22/12/2025
If you focus only on perfect alignment while performing Ashtavakrasana, understand the irony:
You are practicing one of the most physically disaligned postures in yoga.
Many practitioners perform Ashtavakrasana today
without knowing why this posture exists or what it was meant to point toward. This asana was not created for:
physical beauty
energy awakening
strength
balance
or aesthetic perfection
Ashtavakrasana is not a fitness posture.
It is dedicated to Ashtavakra —
a sage remembered as one of the most physically deformed beings in history,
his body bent in eight places (asta–vakra).
If you had lived in his time,
you probably would not have chosen this posture.
You might even have felt ashamed to imitate such a form.
Yet today, the same posture has become one of the most craved poses among modern practitioners, not because its purpose is understood,
but because it looks impressive in pictures.
This is the tragedy.
Ashtavakra body was socially rejected,
but his consciousness was perfectly aligned.
Yoga never measured beauty
through symmetry of the limbs.
Yoga measured alignment of awareness.
By social standards, Ashtavakra would have been called ugly. By yogic standards, he was free.
Ashtavakrasana was never meant to glorify the body.
It was meant to humiliate the ego that worships the body.
Here is what most people miss:
You are not practicing Ashtavakrasana to achieve a particular shape. While the body appears disaligned,
you are actually aligning your inner state
with the cosmic consciousness —
that which remains unchanged across eons,
unaffected by fluctuation,
whether of matter or non-matter.
The posture bends the body
so the mind can taste something that never bends.
If your practice of Ashtavakrasana increases pride,
you have missed Ashtavakra.If it dissolves identity, comparison, and self-image, then the posture has served its purpose.
Final Traditional Truth
A crooked body with a liberated mind is yoga.
A perfect body with a trapped ego is not.
