James Kiernan

Alignment has profound benefits to practitioners who take notice to how they are moving and positioning the body.  When I first began practicing, alignment was not one of the focuses my teachers chose to work with.  As a consequence I hit many roadblocks and developed many compensations in my practice, where things were not moving forward.  Then when I found my first teacher who had a strong foundation in alignment, I soon realized that many of the positions I had been practicing for years where just shapes.  Shapes can resemble postures, but they don't hold our limitations accountable for change.  Shapes allow those limitations to skate by, unnoticed and unaffected, which will not allow the practitioner to progress.

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My philosophy behind yoga alignment is twofold. First is that our postures should have elements of samasthiti.  The second is that our posture has negotiable components, and non negotiable components.  A couple things to say about this.  In our body and in the physical world, movement will always take place in the path of least resistance.  When you move into a pose that addresses a certain area, the resistance of that area may drive the body to move in an unrelated area as a means to resolve tension.  Knowing this, when we look at the the law of specificity, it states that to improve in anything, you must precisely practice the skill that you wish to develop.  This means that we cannot allow other areas of the body to compensate in our asana, which is naturally what the body will do if unchecked.

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And this is a component which facilitates an authentic practice.  If we look at the aim based from the yoga sutras which is to be able to focus on any one thing.  We will choose the body to be that one thing.   As mentioned in the philosphy discussion, yoga practice requires willfully exposing oneself to the metaphorical element of fire within one’s practice (Tapah), serious study (Swadhyaya), and aligning your actions with the true self (Ishvarapranidhana).  To work with the mental friction of Tapas, and to be able to study our mind through this difficult work (Swadhyaya) I will be teaching a concept called the Tapas Point.  The Tapas Point is the individual stopping point for any asana. Starting from a well-aligned starting point we move toward another shape without allowing our non negotiable elements to change. The Tapas Point is that point in that path where going further would mean mis aligning something.

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Many things can challenge you from this.  You may have been used to going into a much deeper knee bend in a lunge.  You may have been used to taking your arms and hands closer together as you reach them up, whatever the case may be, this new concept can challenge you.  It will challenge your ego, and this is where the yoga really begins to work.

 

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