What is the physical practice of yoga actually asking of us?
Let me begin with a clarification, because this matters: This reflection is about asana, the physical movement aspect of yoga. Not because it is the heart of yoga (it isn’t), and not because yoga can be reduced to poses (it cannot), but because asana is often the doorway through which many of us in the modern West first stumble into yoga. It’s the doorway we reach first, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with a backache, sometimes with the simple hope that movement might reconnect us to ourselves.
Here’s the conversation I’ve been having with myself lately (and one sparked by one of my movement thinker heroes, Peter Blackaby): since this doorway is so often the one we’re standing in, it’s worth asking with honesty: What are we actually doing when we come to a yoga class? And what might we really be practicing on the mat? (This is where Peter Blackaby’s work opens something for me. It’s a way of seeing movement not as a collection of parts, but as an expression of the whole living being. Check it out here. )
The Seduction of Shapes
Most anatomy teachings describe bodies like machines: biceps flex elbows, hip flexors lift legs, cores stabilize, hamstrings lengthen, and so on. This sounds tidy and satisfying… in the same way that Ikea instructions make sense until you try to assemble the bookshelf.
It’s easy to fall under the spell of shapes. Much of what some of us have experienced in yoga classes suggested, for instance, that if you could do a deep backbend, it meant you were open-hearted or if you could float into handstand, it meant you were brave. And somewhere along the way, these shapes became postural idols for many of us. Silent judges of worthiness, markers of progress, symbols of something we wanted to believe about ourselves. But a shape is simply a moment in time that tells us little about the inner life of the person inside it.
The truth of asana is not in the silhouette. It’s in the movement that carries us toward and away from the shape. It’s in the breath that steadies or stutters or the patterns we’ve practiced for years, long before we ever stepped onto a sticky mat.
Movement Truth: What the Body Actually Reveals
Peter Blackaby reminds us that bodies are not machines with separate, controllable parts. Your hamstrings don’t wake up in the morning with a to-do list. Your shoulders don’t tighten because they’re stubborn. And no one muscle has ever acted alone. Instead, movement is shaped by your whole history—your nervous system’s sense of safety, your habits of effort and avoidance, your breath’s willingness to accompany you, and your old protective strategies that still whisper beneath the skin. This is movement truth: the honest expression of how your entire being participates in experience. In this sense, asana becomes a kind of moving meditation, a way of seeing ourselves more clearly by feeling ourselves more completely.
If meditation is the practice of watching the patterns of the mind, asana is the practice of watching the patterns of the body. And those patterns are not disconnected from one another. Where the mind braces, the body braces. Where the mind hides, the body tightens. Where the mind is hesitant, the breath thins. To move with awareness is to meditate with the whole organism.
Reimagining the Peak Pose
I’m not against peak poses. In fact, I love the way they create a sense of arc, of inquiry, of possibility in a group class. But the peak pose is not the summit. It’s the clearing, the place where truth becomes visible. The question is not: “Can I do it?” But rather:
How does my whole self respond?
Where do I meet old habits?
Where do I borrow stability or abandon attention?
Where do I surprise myself with ease?
If the shape arrives, it arrives. If it never does, nothing is lost. The practice happens in the seeing. Can the ‘peak pose’ become a lens instead of a conquest?
When Shapes Lose Their Power, Space Opens
When we stop worshipping shapes:
variation becomes intelligence, not apology
teachers tend to speak more precisely and with more humility
the nervous system can relax into possibility rather than performance
The practice becomes so much simpler and truer. Instead of asking: “Can I achieve this shape?” We begin to ask: “What is this movement showing me about how I inhabit myself?” This is where yoga begins to change the parts of us that no photograph can ever capture.
And the postural idols? They can stay on the shelf.
