It's Not About the Shape

“Action Hiro” Landazuri shares his Body Smart Yoga, focusing on muscle sensations and effort over the endgame of a pose.

- RENEE MARIE SCHETTLER

Often, I feel the cues I was taught in yoga teacher training don't relate to what we feel in our bodies when we're practicing yoga. It's as if we're learning from two different textbooks: the old-school cues that don't always make sense for everyone versus what we know about how the body actually works.

In recent years, we've heard yoga teachers say, “Not every approach or pose works for everybody," which is fine, but all that doesn't address the problem.

I've spent a lot of time obsessively thinking that there has to be a better answer. At some point, I came to understand that all the cues that teachers use are about bones. But what we're doing in yoga, sensationally, relates to muscles. So why are we cuing bones? Why not try to alter the cues to muscles, which are what we're experiencing in each pose? Why not focus instead on what a student feels?

Rather than cuing a 90-degree bend in the front knee, we could cue students to “keep bending your front knee until you feel like you want to disengage your back knee." That often creates the same version of the pose-or something even harder-and it gives students a frame of reference. So then the student understands, "Oh, I don't need to create a shape, I just need to re-create a sensation."

The actual shapes don't matter. They really don't. Managing a sensation as well as an ego, that's where the benefit of yoga comes in. The physical side of yoga is only beneficial if you take all of what you learn off the mat and into your life. Ultimately, the emotional intelligence we derive from our practice is what is going to help us.

ON TEACHING AND REACHING ALL STUDENTS