![]() ![]() When a teacher makes up the sequence, guiding postures, transitions, and even breath rhythms, students often get the message that they don’t have the discipline, experience, or training necessary to guide their practice themselves. Is sequencing so complex that we need teachers to verbally structure our practice long after we’re no longer beginners? But it doesn’t change the underlying psychology of the yoga class structure: that we’ve been conditioned to believe we need someone to tell us how to be in our bodies. Having more diversity in the teacher population and improving the chance that a student will find a practice that’s good for them helps to mitigate those problems. That already creates problems of accessibility and inclusion. It’s inevitable that any teacher’s style will be good for some bodies and not for others. When I follow a teacher’s movement sequence, part of what I’m learning is their ideas about how to move, even if those ideas are largely a reflection of the teacher’s experience in their own body, or what they’ve learned from observing the bodies that are usually in their classes. And a subtler version of the same dynamic is at play with verbal or predetermined choreography. This is especially true with hands-on adjustments. The right of students to determine what’s best for their own bodies, and to retain autonomy around their choice of variations-whether and how to be touched, when to rest, and even how they’re observed or their experience named, has become a big topic. But sequencing is important and complex! (Isn’t it?) And what external guidance teaches, in part, is that someone else knows what’s best for your body. Whether that someone is a distant founder of a lineage or the person walking around the room calling out pose names and alignment cues, it’s still external guidance. This was about how we were teaching the practice.ĭespite the many differences between the styles of yoga I have mentioned, one thing they all share is that the sequence of postures is chosen by someone other than the practitioner. ![]() ![]() It wasn’t the economics, social justice issues, or other structural aspects of the yoga studio system, though there are certainly problems with those as well. And as I took other teachers’ classes, I had the same misgivings. It’s a lovely structure for the physical part of yoga practice, based in the simple reality that warming up with easier versions of shapes makes the difficult versions both easier and safer.īut as I improvised variations of basically the same thing day after day, year after year, I came to feel that despite offering a lovely flow of postures (along with whatever wisdom teachings I could weave in), the class format itself might actually be limiting students’ progress. When I taught vinyasa classes, I always improvised my sequences, moving my students through a pretty standard progression of warm-ups and foundational poses to a “peak pose” or two, and then ending with inversions, corpse pose ( śavāsana), and breathwork ( prāṇāyāma). In other styles-like the vinyasa or “flow” that has become the norm in many yoga studios, or Iyengar-style classes that focus less on movement and more on alignment in held postures-teachers talk students through their own sequences, either planned in advance or improvised on the spot. In some styles, like Ashtanga or Bikram, the sequence is predetermined, and teachers may give alignment points or other reminders as everyone moves through it, either together (Bikram), or self-paced (Ashtanga). ![]() And the sequences can be thought of as choreography, though we don’t often call them that. As a group movement sequence done in rhythm, yoga class can be structurally similar to dance or exercise classes, which are certainly part of its modern heritage. For many practitioners around the world now, yoga is synonymous with “guided group posture practice.” We get together, line up in parallel rows on sticky mats, and perform a sequence of physical shapes ( āsana), often linked by transitional movements and combined with rhythmic breathing. ![]()
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