Fun(ctional) Yoga: Finding Your Way Into the Body

Here's something I've come to understand about yoga that changed everything for me: We don't use the body to get into a pose; we use the pose to get into the body.

Sit with that for a moment. It's a quiet revolution.

Most of us learned yoga by watching. We tried to make our bodies look like the teacher's body, or like that impossibly bendy person on the mat in front of us. We contorted ourselves toward some imagined ideal, chasing a shape we saw in a book or on Instagram. But this aesthetic approach (yoga as performance) misses the point entirely.

What are we actually trying to do?

If your intention is health rather than gymnastics, then what matters isn't how a pose looks but how it feels. This is the functional approach, and it rests on three simple keys:

First, know what you're targeting. Every posture has an intention, a specific area of the body where you're trying to create sensation, to generate beneficial stress in the tissues.

Second, pay attention to what's actually happening. Where do you feel it? Not where should you feel it, but where do you?

Third (and this is where the freedom lives): if you're not feeling it in the targeted area, change what you're doing. Wiggle. Adjust. Make it dramatic if you need to. Find the position that creates the sensation you're after.

The liberation of imperfection

Moving away from an aesthetically pleasing alignment is allowed.

Read that again. It's permission to stop judging yourself by external standards. Your body is unique. Your bones are shaped differently, your proportions are your own, your history lives in your tissues. How could one set of instructions possibly work for everyone?

Alignment matters, yes. But alignment is personal, not universal. The cues that help one person might be meaningless or even harmful for another. Your challenge is to find the alignment that works for your body, for your intention.

The simplest test

If you're feeling it, you're doing it.

No one else can tell you whether you're "doing it right" by looking at you from the outside. Only you know whether the pose is working, whether it's reaching the places it needs to reach, creating the sensations it needs to create.

This approach frees us from dogma and images of perfection. Not everyone can do every pose, and that's completely fine. What matters is whether you're achieving your intention. And if one posture doesn't generate the stress you need, there are always others to try.

Practice with attention

Have an intention. Then practice with attention. If something isn't working, find another approach.

That's applying yoga functionally. That's using the pose to get into the body. Not performing for anyone, not even for yourself, but simply arriving where you are.

L.