Katonah Yoga is a practice that weaves traditional Hatha yoga with principles of Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine. It uses visual maps and the language of metaphor to engage the mind as well as the body.
We can think of the body as a vehicle that takes us places, or as a musical instrument that we tune in order to play well with others.
My personal favorite metaphor is the body as a house.
The Practicality of Understanding The Body as a House
One reason I love it is because it is practical, both literally and metaphorically.
Even before I discovered the Katonah practice, I had thought of my body as my home. And, as a real estate broker, it felt like a natural extension of my existing work.
Also, everyone has a conceptual understanding of a house. Even if you live in a one-room apartment, you have different spaces in your home that you use for different functions.
The template of the body as a house offers a way to see where people get stuck in their body, whether through injury, movement issues, compensation patterns, and illness.
It also helps us understand why people struggle in productivity or performance even in non-physical realms.
The Body as a House Framework
The framework maps the house to the 3×3 magic square — like a tic-tac-toe board — to create 9 rooms: three floors bottom to top, three wings left to right, and three sections front to back.
Each floor has a lot of nuance, and rich metaphors derived from the body parts and organs found on that floor.
Even a basic understanding of the house framework can be transformative to understanding where you’re getting stuck.
In broad terms, the three levels of the house relate to stability, ability, and vision.
Here’s a brief overview of the three levels of your body house:
First Floor: Stability
In the body, the first floor is from the pelvis to the feet.
This is the foundation of your house: stability, security, systems, and structures. This floor has the boiler room, the garage, and the laundry room/utility room/bathroom.
Each floor has a fire, and the fire of this floor is the fire of survival: food, sex, money, water, shelter.
In a broader sense, it’s about the things you need to do repeatedly to ensure you have what you need to function well. Everyone needs to shower daily and do laundry regularly. You have to keep water flowing in the pipes and ensure that they don’t flood.
This floor includes the kidneys, the adrenals, and the pelvic floor. It’s about nervous system security, containment, holding space, and finding grounding.
Your feet are how you step into the world. You put your best foot forward, you foot the bill, you put your pedal to the metal. But you can only do any of this if you are grounded and feeling secure.
Second Floor: Ability
In the body, the second floor is the torso, although it also includes the mouth and neck. It includes the heart, lungs, arms, stomach, and spleen.
This is the main level of the house — the place where you entertain and have guests. It houses the kitchen, the living room, and the home office.
This floor is the fire of the hearth: the fire of the stove in the kitchen, which is always the heart of any home.
In our culture of doing, we are all well-acquainted with this floor, which is the floor of doing.
The second floor is about your ability, and your capacity.
How you handle things, how you manipulate your circumstances, how you manage your life, how you manifest your ideas. It’s how you express yourself and articulate your ideas, as well as how you receive and digest what you take in.
This is also the floor of relationships: this is the floor where you entertain guests.
Your hands and arms are the tools you use to make contact and connect. You shake hands to make a deal, give a pat on the back, offer hugs.
This floor is also the source of your power and trust. It’s where your gut feelings live.
This is the floor of spirit: the lungs help you take in air — you inspire.
Fun fact: The Latin root manus — which gives us manicure, manipulate, manifest, emancipate, manage — is conceived as a bridge between thought and grounding.
Third Floor: Vision
In the body, the third floor is everything in the head above the mouth: eyes, ears, nose, and brain.
The top floor of the house, where you find the bedroom, the attic, and your “personal observatory.”
This is the floor of vision, memories, goals, ideas, and thoughts. On the top floor, you have perspective: you can look out the window and see what’s out there for you.
This is the floor of sensory acuity; it’s where your “antenna” is located and how you attune to the world.
You may step out into the world with your feet, but you orient to your surroundings by virtue of what you hear, see, and smell. These senses are how you “make sense” of the world around you, whereas your sense of taste is how you experience the visceral nature of life.
These portals lead directly to the other floors: the ears are portals to the kidneys, the eyes are portals to the liver, the nose is the portal to the lungs.
A Framework For Understanding Your Body and Life
Understanding your body through the metaphor of a house makes its forms and functions more understandable, and can help you identify where you get stuck in movement and in life.
We’ll cover that more in future essays.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...