Yoga students sometimes have the question, “am I doing it right?”
We all want to be “right,” but this question alone could actually be the one thing that stands between you and a more skilled practice. Rather than rehearsing worries or anxiety on our mats, we could experience our own true nature- that is the ultimate goal of yoga!
Let’s answer the question in a few different ways so we can dissolve the doubt and find even more joy through the practice.
Am I doing it the way my teacher wants me to do it?
It’s important for all yoga students to know that the classical yogic texts rarely even mention physical poses, let alone precise instructions for how to do them. Scholars continue to research and debate the origin of the yoga poses we practice today. So in order to be “right” by your teacher, you’d have to know their training background.
Most modern yoga postures evolved from students of Krishnamacharya, a yogi who established his school in Mysore, India in the 1920s and 30s. Each of his three most prominent students had his own “right” way to practice yoga:
K. Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga yoga focuses on the more energetic, flowing style of vinyasa.
B.K.S. Iyengar created the Iyengar method, as described in his 1966 best-selling book Light on Yoga. Iyengar focuses on the detail and precision of alignment and use of props.
T.K.V. Desikachar’s Viniyoga focuses more on therapeutic and individualized applications of yoga poses.
Depending on how your teacher identifies with any of these lineages, he or she will place more or less emphasis on alignment. If a cue or pose doesn’t make sense to you, always ask “why?” A good teacher will be able to explain the intention behind their instruction.
Keep in mind that your teacher’s “why” might not even be the “right” instruction for you. In advanced teacher training, I had one master teacher tell us to “tuck the tailbone” and “lengthen the low back” in preparation for backbending. Another master teacher instructed us to do the exact opposite. I was confused for a good year as to which cue was “right.” Eventually, through practice and getting to know my own body, I learned that tucking my tailbone in backbends was not a useful cue for me.
In teaching yoga, I’ve come to know that there are as many ways to teach a pose as there are bodies in the world. What’s “right” is not a universal principle, but rather skill in action, which will vary from body to body and evolve over time. Be wary of anyone that tells you there’s only one right way to do something; it’s an attempt to undercut your critical thinking and either intentionally or in ignorance take away your agency.
Am I doing it the way it looks in the pictures?
Another meaning of “right” is less about an external authority telling you what to do and not do and more about trying to achieve an aesthetic ideal.
This approach to asana often fetishizes symmetry and, like dance, the “lines” of a pose. As a child, I really wanted to take dance lessons and my mom never let me. Today, I feel lucky that she didn’t because the world of competitive dance, as with all competitive athletics, is not meant to be sustainable. Dancers sacrifice their bodies, practicing through injuries, exploiting hypermobility, in the name of their art. Though making art can be a noble endeavor which feeds the soul, yoga’s intention is primarily focused on the soul-feeding alone, not the beautiful shapes that may or may not happen along the way.
When your yoga practice becomes a performance, it means your ego took the lead. This ego-driven yoga is perpetuated by magazine covers, Instagram feeds, and well-meaning but misguided teachers who demo and instruct complex peak poses that, though aspirational to some, are alienating to most.
Yoga is about longevity not burnout. It’s about turning your attention inward not performing for an audience. It’s about showing up day after day to your mat to work through all the messiness of life not polishing a routine to be executed perfectly on demand. So, in considering if you’re doing a pose “right,” go inward to how it feels and stop worrying about how it looks.
Am I doing it in a way that will achieve a particular end?
Having ruled out an aesthetically “beautiful” pose as a valid end-result, let’s unpack another way we look at “doing it right.”
In a physical practice, poses can have therapeutic applications like correcting imbalance, increasing mobility of the joints, etc. This type of practice requires you to understand that the body is not made up of separate parts that move in isolation, but rather the body is a holistic and fully integrated system: one little shift in one part of the body can drastically affect the function and sensations in another part of the body.
If you want to work towards a specific goal with posture or mobility, you have to be a detective and get to the root cause. For example, to alleviate lower back pain, it might feel great to stretch your lower back in child’s pose, but that addresses the symptoms instead of erasing the underlying cause. To really reach your end-goal of no back pain, you could try stretching the hamstrings to level out your pelvis (so that it does not pull on the lower back), or stretching the outer hips to reduce sciatica. Maybe your lower back pain comes compensating for core strength, and you shift your focus to poses like navasana (boat) or utkatasana (chair). You’d then evaluate those movements’ effectiveness in reducing lower back pain.
Even in the noble pursuit of pain-reduction, you’ll notice that “right” is driven by an internal exploration, rather than a cut-and-paste prescription for making your body fit into a certain shape.
Am I doing it safely?
Students, teachers, as well as studio owners obviously share a concern about safety. The truth is that most yoga injuries come from repetitive strain over years of practice. For example, if you practice chaturanga with your shoulders all the way to the ground 40 times a practice, every day for 10 years, you’ll probably be more susceptible to shoulder injuries. If you’re working with an experienced teacher, he or she will help you correct harmful habits within the first few classes.
Sadly, many yoga schools have teachers memorize and parrot rote cues, so a lot of the critical thinking and intention behind what is considered “safe/unsafe” alignment is lost. So instead of teaching teachers and students to think critically about what constitutes safety, we rely instead on arbitrary cues for alignment that shut down conversation and exploration and make people think there’s a “safe” (i.e. “right”) way to do a pose, which is also just an arbitrary arrangement of limbs to begin with!
For example, a common cue for knee health is to stack the knee over the ankle (or sometimes arch of the foot) in standing poses like Warrior II. But what makes someone’s knee going past their toes unsafe in Warrior II and not in a pose like Garland (aka Malasana, Frog squat)? And isn’t the functional movement of the knee joint meant to be able to bend past 90 degrees anyway?
Likewise, in Tree pose, you often hear teachers cue not to place the foot on the knee to “protect” it. In actuality, unless you’re playing a high impact sport where the knee is hit with force from the side, there is little danger of injuring your knee by placing the foot there.
The over-emphasis on “safe” alignment has led to a bit of fear-mongering and the illusory comfort of safety. The lack of confidence this instills in students keeps them dependent on an outside and seemingly authoritative source for how they should practice instead of listening to the innate intelligence of their own bodies.
It’s not about what it looks like.
Please remember that yoga is more about regulating the nervous system than about contorting your body into any physical shape. So let’s reframe the question not around alignment but around the breath and the ease one feels when in a pose. This makes the “rightness” of a pose less objective or verifiable by a teacher.
Okay, am I meditating right?
Even in the more subtle and subjective aspects of meditation, students want to do it “right.” Some sources will have us believe that doing meditation right will cease all thought. From this false promise, we become incredibly discouraged when we fail to beat the mind into submission.
Beginner meditators must realize that every person encounters hindrances when faced with their own minds. When you start to feel lethargy, restlessness, doubt, or avoidance, this is not you failing and doing meditation “wrong;” it’s an anticipated part of the experience for everybody. Just like yoga, depending on the lineage, you might receive more or less instruction from a teacher around “correct” ways to meditate, from highly specific techniques to overcome these hindrances, to the simple, Zen-like instruction of “just sit.”
In conclusion
I always say that there is “progress” in yoga, but it’s evolutionary not predetermined; it’s progress from something but not towards anything. If we drop the question “am i doing it right?”, we free ourselves from an end-goal and can more fully appreciate the process. We transcend our egos and dissolve the suffering that striving and judgement brings. We can explore our bodies and minds on our own terms, and begin to see that we are already perfect as we are. Without “right,” we can be fearless about our doing and more present in our being.