An excerpt from the foreword of the book, Your Body, Your Yoga
Note: this was written by Paul Grilley in 2015, well before Zoom yoga classes were ever conceived.
Assuming that everyone is the same makes the teaching of yoga simpler but, unfortunately, not safer. We are not all the same: just as you would be ill advised to take someone else’s prescription drugs, or drive while wearing someone else’s glasses, an alignment cue that works well for one yoga student may be quite harmful to you. Where did this emphasis on universal alignment cues come from? Paul Grilley explains:
When did the “rules of alignment” in yoga classes become ubiquitous? Rules of alignment became both rigid and pervasive with the rise of yoga teacher training (TT) programs. Teacher training programs were rare until the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were some yoga studios in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but their bread and butter were daily and weekly classes, not TT programs.
Before the rise of TT programs, yoga teachers trained by showing up regularly at classes and then being asked to substitute for the regular instructor; eventually, they started teaching regularly. There were no formal training programs. In fact, the people who opened and ran these studios had very little formal training themselves. Yoga culture then was like surfing culture is now: people learned from others, practiced on their own and occasionally practiced in groups. Most “studios” were people’s living rooms.
Yoga benefitted from the birth of the modern fitness culture, just as did other forms of exercise such as body building, jogging, dance classes and aerobics. Body building and running are not conducive to group class participation, but dance and aerobics classes were born in the group environment. Yoga classes began to model themselves after dance classes, and the modern “yoga class” was born. People practicing on their own became less common.
Just prior to the fitness boom, yoga was a small niche of hippie/Hindu yogis whose practices focused on calmness and stillness. Yoga might not have benefitted from the fitness explosion had it not been for the Ashtanga/Vinyasa yoga of Pattabhi Jois. This style of yoga was hot, sweaty and similar in feel to aerobics classes. Vinyasa styles of yoga eventually became as popular as aerobics, while the gentle hippie yoga of the previous years was nearly forgotten.
Thanks to Ashtanga/Vinyasa, yoga exploded, and there were not enough teachers or studios to keep up with the demand. Yoga TT programs were created to meet this need. There wasn’t time to cultivate teachers in the old-fashioned way of “show up regularly, then substitute teach, then teach”; teachers needed to be mass-produced in 200-hour chunks of time. None of this was a cynical manipulation—it was motivated by a genuinely felt need.
But how to produce a teacher in 200 hours? The education had to be systematized to be time efficient, and students needed to be assessed unambiguously. Both needs were met by creating manuals with strict and memorizable “rules of alignment” on how postures should be taught.
Continuing along for many years before the yoga boom was a TT program that was not patterned after the “show up regularly, then substitute teach, then teach” model. This was the Iyengar School of Yoga in India, and its branches in the USA, particularly in San Francisco. In fact, Yoga Journal started life as a journal of the Iyengar School in San Francisco.
Iyengar teachers prided themselves on having exact rules of alignment; in this very significant way, they stood out from other styles of yoga and from yoga TT programs. Mr. Iyengar had already developed many “levels” of certification. This is important because the manual first used by Yoga Works in Los Angeles was written by Iyengar and other alignment devotees.
Yoga Works developed the most successful TT program in the hot-bed of the booming yoga business: Los Angeles. Yoga Works has since then expanded to many studios in LA and across the USA, and they have actively exported their TT program to as far away as Asia.
But it isn’t just Iyengar Yoga or Yoga Works that have sought to standardize the rules of alignment: every style of yoga that seeks rapid expansion does the same. Bikram yoga turns out cookie-cutter teachers by the hundreds, and their “training” is largely the strict memorization of a script of alignment instructions. Anusara yoga used to bill itself as “the fastest growing style of yoga in the world!” and its rules of alignment have been described as “Iyengar with spirals.” And almost monthly, someone trademarks their “brand” of yoga, which is essentially trademarking their alignment rules.
Alignment is not a “Western corruption” of yoga tradition. Mr. Iyengar is an Indian from an Indian tradition. But there are many Indian schools of yoga without rigid alignment, and Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga yoga is one of them. There are also Western schools of yoga that are not alignment rigid, such as Kripalu yoga. So, alignment rigidity is not Eastern or Western or universal, it is a consequence of TT programs trying to make it simpler to mass-produce teachers.
Any time an art is constrained to mass production, it will be simplified, codified and rigidified. This is true in yoga, in dance, in the martial arts and in religion. Simpler is easier to teach and absorb, but it also leads to inaccurate generalizations and intolerance of individuality.
Yet it must be said that the impulse to embrace rigid rules of alignment is not motivated only by TT necessities. It is one part of human nature to codify and rigidify, just as it is another part of human nature to break with tradition and create something new. We cannot teach effectively without some generalizations, but we haven’t reached maturity until we have outgrown generalizations and can competently focus on the unique needs of every student in every pose. This is not an impossible dream—it just takes more time than a TT program can afford. The onus of continuing growth is on each and every yoga teacher. This is the only way a teacher can reach his or her full potential.
Swami Vivekananda addressed this issue in the field of religion: “It is good to be born in a church; it is bad to die in one.”
Paul Grilley, September 2015
To learn about finding your optimal alignment by employing a functional approach to yoga practice rather than an aesthetic one, check out the Your Body, Your Yoga trilogy by Bernie Clark