Exact & Perfect Alignment

When I started practicing Yoga, I was a student at an Iyengar studio and thought this path was all about alignment of the physical body. My own scoliosis dovetailing into this belief system, I learned as much as I could about precise placement of arms and legs and how to use the rope wall and the chair and all of the props. This has definitely served me in my own healing as well as the skill set I’m able to offer others. I’ve been on the road this Winter and am soon guest teaching a ropes workshop at a studio in Carlsbad, California. It’s been really wonderful to reflect on the fact that I have a specialty that can be of any value.

But the road also has me thinking of the vast many other definitions of alignment beyond just the physical. And how it’s possible to shift our own interpretation of alignment at any particular milestone in space and time. For me physical alignment is often still my aim, and I have all my carefully cultivated practices and poses and lifestyle things that keep my body just so. But on the road I’ve found myself willing to make little trades and compromises in order to experience alignment in other ways. For instance, driving from WY to CA wasn’t super easy on my body. Bopping between a couple AirBNBs, sleeping on different mattresses, working from different chairs all aren’t ideal either. But here in the warmth of the sun and the freedom to explore and connect, I feel more emotional/spiritual alignment than I would spending the winter with too much solitude in too cold of a place.

There’s also the misalignment of eating unfamiliar foods, but the alignment of finding some new restaurants that I really love. Or of missing my home studio where I usually practice, but finding new studios that expand my horizons and nourish me in different ways. The difficulty of leaving known friends, but the blossoming of making new ones.

In totality it becomes something of a surrender to the give and take of life, as mused in my favorite Joni Mitchell lyric “something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day”.

And for me the true value of Yoga doesn’t come in memorizing and executing proper anatomical cues. It comes in knowing that Yoga is a wide and diverse set of tools ready to meet you wherever you are in life. It is physical poses and the breath. But it’s also the gentle willingness to be OK with not being as you were the day before. And knowing the change isn’t a loss, it’s an evolution, it’s a new destination. And with time Yoga creatively fills your body, mind, spirit with ideas of how to find just the support you need in any given moment. As iRest, one of my Yoga Nidra lineages would say, always knowing the “exact and perfect response” to the moment we face. It is my experience that this is possible and true, and I’m grateful every day for the unchanging way that Yoga meets my forever changing landscapes. I wish this for you too.

Namaste,

Hannah