Even though Iyengar can appear as a mere physical practice for an external observer and even for a beginner, it is much more than that, since it has to do with what is done within and through the body in a way which necessarily implies the mind. In fact, it is expected that by connecting mind and body in the use of our corporeality, there will be effects along all dimensions of human existence, including the physical, psychological and spiritual realm. In Iyengar´s (2005 in IYI Maida Vale 2012) words: “Even in simple asanas, one is experiencing the three levels of quest: the external quest, which brings firmness of the body; the internal quest, which brings steadiness of intelligence; and the innermost quest, which brings benevolence of spirit”. In this respect, Iyengar practice can be considered as an embodied reflexive practice, for it demands both the development and cultivation of mental and physical capacities, particularly a state of embodied awareness which is the basis for moving forward with the practice. Although not exactly the same, we might think about Crossley’s (2004: 37) description of ‘reflexive body techniques’: “´The body’ is an object in practices of modification. It is reflectively thematized and worked upon. But it is equally a subject or agent in such practices”. Therefore, Iyengar yoga has been described as ‘meditation in action’ and it can be actually thought as similar to other spiritual practices such as Buddhist meditation which also originated in Eastern ancient philosophies and are characterised by a non-dualistic approach (cf. Pagis 2009).
In my experience with Iyengar yoga I have seen that it is this mind-body connection what appears as the most challenging aspect when it is first taken up. After all, what is at first realized when engaging with this practice is the everyday condition of one´s own body, which is for the most people normally characterised by its absence, in the sense that it remains out of reach of their consciousness. In Iyengar yoga, beginners are usually surprised when recognising that verbal instructions that appear to be easy are really challenging, since what is apparently understood by attending to the teacher´s demonstration (corporeal/visual and verbal) ends up being something infertile which does not necessarily lead to the performing of the posture. Thus, the beginner realizes the general disconnection between mind and body that is present in most people´s everyday life.
In this sense, from the very beginning of Iyengar practice it is central to learn how to bring the mind into the body, being able to transfer a verbal instruction into a material, fleshy action. For beginners this might be necessary even for rough actions, such as extending legs and arms to their full potentiality. This capacity for connecting the mind and body is not something that is achieved by intellectual thinking or just by will; actually it cannot be transmitted just by the teacher´s bodily demonstrations and verbal instructions. It is something that depends especially on the individual´s ability for developing the body´s capacity for sensing, thinking and doing. The cultivation of this embodied capacity is like an open-ended journey from the coarsest layers to the subtlest ones discovering a whole new universe of sensations and perceptions. It is a journey from the external, visible, known and speakable to the internal, invisible, unknown and to some extent unspeakable. In this sense, it is said in Iyengar that the real work in the posture only begins with the actions (internal and invisible) that are carried out after movement (external and visible). This exploration from the outer to the inner (unlimited) body is made possible by the dynamic interpenetration of mind and body which allows to penetrate with self-awareness increasingly more space of one´s own embodied being.
Starting from a cognitive understanding of the posture (through visual and verbal information), the first step is to recognise and ‘inhabit’ the external body by paying attention to it in a way that it can be sensed. It is true that at the beginning, while mind and body are strongly disconnected, the practitioner has often no sensibility of her/his own body at all, and has to look at its parts to know if they are responding or not to the mental instruction. However, the capacity for sensing the body is something that starts to come quickly with practice. Nevertheless, the challenge from here is to transform what is initially a general sense of the body with only thick distinctions of its main and evident parts (trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet, neck and head), into a finer and subtler sensibility for exploring not only more specific parts of the body (such as shoulders, upper and lower arm, heels, toes, etc.) but also the materiality of the skin and from there to the inside of muscles, tissues and organs. In my own case, I can remember when I moved from an external and plain sense of the skin to more profound internal sensibility, through which unexpected actions and feelings were opened. Some of them are speakable, such as opening my chest by expanding the space around the sternum and expanding the thoracic cage through the activation of my pectoral and intercostal muscles; others are only partially grasped by language, such as sensations of emptiness, ecstasy and electricity.
In this sense, the practice of yoga is experienced as an ongoing process of transformation of one´s body; an opening of a ‘sentient body’ (Blackman, 2008) where the capacity of thinking is progressively detached from the visual sense to be located in the skin and the more internal and visceral senses. The visual sense is particularly challenged from the beginning when the practitioner is encouraged to feel its back and all the body´s parts which are out of the visual range in order to correct any ‘de-alignment’ which would be unsafe and more difficult to adjust in more advance poses. By doing different kinds of postures the embodied awareness is distributed to every part of the body´s surface and inside by using the sensibility from propioception and interoception. For example, while standing poses such as Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon pose; see left photograph), develop the capacity to sense our feet with its toes, sole, heel, arch, etc., inversions like Sirsasana (Headstand pose; see right photograph) defy our spatial references and demand a flowing sensibility responsible for maintaining the dynamic balance needed for being some minutes in the posture. 
In this way, the sentient body discovered and created through the practice involves a complex and dynamic system of sensible connections between the smallest and most specific parts of the external and internal body. Thus, the capacity for performing a pose in its visible and invisible dimension depends on this embodied awareness, which can be thought, following Blackman´s (2008) words, as the psychological distributed throughout the body. Or, to draw a parallel with Sheets-Johnstone´s (2011) notion of thinking in movement, as the body’s capacity for thinking which in the case of Iyengar practice is created not so much through the kinaesthesia but through sensing the internal movements which are created within and through the body. In relation to this, and to be more precise, one would have to say that the body constituted by Iyengar practice may be described not only as a sentient body, but also a ‘feeling body’ and a ‘somatically felt body’ (Blackman 2008). Feeling body, because of its capacity for thought (2008: 57), and somatically felt body due to its “aliveness or vitality that is literally felt or sensed but cannot necessarily be articulated, reduced to physiological processes or to the effect of social structures” (2008: 30).
From the aforementioned, we can see that the embodied experience created by practicing yoga is constituted by a continuous interchangeable doing from mind to body and from body to mind, understanding mind not as separate but as embodied consciousness. This means that both are in an intimate relationship where there is never a mind working over the body as pure object, inert and passive, but rather an entangled and bidirectional dialogue between the material and the mental, the physiological and the psychological. Because of this complex interplay between a mindful materiality and an embodied self Iyengar yoga can be considered as a practice that challenges the Cartesian mind-body dualism by highlighting the body as the grounding for our existential condition (Csordas 1990, 1999).
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