Ep 106: The Myth of Perfect Alignment

In this episode, we’re talking about one of yoga’s most persistent myths: that there’s such a thing as perfect alignment. Many of us were taught that safety and skill are determined by how closely a student’s alignment matches the positioning that you saw in a picture. However, modern understanding of anatomy, pain science, and the nervous system tells us a very different story.

Alignment looks and feels different for every student. Their structure, past injuries, and proprioceptive awareness all influence how a student experiences movement. 

I’ll talk about how & if you should pause your class when your cues aren’t landing, how to communicate function rather than shape, and how to help students explore alignment through curiosity instead of correction. You'll understand how nervous system regulation plays into physical expression and how fostering safety can change the way your students move and learn.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a more modern perspective on alignment and practical ways to bring individualized, inclusive, and evidence-informed teaching into your classes. 

If you want to evolve past outdated alignment rules and start teaching from a place of understanding, compassion, and adaptability, this is the episode. 

Transcript

Monica: 3:59

In this episode, we're talking about one of yoga's most persistent myths, that there's such a thing as perfect alignment. Many of us were taught that safety and skill are determined by how closely a student's alignment matches. The positioning that you saw in a picture, but modern understanding of anatomy, pain, science, and the nervous system tells a very different story. Alignment looks and feels different for every student. Their structure, past injuries, and proprioceptive awareness, all influence how a student experiences movement. This episode is about understanding why some students can't square their hips forward or stack their joints, not because they're doing something wrong, but because their body simply isn't built for it, and that's okay. In this episode, I'll also talk about how to pause class when your cues aren't landing, how to communicate. Function rather than shape, and how to help students explore alignment through curiosity instead of correction, I'll explain how nervous system regulation plays into physical expression and how fostering safety can change the way your students move and learn. By the end of this episode, you'll have a more modern perspective on alignment and practical ways to bring. Individualized, inclusive and evidence-informed teaching into your classes. If you want to evolve past outdated alignment rules and start teaching from a place of understanding, compassion, and adaptability, this is the episode owe. Welcome to the Essential Conversations for Yoga Teachers Podcast with me. I'm Monica Bright and I've been teaching yoga and running my yoga business for over a decade. This is the podcast for you. If you are a yoga teacher, you're looking for support. You love to be in conversation, and you're a lifelong student. In this podcast, I'll share with you. My life as a yoga teacher, the lessons I've learned, my process for building my business and helpful ideas, tools, strategies and systems I use and you can use so that your business thrives. We'll cover a diverse range of topics that will help you, whether you're just starting out or you've got years under your belt and you wanna dive deep and set yourself up for success. I am so glad you're here. Listen, I don't take myself too seriously, so expect to hear some laughs along the way. Now let's do this together. Oh, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system insights, plus all the real life knowledge you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. Okay. There's a longstanding belief in the yoga world that there's such a thing as perfect alignment. We're taught to look for specific shapes, specific angles, and specific joint placements that supposedly make a pose safe or correct. For many of us, especially when we were newer teachers, alignment felt like the holy grail. Right. If we could just teach the right cues, students would find the right shape and experience the intended benefit of the pose. But over time, most teachers start to realize that this idea of perfect alignment isn't as perfect as it sounds. In fact, it's one of the biggest myths. That puts unnecessary limits on both you and your students. Here's the truth. There's no single alignment that works for everybody. What we often see as misalignment is sometimes just a reflection of a student's individual structure, history and movement capacity, every student's body tells a different story. Stories of past injuries, habitual patterns, compensations and unique bone structures, and no amount of verbal queuing adjustments or how often you teach a pose will override those differences. So let's start with something that I'm sure has happened to you as it has happened to me. You give a cue, maybe something simple like square your hips to the front of the mat, and some students adjust right away. Some hesitate, and some seem to completely ignore the instruction, but what if it's not that they're. Ignoring you. What if their body simply cannot do what you're asking? Sometimes students don't realize they aren't doing what you're asking them to do. This isn't defiance. It's a lack of proprioceptive awareness, meaning they may not actually feel what their hips, shoulders, or maybe their spine is doing in space. Their internal map of their body doesn't quite match reality. This happens to everyone, even experienced students, and it's one of the reasons why verbal alignment cues aren't always effective. Other times students might hear what you're saying, understand what you're saying intellectually, but still struggle to translate it into movement. This is often a communication gap, not between you and the student personally, but between language and lived experience. Words like. Draw your ribs in or lift from your pelvic floor or even spiral your inner thighs back. You've heard that I'm sure in downward facing dog. These words can mean completely different things depending on the student's background, their body awareness, and even their emotional state on a particular day. And then there are students who simply cannot achieve the alignment you're describing because their body isn't built for it. Their hip sockets face a different direction. Their femur length or their spine curvature changes. How opposed expresses in their body or an old injury has reduced their available range of motion. Trying to push these students into textbook alignment doesn't make the pose more effective or safe. It will often do the opposite. It can lead to frustration, compensation, or discomfort that takes them further away from the intention of the pose. And in the meantime, you've got your head tilted to the side wondering why are they moving like this? This is not what I queued. Trust me. This happened to me and it changed the way I approach teaching completely. This is where individualized movement comes in. When we shift our focus away