Adapting Your Yoga Practice to Suit You Perfectly || Mark Whitwell

A central principle of the Yoga I received from my teachers is that there is a right Yoga for every person, no matter who that person is. Adapted to age, health, body type, culture, religion and stage of life. This immediately stood out in contrast to the physical systems I had been experimenting with up until that point.

Prior to meeting Desikachar and his father, Krishnamacharya, I had perceived Yoga as a fixed thing that practitioners strive to move towards, rather than the other way around – adapting the Yoga to suit the person. After the first lesson, where Desikachar watched unimpressed while I demonstrated the asana I was so proud of, and taught me how to breathe correctly, it became obvious. Standing in the moonlight on a rooftop in Madras (now Chennai), I could feel that the body loved its breath. And that Yoga was simply our participation in the life that we already are, the participation in the power of life that we are.

I saw all kinds of people come and go from the house, as well as from the Mandiram, which was built by that time. All sizes, ethnicities, ages, men and women, some very ill, some very religious, some with very specific issues. What I noticed is that although Krishnamacharya was a renowned healer and Ayurvedic practitioner, whose hands were revered as having healing powers, he did not dispense Yoga like a pharmaceutical product. The poses were not dispensed like different drugs for different problems. Instead what I saw was how he and his son helped each person find their breath in whatever way worked for them, so they could participate in what was whole and alive about them, identify with that, and participate in their own healing.

Looking around at the modern Yoga scene, I do not often see this nuance of adaption. I see a dominant paradigm that describes Yoga poses like individual pharmaceutical ingredients, good for the liver, good for the back, etc, divorced from their context of breath and vinyasa krama, and the placement of the mind in the aliveness of the body. I see people looking to Yoga teachers for healing the way they look to doctors, in a disempowered search for a parent to make everything ok. And I see yoga teachers absolutely burdened in their shared belief that they are supposed to heal or fix their students, rather than enable them to participate in their own health and healing.

It is a big step to leave the studio and the gymnastic routines and commit to our own personalized home practice. But it is an equally big and important step to really understand what this adaption is, and what the role of the teacher is in it. The teacher’s job is not to diagnose you and give you poses like medicines. No matter how good a teacher is, how educated in physio and anatomy and Ayurveda and all the other modalities of modern healing, and no matter how much information you share with them, the teacher is not there to replace your own body’s intelligence. Rather, their job is to help and empower you to participate in the body’s essential health and aliveness, even in the midst of perhaps injuries or a condition of illness. To participate in what is well. That participation spreads into all areas of one’s life as a shifting of focus. This is quite different from the standard modern approach to adaptation, which treats the individual like a collection of problems to be solved or treated.

The principle method by which your practice is your own is your breath. The length, depth, pace, ratio and retentions of YOUR breath. By making your breath the central feature and purpose of your asana, your practice gradually becomes utterly fitted to your unique embodiment. By making the breath start before the movement and finish after any movement, you safely hold your asana within the envelope of the breath. It is a revolutionary change, from imposing postures on the body, to allowing them to happen in their natural shape within the natural rhythm of your unique breath. If we are pushed beyond our physical capability, we will not be able to take a smooth and even ujjayi inhale. Therefore, the breath will keep you safe and be the guide and guru to help you modify your practice.

Adapting your practice to suit you perfectly does not necessarily mean it will look any different from a standard template or someone else’s practice. It is the principles of breath that ensure it is completely and subtly unique to you. Just as many people kiss in the same way, but no two real kisses are the same or boring, it is your intimacy with life that makes your practice utterly your own.

We also must break free of the constraints of ‘ideal form’ goals in terms of asana. There is no ideal shape. Krishnamacharya would say there are as many asanas as there are living beings. What did he mean? Just that every body is unique, and asana can and must be modified to suit us. They are not like yantra, needing to be done in an exact precise shape. We do not need to yank our bodies with ropes and straps and chairs into approximating the forms that were idealized by someone else’s body. If your knee is injured and kneeling asana hurt, simply do not do kneeling asana. Consider the movements of the breath and spine that such asana facilitate, and how else these can occur. There is nothing eternal and holy in any one asana. Take inversions, for example. A safe and accurate headstand is a very beneficial thing, but suitable for only a small percentage of the population. A shoulderstand gives many of the same benefits, but again will not suit everyone. To lie on the back with the legs up on a chair, however, and breathe with the arms, is something accessible to almost anyone, and gives great benefits of elevating the legs above the heart. We must not be put off from doing what we can do by what we cannot do.

