Yoga, Risk, And The Myth of Perfect Alignment

When did yoga become the big bad wolf?

For a practice that goes back at least decades, and possibly hundreds of years—depending on how you define yoga and who you’re asking—yoga has changed a lot in the decades I’ve been practicing. It’s gone from something curious spiritual seekers do, to a mass-market product often packaged as a one-size-fits-all wellness activity that cures everything from back pain to chronic anxiety. Many of yoga’s touted benefits are real, and the great thing about how widespread it has become, is that so many more people can experience those benefits. But, the tricky part about anything that becomes significantly more popular, is that some essential components can get lost along the way.

And lately, one essential component that seems muted, is the curiosity, openness to the unknown, and joyful enthusiasm that I used to encounter from yoga practitioners. Instead, it seems to have been replaced by fear. More and more often lately, I hear yoga students and teachers talking about yoga in a way that suggests they believe there is a single “right” way to do yoga. Alongside those statements, I hear students and teachers talking about yoga like they believe that if we don’t do the right yoga, something bad will happen. Or, I hear people speaking as if they believe that if we do perfect yoga, we’ll only have perfect, blissful experiences.

Fear and language in yoga

The accumulation of so much fear-based language when we talk about yoga seems to be propelling us into a kind of yoga-related moral panic. More and more often, I hear practitioners and teachers talking about yoga as if they expect extreme injury and harm to be around every corner. The more of this I hear, the more I wonder how it’s shaping our expectations of yoga and our experience in yoga practice.

Fear-based cuing

One of the ways this fear-based language shows up in yoga classes is in fear-based cuing. By fear-based cuing, I mean instructing poses primarily by what not to do, rather than what to do. This is not to say that there are no appropriate situations for expressing caution or concern. But, if our only direction in yoga is away from what we imagine to be potentially injurious, then where are we going to? Rather than so many fear-based cues, why not cue helpful patterns for evolving poses? Helping students understand the essential patterns that underlie groups of postures and breaking down the steps to get there, gives the student a direction toward something positive, rather than away from something negative. And, it reduces the chances of injury at the same time, by teaching students what supportive patterns look and feel like.

The magical alignment trap

Another way an underlying fear of injurious outcomes in yoga shows up is in a false idea that the “right” alignment can create the perfect yoga. I hear alignment-related cues used like the underlying belief is that if we just line up the right things in the right way, then we will have only positive experiences. This is a false idea that if we do everything with the right alignment, no one will ever experience an injury, overstretch something, or have a negative experience.

However, in my mind, that misses the point of yoga and misses Krishnamacharya’s overarching teaching philosophy of adapting individual practices to each student moment by moment. There is no single right alignment. If we’re teaching, looking to overly simplified ideas of alignment as the be-all-end-all or right answer, avoids the slow and challenging work of learning anatomy, learning about healthy biomechanics in the body, starting to see whole body patterns and relationships, learning to build more complex shapes from simpler ones, understanding what essential patterns underlie more complex shapes, and learning how to help students with many different body types find their way there.

What are we really afraid of in yoga?

So why all this fear in yoga? What are we afraid of? Yoga asana is a physical practice, so some amount of concern about injuring ourselves or our students isn’t unreasonable. Perhaps as teachers, we feel a strong sense of responsibility towards our students and simply want to do all we can to increase the likelihood that they have a positive experience. Maybe we’re afraid of not doing yoga “right.” Or, perhaps when we as practitioners and teachers are uncertain of when, why, or how to adapt our yoga practice to the specific moment, we experience fear.

Of course, there is no perfect yoga. Its association with wellness does not mean it’s guaranteed to lead in a linear way towards a particular outcome. So, some amount of concern about the unknown is to be expected. I often say that the yoga asana doesn’t even exist until we do it. Without a person doing the yoga pose, it is neither inherently injurious nor inherently healing. It doesn’t exist until some individual human brings it into being by taking it on in their body. However, we are human. Despite our best efforts, sometimes we miss the mark. We may misunderstand our body’s signals, be distracted and miss a cue from our body completely, or something outside our control will happen.

