04/16/2025
Posted • CONVERSATION STARTER—Do you ever feel guilty or struggle with adapting poses?
Have you ever thought about how much of a grip yoga poses have on mainstream practice?
I’ve said it over and over again—most poses as they are taught are unsustainable and potentially risky or injurious for the majority of people. And they’re only a small part of a yoga practice.
Yoga as a practice dates back thousands of years, but the poses that we label as yoga today were largely introduced in the last 50-100 years.
What’s wrong with reorienting our relationship to the poses, or even leaving them out of our practices if they don’t suit us? You can create poses, that allow each unique individual to deeply engage with yoga’s teachings and those shapes don’t have to look anything like what we’ve come to think “yoga” has to look like.
The poses weren’t delivered from a higher power; they were created by people, just regular people. They’re teaching tools where we can investigate our relationship to sensory input and subsequent choice and how the mind is involved in that equation. So why do we cling so much to keeping the way they look alive?
Part of it is that yoga as it’s taught is a big business, and it’s also a part of many people’s identity. If we question the poses, a lot of things can feel shaky and uncertain, and that can be scary and uncomfortable.
But clinging to the status quo especially when it’s not working, is exactly the kind of attachment yoga teaches us to let go of.
Wouldn’t allowing for change and inspecting our desire to cling as change occurs be more powerful than any pose could ever be?
Is there a pose you can’t make work for you or your students but are afraid to let it go?
