Bio-Individual Yoga

Have you ever wondered why you can’t do a specific Yoga pose and everybody else seems to ease into it with no sense of tension or compression

For years I wondered and got frustrated with being unable to do specific poses.

For years, I thought this pose was emotional stress, which was the reason my leg wouldn't move further down to rest on the other leg. Turns out, I really just can't move beyond the bones...

This is no secret, but it is for some. We are around 7.9 billion people worldwide and don’t look like the plastic skeleton we learned anatomy from in school. All 7.9 billion people each have a unique bone structure; no one looks the same. And this means EVERYTHING for your Yoga practice and your life in general. We do not run around with X-ray vision, but certain clues can tell us IF there might be a simple explanation as to why a specific pose may be limited in range OR maybe very extreme expression to a pose.

Tension in yoga poses, we can work with. Tension is felt in the area you are moving away from the body. The area that is opened, like the inner thigh and groin in a butterfly or straddle. Maybe also along the spine if you are folding forward.

Compression is a natural sense of not being able to move any further due to bone-on-bone restriction or flesh-on-flesh. Ex, a straight-legged forward fold when the body meets the legs, this is flesh meeting flesh. But there may be a natural restriction before and this is when there is a natural variation in the hip socket or the femur, that stops the body before it meets the legs. This is not something we can move beyond, but we may be able to open the legs a little to the side and experience a deeper forward fold because we are moving away from the natural variation in the hip area.

Another example would be in the wheel pose. Like the picture above. We may meet compression in several places, notice the arrows. There are three of them because I know I have restrictions in these areas. First, the area where the femur may meet the hip socket. Second, the vertebrae may meet each other and I won’t be able to go beyond this. Third, The shoulder blades may meet the limit of range of motion when meeting the side of the spine.

How do I know for sure

I don’t, because I can’t x-ray myself in this pose and therefore not say with 100% certainty that this would be the case. But I can say that there is no tension on the front side of my body and this may indicate that bones are meeting bones.

So, is the pose good or bad? For me, this is my edge, which is stopping me, meaning I have worked myself to my limit. I will not be able to go beyond this, for me, this is good. For another person this pose, will probably be completely different, I hope that we all have different expressions of a pose.

Take a look at this picture and notice the back of my leg is hanging freely, with only gravity pulling it down. What is stopping my leg from moving further down?

Why is this important to a yoga teacher_

As you can imagine, a yoga teacher has a lot of different students and of course, there is an average student they teach, but you are not average. You are unique and have healthy variations of your skeleton. The teacher’s job is to notice a difference and make sure that you know, that you have your expression of a pose. And that is ok.

My mission when teaching yoga is for you to feel not only welcome but feel that I got you if you can’t get into a pose and I do have knowledge enough to understand the reason why, so you will walk out of the studio knowing that what you are doing is amazing and unique.

It is your yoga and most importantly, your body.

Much Love and Compassion,

Penelope.