Why aren’t we afraid of any other movement practice?

We do many other physical activities in addition to yoga. So why don’t we express the same kind of fear-based language in our discussions of playing basketball, going for a daily run, riding our bikes, dancing, working in the garden, or hiking on a trail? Part of this may have something to do with our expectations of yoga. We often talk about yoga as a “wellness” activity and use language that reflects an underlying belief that yoga should be risk-free. But, is that realistic, or even possible?

Yoga is a tool that we can choose to apply towards the cultivation of greater attention, attunement, and awareness. We use the body and breath as tools to develop these skills because they are concrete and accessible in a way that working directly with the mind is not. Yoga can also be a laboratory for exploring discernment in the physical body. But, there are no guarantees of a particular outcome. And sometimes things just happen despite our best efforts to prevent them.

A conversation about risk

One part of the yoga conversation that still seems to be missing is an open discussion of risk and movement. We don’t saddle other sports and movement practices with the heavy weight of the zero-risk, all bliss expectations that we pile on yoga. The truth is that no one comes to yoga with a perfectly balanced body. We all have converging histories with past activities, injuries, age-related dysfunctions, and genetics. All of that intersects with our yoga practice, not to mention the day-to-day variability of simply showing up to practice feeling tired or distracted by things in our lives.

All movement practices carry risk. We accept this as par for the course in dance, gymnastics, running, cycling, soccer, tennis, basketball, etc. If you trip and roll an ankle while running, we recognize that it’s something that can happen while running. We can take steps to reduce that risk, but we can’t remove it completely. We know that in any of these sports and movement activities, there are ways to do them with more risk or less risk, but there is always some risk.

What are our responsibilities as teachers?

So if we’re not using overly simplified alignment cues or repeating fear-based cues about only what not to do, what do we teach? How do we act as responsible teachers who want to keep our students reasonably safe and minimize unnecessary risk while leaving an open space for our students to explore the messy nature of learning new things? Our choices in yoga are not all or nothing. Instead of replacing those moments of uncertainty with fear-based cues, what if we could draw on a knowledge-based decision-making practice?

Good teaching means assessing where the student is on their journey of yoga. It means paying attention to how long they have been practicing, how consistent and invested in regular practice they are, how well they understand the biomechanics of what they’re trying to learn, and how patient they are with taking things step by step. This is an ongoing process of deepening our knowledge of yoga asana, how to build the patterns of movement common to yoga in a step-by-step way, and how to see what’s missing. What does this student need in this moment? Do they need a different technique, strength, flexibility, or something else?

Apply an individualized teaching approach

Good teaching means having ongoing conversations with our students about their goals, experiences in practice, and what kind of risk they are up for. There are benefits and risks to stretching, going upside down, doing arm balances, bending forward, bending backward, putting our leg in half lotus, and putting our leg behind our head. I don’t want to moralize categories of postures like lotus, backbends, arm balances, or any others, as inherently “bad” or “dangerous.”

Learning arm balances can be empowering for students, and there is always some risk of falling. Both are true at the same time. We can reduce the risk of falling through our teaching techniques, but we can’t remove it completely. If a student wants zero risk of falling, then arm balances shouldn’t be part of their practice.

Using neutral language

Similarly, instead of saying lotus pose is dangerous, why don’t we simply acknowledge the challenges and risks of this particular shape? Instead of fear-based moral panic in yoga, let’s just talk about risk using neutral language. When our hips don’t rotate enough, poses like half-lotus and lotus can increase the pressure in the knee. There is some risk to the knees when doing this pose. If your student’s situation is one where they don’t want that risk at all, then they should not do half-lotus or lotus. If they want to explore the pose, but reduce the risk of injury, then you can work with them to open tissues at the hip and ankle to reduce the amount of force that goes into the knee, with the understanding that there is still some risk.