. This is an embryonic structure from which the brain, central and peripheral nervous system eventually develops.
Although these very real structures no longer exist in their original form within our adult bodies, it’s interesting to ponder how much of an impression is left within our somatic memory – within our felt sense and our innate wisdom? Much like recalling the memory of spending time with friends, whilst it’s not currently happening to us, through contemplation and meditation, can we bring forward something of the experience of the earliest development of our embryonic selves? It happened after all: not a single one of us got here without this stage of development.
Far from the concept of prana, nadis and chakras being irrelevant to modern life, they actually suggest the connection with innate wisdom that can arise from deep contemplation and meditation. Did the early yogis feel into their own embryological development? Whilst we cannot locate Sushumna Nadi within our adult physical bodies, is it possible we have embodied awareness of that earliest primitive streak, that this is the kind of somatic memory the early yogis experienced? Or that we have an innate sense of what is central within us, that the complexities of our adult selves have their origins in these early forms and structures which cannot be located, but were experienced? It’s quite something to contemplate.
When we come back to the embryology, we can contemplate the innate wisdom which creates human form from two single cells. Cells which no longer exist within their original form, but that set forth the process of human development. The energy those cells carry individually and the energy they form when they unite, is greater than the sum of their parts and gives rise to awareness, contemplation and meditation. Similarly, we might contemplate an acorn carrying the innate wisdom that has the possibility of becoming a 500-year-old oak tree. The colliding of worlds, of seed and earth, of embryonic disc and womb, creates possibility far beyond its earliest structures, but has to first be its primitive state before it can be more complex.
Vanda Scaravelli, in ‘awakening the spine’ considers that:
“The psychological impact of a memory is more important than the fact itself, because where the sensations are involved, there is a deeper and stronger connection. This will affect the unconscious, leaving a mark in the memory which may pop up spontaneously, like a spring, when required.” (Scaravelli, 2024)
Whatever we decide to call that energy, its experience is undeniable. Whatever literature we chose to understand it, whether scientific or poetic, whether spiritual or worldly, what we are actually doing is contemplating and making sense of our deepest inner selves. This is why we chose yoga over other forms of movement, for the ways in which is points us towards understanding the inner experience, the pre-verbal, the innate, the somatic. For the ways in which it connects the mind and its cognitive understanding of the world and ourselves with the felt experience of living — we are lucky enough to be living in a time where we can marry ancient wisdom with modern science with immediate access to both.
Practice yoga with Lauren Bloxham online or on-retreat at: sabda.uk and on Instagram @laurenbloxham.yoga or listen to ‘The Honey Doctrine – Ancient Yoga, Modern Living’ wherever you find your podcasts.
Om Magazine
First published in November 2009, OM Yoga magazine has become the most popular yoga title in the UK. Available from all major supermarkets, independents and newsstands across the UK. Also available on all digital platforms.