from achieving the perfect shape and instead towards the function of the movement, everything changes instead of asking yourself, does this look right? We begin asking, what is this pose trying to do for the student in front of me? That's where teaching becomes truly responsive and inclusive. In these moments, your ability to pause becomes a superpower. When you sense that multiple students are struggling with an alignment cue, that's an invitation to stop and teach. Take a moment to ex. Explain what the intention of the cue is. Maybe you show a variation or have students explore the movement in smaller, more accessible ways. For example, instead of continuing to cue Warrior two endlessly for pelvic positioning, or the front knee stacked over the ankle. Pause and invite students to experiment with shifting their stance, exploring how their hips feel in different positions, and noticing which variation gives them more freedom or maybe a feeling of more stability. Okay. This doesn't just help students find more accessible options. It teaches them how to feel their way into poses instead of performing them. It builds body literacy confidence. And a sense of ownership over their practice. And as a teacher, it teaches you to be adaptable, to lead with curiosity instead of control. And to trust that students can learn to lean into the intelligence of their own bodies Now. Now we also need to talk about the nervous system's role in alignment. When students are in pain or maybe they're feeling anxious or unsure, they're. their soft tissues might tighten or brace reflexively. Their body is simply trying to protect them in those moments. Alignment cues won't register effectively because their body isn't in a receptive state By creating an environment of safety and curiosity through the tone of our voice. The pacing of our words and reassurance that this is a safe space to explore movement. We can help their nervous system downshift, making space for genuine exploration rather than forceful creation. As teachers, it's also important to question our own relationship with alignment. Many yoga teachers were taught that alignment equals safety and deviating from it could lead to injury. But current movement research shows that safety is not determined by perfect positioning. It's about load management variability, and adaptability. In other words, being able to move in different ways is often more protective than staying in one ideal alignment. Here's something to consider. Are you queuing for alignment because it serves the function of the pose or because it makes the pose look a certain way? And what might happen if you gave your students permission to explore what alignment feels best in their own bodies, even if it doesn't look traditional? Students who learn this way, develop trust in their body's feedback and resilience through movement variability, but we have to give them the space, the freedom, and sometimes the permission to trust themselves. This is a true sign of progress. Especially for students with pain and injuries, not the depth of their forward fold or how stacked their joints appear in Mountain Pose. In the end, the myth of perfect alignment keeps both you and your students from progressing. It limits creativity. It fosters comparison, and it can even make students feel like they're doing yoga wrong. But when we move away from this myth and into individualized movement, we honor the students' entire experience, the whole human being in front of us, their mental and physical history, their body structure, and their potential for recovery and growth. So the next time you're teaching and you notice students struggling with a cue, consider slowing down. Offer them the gift of time, the gift of space, the gift of curiosity and exploration. Ask questions like, what are you noticing here? And then be quiet, or does this variation offer you more ease or more challenge again, once you're quiet after these questions, you give them the space to answer them for themselves. Invite them into a dialogue with their own bodies rather than dictating a single right alignment or positioning. This approach won't just transform how your students move. It will transform how they. Feel about themselves in their yoga practice. It helps to make yoga more inclusive, more sustainable, and more adaptable for each student.. Because yoga isn't about perfect alignment. It's about an ongoing relationship with your body, and that relationship is unique for every single student who comes to your class. As you ponder this conversation, I want to leave you with a few thoughts to sit with when you go to teach your next class. Take a mental note of the way you look at your students, not through the lens of what needs to be fixed or corrected, but through the reality of who is actually in front of you. Every student's body is a reflection of a lifetime of movement patterns, pain and injury experiences, and stories you may never fully know. Alignment then becomes less about angles and more about how you attune to your students and your ability to meet them exactly where they are. You don't have to know every anatomical detail or have the perfect cue for every pose. You just have to stay curious. Keep asking yourself, what does this student need to feel supported right now? When you lead from that place, you move beyond technique and into teaching as a living, breathing relationship. One that evolves each time a student takes your class. So instead of striving for perfect alignment, what if you aimed for perfect connection? What if the real goal wasn't to make a pose look a certain way, but to help a student feel safe enough to explore what's possible in their own body? That's where the real teaching begins. So take a moment to reflect on this. How might your classes change if you release the idea of ideal alignment and instead focused on helping students experience movement in a way that feels freeing, supported, and uniquely their own? This is where growth happens, where you evolve and mature, and where your students realize you are a different kind of yoga teacher. Remember when we talked about separating yourself from the pack? This right here is the work. Understanding anatomy, biomechanics, and the effects yoga Asana have on the body helps you help your students. If you've been enjoying these episodes, I know that you are a yoga teacher who's ready to teach with more intention and less fear around injuries. Let's continue to raise the bar for how yoga supports real bodies in real life. It is so important for us to have this conversation so that you remember that students of all shapes, sizes, alignment, and abilities come to your classes and you can serve all of them. You know that my goal is for you to love the yoga teaching life. It's important to understand movement and the issues students come to your classes with. Subscribe to the podcast so you're always in the know when a new episode drops, and share it with another yoga teacher who you think would love to be in on these conversations. And finally, thank you for helping to spread the word about this podcast. Alright. Thank you for listening. That's it for now. Bye.