#64 – Keen on Yoga Podcast with Liz Koch (part 2)

Liz Koch comes from an academic background as a teacher of
sculpture. However, her speciality in this is the spacial element
of sculpture. One day she happened upon a yoga class and realised
this was what was actually being denied in the dissemination of
yoga.  The space for one’s own experience of being, outside
notions of alignment focussing on the rigid column of the spine.


Soon after Liz was asked to writing for yoga journal, and these
articles ended up turning into the book Core Awareness. This was
really the first serious discussion of the psoas, published in
the 90s when hardly anyone had heard of it. We covered this 
in our 1st podcast together, episode 59.


More recently, Liz has released Stalking Wild Psoas.  This
is by way of an answer to the mistaken attempts in the yoga world
after helped bring the psoas into general awareness here. Liz
feels the yoga students are busy again dominating, essentially
­re-colonising their bodies.


Here we spread out from the physical body.  We look at our
attitudes to our own individuation to our socio-economic
attitudes to the world, and others in it. Having reduced our own
experience of ourselves to something we can isolate, know,
control and often commoditise.


This is why I really wanted to do a second session with Liz as
the implications of her work on the psoas go deeper than the
body. In embodying ourselves in this more visceral, non-linear
manner, we notice the kind of narrative of repression and
restraint we – generally in the West – have been living under.


I found our talk highly inspiring. There is no time when we might
not better look for other perspectives – non colonial established
and patriarchal narratives on our own experience than now!