Alignment oriented vs functional yoga, and why I (most often) teach the latter

Like many yoga practitioners in the West, my first encounter with yoga was through yogasana, or postures.Then I started practising Ashtanga Vinyasa, which I enjoyed as it made me feel strong. So a few years later, when I did my very first teacher training, I started teaching a rather strongly alignment oriented yoga. I almost took pride in teaching the "traditional" way, but not for very long. Soon enough I realised that many of the postures as I learnt them weren't accessible to many of my students most of the time. The reasons were varied. As a baseline we know that each of us is unique in how our bodies are built. Some of us may have shorter arms, or longer legs, or our hips might be more or less open due to how our bones are shaped. We might have injuries or illnesses that others don't have. All these characteristics will affect our mobility and range of motion.

And I didn't even touch the topic of flexibility, in the more traditional sense, where we think of how tight our "muscles" are. I put muscles in quotation marks because we now know that a great part of the tightness in the muscles is actually not due to the muscles, but the connective tissue around the muscles, the myofascia. 

There was a time when I felt conflicted about how I should teach these postures and what was available to my students in a healthy and safe way. In fact, had I insisted on teaching a purely alignment oriented yoga, my classes would have been completely empty. So naturally my focus started shifting from what a posture should look like (aesthetic aspect) to what a posture should feel like (functional approach). Or more accurately, with each asana I brought to my classes I started focusing on a target area where we are most likely to have the sensations  - and this is already stretching it because strictly speaking we might feel the same posture at different parts of the body, and each of us might have a variety of sensations.

So here are a few things I learnt very early as a yoga teacher (the list is by no means exhaustive) 1) To adapt the postures to every participant's needs irrespective of what the books say about how a posture should look like. What is important is what the posture feels like for each practitioner;

2) To give alternatives because sometimes even the most gentle version of a posture is not accessible to everyone. As long as the student feels the asana in a target area of the body in a safe and pain-free way, I'm happy. :)

3) Every practitioner is their own authority. They know what is best for their body (mind and soul) at that moment. So I actively encourage them to disregard what I say if it doesn't feel good, if it's becoming too much or too strong (and of course I'm there to give options :) ). Everyone is allowed to get out of the posture when they feel it's enough, irrespective of what I said.

And a BONUS point because the breath is more important than the posture: 4) I invite students to let their breathing be their inner guide. If you cannot breathe in a posture, the asana needs to be adapted, not your breath. A post might come later about why I sais this last sentence.