Yoga students and teachers alike should not be intimidated to modify asana to suit themselves. It is not an immutable gallery of precise forms. What do we think the purpose of asana is? To dance? To be elegant? To be photographed? To do a magic ritual that performed correctly will get a reward, sometime later? No, the entire function of asana is to facilitate the movement of the breath. It is moving pranayama, using the whole body to direct breath and prana in restorative and beneficial ways.

So do not wait for a teacher to come along and give you special poses “adapted to you”. In terms of asana, just do what you can do, within the logic of vinyasa krama (which you can recap within the online immersion we have made if you wish). The customization will come as you learn to remain within the tides of your inhale-exhale, based on the principles of practice.

Furthermore, we will each have our unique loves and reminders of life’s power. This may be religious or it may simply be flowers, poetry, a photo of a loved one or a view. We weave these devotions into our Yoga practice, making it truly our own. This is not separate from our asana and pranayama. For example, a Christian student of Yoga may begin with a short prayer, then do some sun salutations to God, some standing asana mirroring the yantra of the cross, some keeling prayer asana, some lying down asana and inversions, with a focus on the breath as the gift of God, some backbends on the abdominals with a mood of sacrifice or release, some seated twists and forward bends “giving oneself to the Lord,” savasana in a mood of “abiding in the holy spirit,” a simple pranayama, and then some prayer or song. Every different person will have something different.

Another example: an atheist who loves astronomy and the stars. They may have a beautiful framed picture of the galaxy in their practice space, or perhaps even practice under the night sky on occasion. They may begin with a quiet reflection on themselves as made from the same particles that have been around since the dawn of the universe. They may practice some surya namaskar, with a feeling of gratitude for the light and warmth of the sun, knowing that we would only be alive for eight minutes were it to go out. They may do a short practice of standing, kneeling, lying down, twists and forward bends, and finish with their legs up on a chair. During their practice, they might like to visualize the breath enlivening every cell of their body with oxygen, and then releasing toxins on every exhale. Lying down, they could let their mind roam into the utter stillness and silence of space, and feel themselves as part of that immense vastness. Their practice could then conclude with a podcast on new and amazing astrological research, as they move into their day.

The point is that adapting our yoga practice will come naturally when we desanctify the precision of poses, and resanctify the uniqueness of our breath and our specific life interests and directions. You vinyasa krama encompasses all the aspects of your daily intimacy with life, through whatever the appropriate means are, including your asana and pranayama.

Many students wish for a completely customized and unique asana sequence, but this is not necessary for a completely personalized practice. In fact, it would be an imposition. Your adaptations must arise from your body, not from the mind’s learning. We must be more nuanced and precise. Instead of just getting a new wardrobe of clothes, we are tailoring all of the existing clothes to fit perfectly. Your breath is the key.

Finally, I am not advocating for spontaneous movement each day in order to be “free.” This is like trying to be with a different person every day and never getting a chance to relax into real intimacy and depth. Doing a different thing every day keeps the mind active and engaged, thinking of what to do next, and means we will avoid the discipline of breath in areas that might facilitate release, such as forward bends or pranayama. Avoidance of practice is very common and can hide beneath “my dancing is my yoga” or “spontaneous movement is my yoga” etc. It is true that you are already the power of the cosmos, and that whether or not you do a practice you are completely fine, but if we suffer from any restrictions at all in our flow of intimate connection, then we do need a little precise and uncompromising asana-pranayama-meditation, as a remedial practice. It is normal to feel some resistance and to need to cut through this. Not as an imposition but with love. It is completely fine to do basically the same sequence every day, perhaps altering a little with the moon. Your breath will naturally refine the practice into something completely fresh every day. Again, like a kiss.

Over time, your practice becomes like a favourite pair of jeans that you can just slip into without having to think about it. It is there to facilitate the movement of above and below, the beauty that is the breath, no more and no less. It is not a struggle to attain a future result, nor merely a therapeutic system for the physical body. Gently, over and over, take the mind out of worrying about the hamstrings or the face muscles; the elbow joints or the hip flexion. Reimmerse yourself over and over again in the breath. If you can breathe, you can do Yoga! Your breath is the key to your Yoga fitting you like a glove.

A class with a teacher is useful for learning basic principles, but as with a music lesson, they must be implemented in the privacy of our own home practice to be of any use.

If you are interested to look into these breath principles, we have made a self-paced online immersion sharing these in some detail, available by donation at www.heartofyoga.com/online-immersion.

About Mark Whitwell

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant.

Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.