Out of Alignment? by Lexie Wolf
Confession: I’ve never much enjoyed yoga classes with a lot of complex, pretzel-y poses and very detailed alignment cueing. (Alignment describes how the body is arranged in yoga postures.) When I stepped into my first yoga class 27 years ago, precision was much more in vogue. Teachers would come over and physically move a foot or a hand a few degrees, making minute adjustments to the shape of a pose. It didn’t particularly bother me; it just didn’t interest me very much.
As my practice deepened, this kind of attention to detail started to take me out of my experience. The delicious experience of being in my body—moving and breathing and stretching and releasing tension and feeling present and relaxed.
There was and is a philosophy behind the precision. In popular traditions like Anusara and Iyengar Yoga, the discipline of attending to all those details was itself part of the practice—a way of developing concentration, discipline, sensitivity, and self-study.
I can appreciate that! I just think I’m interested in arriving at some of the same things by a different route.
For many years, precise alignment was also commonly presented as a matter of safety: there was a “correct” way to position the body, and deviating from it could lead to injury. But that thinking has definitely evolved.
Human bodies vary enormously—in skeletal structure, proportions, mobility, strength, injury history, and simply in how we move. Contemporary movement science has moved away from rigid universal rules about how a body should stand, move, or embody a shape, and from the idea that deviations from ideal alignment are inherently dangerous.
So. Rather than continually correcting bodies toward an external ideal and micromanaging the experience and look of a pose, evidence-based yoga educators have been telling us in the last 5-10 years or so that we can give students a lot more room to find what works in their own bodies.
Whew! This was and is very good news in my book.
I teach how I practice, and the cues I like to offer lead us into the shape and can be useful tools for building awareness, exploring possibilities, or adding or reducing the intensity of a posture.
Important caveat: I don’t generally practice or teach complex or highly demanding poses, where technique, preparation, and more specific instruction matter a lot more. To be honest, I never could do a lot of those poses. I imagine that if you can put your feet behind your head, that’s fun. Yoga used to attract a lot of ballet dancers as teachers, not surprisingly. It’s very cool what they can do, but I’m also really glad yoga has shifted toward being more welcoming of all sizes, shapes, and abilities.
Trauma-informed yoga has reinforced this shift through its emphasis on bodily autonomy. At its heart is the recognition that the person practicing is the authority on their own body. An instructor can offer knowledge, experience, context, and possibilities. But we aren’t inside someone else’s body.
And to me, this is where movement science and yoga philosophy begin to meet in a way that really enriches my time on the mat.
Self-study is an important part of yoga philosophy. So is learning to turn our attention inward and trust our own experience. We practice becoming more sensitive to what is actually happening rather than moving through life entirely according to external instruction. We practice becoming attuned to our inner voice—and learning to listen to it.
A skilled instructor can introduce possibilities, share what we know, and help students notice things they might not discover on their own. But ultimately, the practice belongs to the person practicing.
Maybe this is why I’ve become less interested in perfecting the shape of a pose and more interested in what happens inside it.
Can I pay attention? Can I feel what is happening? Can I trust what I notice? Those feel like skills worth practicing on the mat—and taking with me when I leave it.
