Freeform yoga is a truly customized yoga practice. It’s a qualitative leap beyond the appropriate caution you hear so often from a teacher to always honor what your body needs and to not move into pain. An attentive freeform practice – in which you make no decision in advance about what you’re going to do from moment to moment – takes that idea a giant step further along the same trajectory, tapping into your innate sensitivity to move in whatever way best clears the blocked channels through which your body’s energy flows.

This ‘methodless method’ of cultivating a home practice has been around for eons. But it’s elusive for many of us as we’re accustomed to striving to make our poses look a certain way or produce the result that we’re told from all the books and videos to expect. It’s natural if practicing this way feels strange since most of your experience on the mat so far may have revolved around following instructions from a teacher or a video, or working through a prescribed series of poses in a book or manual.

There’s nothing wrong with learning this way. If it weren’t for learning this way, most of us would probably have never opened the door to yoga in our lives. We have to start somewhere, after all. But do yourself a big, loving favor and make room for the notion that it’s okay to do ‘illegal’ poses. It’s okay, even desirable, at some point on your journey with yoga, to cut loose and customize your practice, moving away from the mechanical routines that informed your safe alignment and toward a practice in which, because you’re listening so attentively moment to moment, your alignment is not only safe, it’s exactly right.

Know the Poses as Templates, Not Destinations

Life’s stresses and strains, sitting at a desk all day, or any repetitive movement or poor postural habit creates contraction, stiffness, and weakness. Yoga, of course, is an elegant metaphysical science, one of whose limbs includes thousands of poses that open up areas where people are typically blocked or contracted. Each pose is, in essence, a specific shape that emphasizes opening a specific area or areas.

Triangle pose (trikonasana), for example, builds strength in the thighs and stretches the groins, hamstrings, calves, and chest. Bound-angle pose (baddha konasana) stretches the inner thighs and knees. Seated forward fold (paschimottanasana) stretches the thighs, shoulders and hamstrings. But the degree to which each of those poses can stretch or strengthen individual parts varies tremendously based on how you move into the pose, where you choose to take the emphasis point of the stretch, and the balance between doing and non-doing.

Since yoga is about moving out the mental, physical, and spiritual obstructions that constrain the inspired life-energy that you’re made of, one creative and extraordinary way to approach a home practice is to get out of your own way and allow movement to happen. And to therefore tailor your practice to what is most appropriate and freeing for your whole self during that session on the mat.

Instead of orchestrating the poses and sequences, relax deeply and listen attentively to the subtle messages your body conveys about what it most needs. Relax even more deeply, connecting to whatever image, sense, or deity connects you to your truest, deepest self. Just be there, and act as a willing and grateful witness to the body’s own intuitively healing meditative motion. Use the general shapes within each pose as rough draft inside which you have full license to explore the entire landscape as you’re guided to.

First: Get Quiet

It’s a good idea to begin with a quiet meditation or centering, getting as deeply relaxed as possible. Keep it simple. If your mind is racing, then find something to which you can tether your attention: you can begin counting your breaths backwards from fifty down to zero. Each time a thought creeps in, think nothing of it and just return your attention to your breath. Sink into and stay interested in the stillness. You’re not flat-lining here. What you’re doing is sinking further and further into the mind-state where you’ve stilled the chatter in your mind enough to hear and appropriately respond.

Make no effort to control the breath here. Let your breath be as free and full as possible, without straining in any way to change it.

Another technique that works for many people is to focus attention on a distinct “something,” such as a candle flame or a stone or really absolutely anything, and fully participate in the experience of being wholeheartedly interested in the object. The idea here is to use whatever works best for you on any given day to still the mind’s noise enough to stop being quite so involved with and distracted by your thoughts.

Don’t make this complicated: simply be quiet and listen.

Quiet listening is a very big deal. Huge things happen. But don’t make getting to that quiet listening place a complicated event.

Next: Listen and Be Moved . . .

Wait for the inner cue. If movement doesn’t happen at first, be content where you are, sitting or lying down. Give the stillness a chance to cook. Chances are, if you’re patient and stay relaxed and gently alert, you’ll notice that a part of your body that’s in need of letting go of some contracted energy will send you a clear signal. But instead of immediately acting on that signal, relax even more deeply, and wait to see if something starts to move without your forcing it. The initial movements may be extremely subtle and small. Then, often—but not always—they evolve and change as more and more of the body gets involved.

There’s a delicate interplay between your natural, conditioned urge on the mat to coerce your body into shapes and staying in a state of meditative, relaxed alertness to allow the movement to happen.

The first few times you try practicing this way, you might be tempted to coax some movement along, concerned that if you don’t, you’ll be sitting around for an hour doing nothing at all. So if you’re moved to move -- do that. You’re not trying to fake yourself out here or make this some titanic struggle between the mind and body. Quit struggling. Let mind and body inform each other and align with the harmony that already exists.

If you’re familiar with ujjayi breathing, you can allow that breath to emerge. Ujjayi breathing is a beautiful way of letting the breath channel the energy into the places in your body that most need it. It also offers a nice aural cue to remember to let the breath animate the event. Let the shift from thinking to being quietly and attentively happen. But do pause often and listen with your whole being. Do that over and over. Sometimes it will feel just right to amp up the ‘current’ or muscular energy in a particular place. Other times the current will naturally want to slow down. But to know that, you need first to be still and listen. Allow those pulsations to happen and enjoy the ride.

You might be pretty surprised at what happens. Maybe you felt a twinge in your hip, but the part of your body that began to move was elsewhere at, for example, the neck. Just stay with what’s happening and trust that whatever it is that’s moving you knows what it’s doing.

To see how beautiful, creative, and joyful this kind of practice is, check out Erich Schiffmann’s beautiful video, “Freedom Style Yoga.”

You Can Most Definitely Do This

It may sound a bit mysterious or even wacky at first, but absolutely anyone can do this. Have you ever been lost in a moment, riveted to an unfolding drama of beauty in nature? That quality of presence during which, instead of mentally describing or editorializing on what you’re seeing, your thoughts have become a whisper as your attention shifts fully to what’s happening?

That’s what you’re doing in a freeform practice on the mat. You’re fully immersed in attending to each moment, animating your yoga practice with awareness so that it’s no longer a routine – even though it might look like it on the outside – but is instead a series of new Nows.

Make it less about striving to achieve and more about creating conditions where the obstacles and barriers that are between you and your connection to Spirit are free to evaporate.

And what you’ll have left? That’s yoga.

You’ve already got it, in fact. Your work on the mat, your life practice, is a graceful stagger to remove the constraints and begin fully savoring the source of joy that’s always been there and always will be there.

Oh yeah, that’s definitely yoga.