Reflections on 30-years; Alignment

You may think that writing about alignment would arise spontaneously for the founder of Alignment Yoga, though I’ve struggled to coalesce my thoughts into a manageable blog posting. After some serious procrastination, I’ve decided that tonight is the night to put fingers to keyboard, and tease apart some ideas about alignment.

In the prior blog posting, I discussed how simply feeling your body is the essence of practice. Independent of technique, cues or alignment, embodiment is perhaps the greatest gift that can arise from investing the time and energy into mind/body practice. Riding on the coattails of this de-emphasis on form is a de-emphasis on postural alignment. This was and is intentional - alignment is overrated.

Many people inhabit bodies that may be considered misaligned, yet experience little if any pain. Other people may suffer terribly with the supposed symptoms of misalignment, yet their bodies are fundamentally well aligned. In working with bodies, causality is often conspicuously in short supply, and the fabled misalignment = pain has attracted far too much press.

When I was a boy, my Father hoped that his love of hunting would rub off on me. To that end, he taught me to dissemble and clean guns, we spent hours shooting at targets, and he also taught me the art of tracking animals in the forest. While I ended up a non-hunting vegan, I have long cherished the lessons that we shared in the forest.

My Dad first taught me this lesson about straight lines; nature doesn't seem interested. Humans like straight lines, and the presence of a straight line in the forest means that you’re probably on someone else’s property. My Dad pointed at trees and rivers, and challenged me to find anything in macroscopic nature that wasn’t curvilinear. I couldn’t, and still cannot. Nature twists and turns in harmony with the vital forces, whereas a straight line rigidly resists. As our bodies are living expressions of wild nature, the supposition that hips and shoulders should be or must be perfectly aligned is inherently at odds with the natural world. And for better or worse, I’ve watched many a mind/body student struggle mightily to rectify misalignments that are more than likely functional adaptations to the experience of embodied life.

Big Sandy Lake, MN
While this vegan didn't take to hunting, I cherish time spent in nature.

Lesson number one on alignment; relax. Rarely is postural misalignment the cause of what ails you. Potentially a contributor, though rarely the cause.

Now, in a seemingly contradictory series of statements;

• Humans tend to move from the places that are stronger and avoid the places that are weaker.
• Similarly, we tend to move from the places that are already mobile, in avoidance of the places that are stiffer.
• Over accumulating years (aging), the strong areas get stronger, the weak areas get weaker, the stiff areas get stiffer, and the mobile areas may become hyper mobile.
• This embodied expression of entropy can be problematic, and some modest amount of attention to bodily alignment can have some utility.
• The key point is moderation!

The challenge in the mind/body practices is to primarily experience the body as it is, misalignments and all. Non-judgmental awareness is the alpha and omega of embodied practice. In order to address the bulleted points above, some modest amount of attention to alignment can be beneficial, though is frequently overdone.

How to proceed? Observe your body as-it-is. If and when you observe misalignment, spent some time with those feelings; observe how they feel in your body, observe the thoughts that arise in your mind, and experience the emotions that may accompany these observations. That’s it. Breathe.

If, after some time, the misalignments still seem important, compassionately work with them. Please keep in mind that locked-short tends to attract the most attention, though locked-long is the more common cause of misalignment. When in doubt; strengthen, rather than stretch.

While here’s far more that I can write about this subject, I'll save it for another day. I’d best feed the cats and work a bit more on my MS thesis before turning in for the night.

Thanks for reading!