By Gopi Rao
When taking yoga classes, you will often hear unproven tales
about proper alignment. What does it really mean? The word “alignment” floats
around with no real guidance attached to it. Here are a few stories and reality
checks about alignment.
Tales vs. Reality: Yoga Posture Alignment
1. When you do poses
with proper alignment, energy flows freely throughout your whole body.
Well, most practitioners believe when you do a yoga pose with
perfect alignment, your nervous system lights up. Energy, or prana, flows
through the entire body. All obstacles that are blocking any energy are
removed. However, the idea is to create a blockage with the pose so that you
can have large amounts of energy flow through you after a few minutes of doing
the pose. Whether you twist your spine or do a triangle pose, the idea is to
test the ability to continue breathing and remain calm while doing difficult
poses.
2. You were born with
perfect alignment, but you lost it due to environmental conditions.
This story is very common in yoga, but it is also very wrong.
The truth is that we are all born imperfect. That means one arm is longer than
the other, one breast may be bigger or smaller than the other for women.
Everyone has a dominant side as in the hand you write with. Me being a righty,
I am more comfortable doing things on the right side of my body as opposed to
the left side. Life experiences, mood, and behavior do affect the tone of your
muscles and your posture whether it is for the good or bad. Once you realize
that everyone's body is unique, you will be able to get the pose into your body
rather getting the body in to the pose.
3. If you are not in
proper alignment, you may injure yourself.
When it comes to a machine, alignment is very important. Like
aligning tires for your car. The thing is, bodies aren't aligned like cars or
machines. Bodies are constructed in curves. Not straight lines. So while some
yoga teachers will make this comparison, it isn't completely accurate. Now, injuries can occur in yoga, but it's unlikely that the result is from improper
alignment. The reason why people injure themselves in yoga is because they do
not pay attention to the signals their body is trying to send them. They push
themselves to reach some goal that they are not ready to achieve just yet. They
don't look at what is safe and what is unsafe for their body.
The
real truth is that there is no perfect alignment in any body. All bodies are
individually unique. Your body is born the way it is and all you can do is use
it properly. In order to make it better, you have to test yourself carefully to
see where you can go, realize that your body may not look like someone else’s'
and that is okay. Also, realize that you should not push yourself farther than
you can go in order to fit your body into a preconceived mold.
© Copyright 2016 – Aura Wellness Center – Publications Division
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1 comment:
Thanks for sharing this interesting and informative article.
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