Founder Letter: The Body Knows- Where Precision Meets Pleasure

When was the last time you felt fully at home in your body—without trying to fix or change a thing?

Dear Rosies,

Today, we begin a new series on trusting the body—and remembering that the body knows.

In my classes this year, I've been working with the idea of simultaneously having more precision and more pleasure, both in asana and in everyday life, in everyday motions. When I say precision, it’s not about perfection, but rather about a detailed kind of awareness—one that guides us to bring more freedom and spaciousness in the body, more breath where it's needed, from which more pleasure arises.

Sometimes students seem to get so caught up in their stories about their body that they forget to feel the body itself. The judgments and shoulds scramble the signal from the body to the heart and mind. Judgment is static on the line between awareness and flesh. And when that signal's fuzzy, the body (like anyone else being criticized mid-sentence) pulls back. It braces. It shuts down. It stops revealing itself.

But when we stop judging and start noticing, everything changes.

If we sit just as we are right now and bring our attention—with no opinionated commentary, just our attention—to the sit bones or the breath, something subtle happens. Maybe our breath deepens. Maybe the spine lengthens on its own. Maybe nothing "moves" at all, but the whole field becomes clearer.

That's the body responding to being seen without rejection. That's precision—not as control, but as clarity. And out of that clarity, pleasure arises naturally. Not the striving kind, but the deep, animal ahh of a body allowed to be itself.

I keep returning to this little phrase: "where all one is."

Not where all of you should be, but where all of you is right now. The shoulder still hanging on to yesterday's argument. The hip with a story to tell from ten years ago. The jaw clamped tight because you're trying so hard. The belly soft because you exhaled with your full self. The heart open because something touched you this morning.

When we can be aware of all of it—without labeling any of it as wrong—something shifts. That's wholeness. And wholeness has its own intelligence. Once it's seen, it knows what to do: a subtle release, a spontaneous adjustment, a deeper breath. But the body will only reveal that wisdom once we stop bossing it around, stop dominating it.

In youth, the body is resilient enough to ignore its own signals and keep going. There's freedom in that: you get to test limits, to play. But you also risk teaching yourself that sensation doesn't matter. Midlife is different. The body starts insisting on being heard. Many women tell me, "My body's betraying me." But I don't think that's it. I think the body is refusing to be ignored. It's saying, "Look at me. Not your idea of me. Me." And later still, the body stops negotiating altogether. It becomes the teacher. It's not interested in yesterday's capacities or someone else's expectations. It invites a deeper, subtler awareness. Judgment is no longer in the way.

The practice in yoga and in life is to stay with that noticing. This is precision as love, as looking with such clarity and gentleness, that your body finally has room to be what it already knows how to be. And in that space, real pleasure emerges on its own. The body rejoices in being seen this way: without criticism, without demand, without comparison. To be seen, and heard, and listened to.

All love, all the time,

Christine Marie
 Founder, Rosebud Woman