The Body is Not a Machine and Beyond Information, Into the Lived Experience of the Body
Updated: 9 hours ago
Delia Brett is a transformational coach, yoga teacher, and dancer with 35+ years of experience. Owner of Green Room Yoga and creator of East Van Wisdom School, she guides people to dissolve stuck patterns, reclaim their power, and awaken to deeper purpose and creativity.
The body is more than a collection of parts or a machine to be understood through facts and figures. It is a living, responsive whole, constantly adapting to our experiences and the world around us. Through yoga, movement, breath, and mindful attention, we can move beyond what we know about the body and discover what it means to experience it from within. This shift invites us to listen more closely, deepen our awareness, and bring a greater sense of connection and presence into everyday life.
The body is more than we can measure
We've been trained to think of the body as a simple equation: calories in, calories out, an input-output device. Or, at best, as a sophisticated machine, with parts that plug into other parts and operate other parts.
The truth is, while these frameworks are useful in some regards, they don't capture even a fraction of the body's miraculous complexity. The body, like all other life forms, is built from nature, from the force of life itself.
It is constantly rebuilding, adapting, and responding. Cells are dying and being replaced. Tissues sense and respond to mechanical forces. The nervous system continually changes in response to experience, learning and environment.
Even fascia, the connective tissue that runs throughout us, isn’t simply wrapping and holding things together. It is richly innervated, and the cells within it can sense mechanical forces and translate them into biochemical signals that influence how the tissue behaves.
In other words, the body doesn't simply experience force; force is information to the living tissue. Then there is the physics of simply being alive on Earth.
Every time we stand, walk, step, jump or land, we are in a conversation with gravity and the ground beneath us. The ground pushes back. Forces travel through the body as we move, and our cells and tissues are exquisitely responsive to them.
What we call mechanical loading is part of this constant conversation between the living body and the world around it. So even at the level of cells, connective tissue, the nervous system and physics, the body isn't a machine made up of isolated parts.
It is a dynamic, responsive, continuously adapting living whole, sensing, exchanging, reorganizing and responding.
Information is not the experience
Even that information, as astounding as it is, doesn't come close to what we can know through our own felt experience. Or let me put it this way, "Information is always about something. It describes the thing, but it is not the thing itself."
Information doesn't heal us, restore us, or help us transform less-than-optimal ways of holding, moving, or living in our bodies. That's where we get it all wrong in the West.
We prioritize information over the felt experience. But when we practice things like yoga or breathwork, when we sing or dance, or when we're simply hanging out with friends, laughing and socializing, we do wonders to bring the body into a more balanced, harmonious state of flow.
These are the things, these are the experiences that we are skipping over when we consume information as though it were the source of our healing or transformation.
There is an old Buddhist metaphor: the finger pointing at the moon. The finger is not the moon.
It is simply pointing toward it.
When we begin to treat information as the finger pointing at the moon, we can stop staring at the finger. We can go to the moon, to the feeling, to the body.
From there, we can begin to amplify our capacity for healing, understanding, growth, and the full embodiment that we are ultimately hoping to have in this life, where we feel more ease, more connection, more comfort, and strength in our bodies.
Because the way we feel in our bodies informs the way we show up in our lives. It gives us access to greater presence, capacity, energy, and resilience.
Arriving at the moon
I've spent decades hungry for information, hungry to understand the body's mysteries. What I've learned is that these practices, yoga, dance, voice, are, in fact, the most valuable ways that we can come to arrive at the moon.
They bring us into the very experience we've been looking for. So how do we do that? It sounds complicated when you put it into words, but really, it’s very simple.
We take what we know about the body and turn it into knowing through the body. That means moving beyond the technical language and into sensation, relationship, rhythm and response. Instead of simply understanding that the spine can move in certain ways, we begin to feel the spine moving. Instead of thinking about gravity as a force acting on us, we feel the ground beneath our feet and notice how it meets us, pushes back and sends support through the body.
This is what I try to cultivate in my yoga classes. We move through poses, but the pose is never really the destination. We wave our spines through cat-cow. We lean over the left foot to float into Warrior One rather than simply coming into Warrior One and straightening our leg and lengthening our spine.
That is not just an aesthetic sensibility. Or a decorative, feel-good kind of approach. It's actually a sophisticated understanding of how the body works: through a net, a weave of systems inside of systems, inside of systems, constantly processing and filtering, interacting with each other in an exchange, a flow.
I teach this way so we can train our minds to stay present while moving through, stepping into, breathing into and expanding from, etc. These verbs become actions of being and bring us closer to the truth of our lived experience.
In a yoga class, all of this is happening at once, the myofascial flow, the deep core line, the physics press of the feet, the bounce of the Earth back up through. We are moving, breathing, sensing, responding, taking in so much information through the body that we don't necessarily have time to stop and understand what is happening. We don't need to. The body is already doing it.
But there is something powerful about slowing down enough to notice. To begin to recognize these underlying principles, not as information to memorize, but as something we can feel and eventually carry with us off the mat, into the way we walk, stand, breathe, move and meet the world.
So we can begin to listen to the cues, the signals, the sharp pains, the discomfort, whatever it may be, and respond by fine-tuning the way we're sitting, standing, carrying ourselves and breathing.
The practice of wholeness
This is, to me, what yoga has always been about. Because yoga, in and of itself, is about everything.
It's about joining. It's about yoking. It's about bringing together all that is. It's about dissolving any sense of separateness into a whole, full, unified state of being.
No, we can't get there in a workshop. We can't get there in a single class, but I believe we can arrive there in a single moment, when we drop into feeling, when we drop into presence, and we allow the natural wonders of the mountain, the sky, the sea, the stars, the fractal formations of leaves bursting open in the sun, to reveal the same miraculous truth about our bodies, and about ourselves.
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Delia Brett, Coach, Teacher, Facilitator, & Dance Artist
Delia Brett is a transformational coach, embodiment teacher, and yoga instructor with over 23 years of experience. A veteran dance artist and choreographer, she co-directed the interdisciplinary company MACHiNENOiSY for 17 years, creating boundary-pushing productions with youth and adult performers. She is the founder of Art Full Well Coaching and the East Van Wisdom School, and the owner of Green Room Yoga in Vancouver, BC. Delia blends somatics, creativity, and consciousness to help people dissolve stuck patterns, reclaim their power, and reconnect with the wisdom of their bodies. Her work invites others to turn life’s challenges into gateways for growth, clarity, and spiritual awakening.
