Alignment in Yoga: The Conventional Wisdom
When starting out as a yoga teacher, I was told that focusing on alignment is the key to fostering your growing sense of body awareness. I now know that is not true because when you get fixated on alignment, the mind-body conversation is one of “do as I say,” not one of “let's work together”.
Across all the different yoga styles, alignment is constantly emphasised as the pivotal element of your practice. Correct alignment reportedly reduces stress on joints, muscles, and ligaments, safeguarding against potential injuries.
A Different Perspective: Lessons from Sports Development
However, in sports development, you are taught to evolve beyond basic alignment training for the same reasons: to minimize stress on joints, muscles, and ligaments.
In sports, alignment is primarily a concern for absolute beginners as they establish a foundational framework into muscle memory. Once that foundation is set, the focus shifts away from alignment on to refining body engagement to achieve precise coordination of your limbs while ensuring the body is free of tension.
Questioning Yoga's Alignment Fixation
So, why is yoga always so fixated on alignment?
I would have never considered fully exploring this question if it weren’t for the fact that, after heading up London's largest group of yoga studios, I became acutely aware of the number of people who initially feel yoga helps them with joint or back pain only to have the pain return down the line with a vengeance. This is particularly alarming because the yoga industry promotes itself as a healing practice, which was why I was attracted to it.
The Limits of Traditional Advice: Alignment and Gentle Yoga
The typical advice to students struggling with joint or back pain is to take it easy and pay closer attention to your alignment. Or, if you’re like me, over the age of 60, you may be advised to try more gentle and so-called therapeutic styles of yoga, where poses are supported by props such as blankets, bolsters, blocks, and straps to help practitioners relax into the posture without exerting effort.
As outlined in my book - Yoga: The Sohot Way: The Secrets to a Healthy Body Your Yoga Teacher Isn’t Telling You, cutting-edge science has proven time and time again that the only way you will ever wind back the years and restore the body is with active body engagement.
Fixing issues such as tight muscles, inflexible painful joints, and back or sciatica pain can only be achieved by re-educating the body's neuromuscular connections, which doesn't happen if you take things easy (nor, for that matter, does stretching. But that is for another blog).
Active Body Engagement: The Path to True Healing
The critical aspect of this re-education is ensuring the body is powerfully engaged without experiencing even a hint of body tension. As we all know, body tension is the devil, but eliminating it is not a passive process but a highly active one.
Eliminating Body Tension: An Active Process
You have to re-educate your motor control to actively eliminate tension. Eliminating tension requires targeted effort. Taking things easy and feeling a deep sense of relaxation may feel nice, but you won’t rewind back the years. Body restoration and development are neurologically active processes that requires effort.
Dynamic Body Engagement: Beyond Alignment
The conversation you need to have with your body is one of dynamic body engagement, being open, loose, and relaxed at all times. These qualities govern your ability to target power with coordination and control effectively. Actively tuning into body tension and eliminating it is the real path to success.
Understanding and Addressing Body Tension in Yoga
When you're executing a yoga posture, there are two main reasons your body feels tight and tense. The classic reason is due to the tension which has been fused into the body as a result of trauma and the stresses of life, resulting in neck, back, and hip pain. This type of tension is easily eliminated with targeted active re-education.
Tension is also created by the body in order to protect itself from unwanted movement.
Redefining Alignment: A Personal Journey
This brings me back to the subject of alignment. If your body feels the position you are asking it to achieve is harmful due to overcompression or excessive muscle stretching, it will tense up the body to block further movement. This typically happens when you are fixated on achieving some theoretical alignment rule or position.
Remember, alignment principles are theoretical concepts. Alignment is primarily a concern for absolute beginners as they establish a foundational framework into muscle memory. Alignment principles are fundamental concepts that you must strive to evolve beyond, not remain trapped into.
Having learned the basic alignment principles, you must evolve beyond such thinking.
Most importantly, you must become highly aware of body tension created by the body in response to your requests. You must work with your body to make subtle adjustments to eliminate this tension. You must help your body discover an alignment perfect for your body type.
Incorrect alignment is one in which your body is creating tension due to its position. The more you enhance your ability to identify and eliminate tension, the better your body can safely position itself into any structure it likes.
You can place your limbs anywhere you wish, and you will never injure yourself, provided you are open and loose without tension.
Correct alignment is born out of correct body engagement, not by insisting your body conforms to a set of theoretical rules.
Conclusion: Fostering a Collaborative Mind-Body Dialogue
The conversation you need to have with your body is one of dynamic body engagement, being open, loose, and relaxed at all times. You must target all your efforts to ensure the body is powerfully engaged without experiencing even a hint of body tension.
When you get fixated on alignment, your mind-body conversation is one of “do as I say”, not one of “let's work together”.
Bill Thwaites
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