Side bridge or side forearm plank or even side crawl. More and more the shapes I’m exploring on the yoga mat do not have definitive yoga names. It’s an exciting time which means it’s also challenging, because asana not movement is the language spoken in studios. I’m broadening that vocabulary. I’m not turning things into interpretive dance, but I am pulling from other disciplines so the yoga serves the person on their mat in front of me. Unlike a set sequence that becomes familiar and predictable, this asks for another level of your attention. It involves motor learning.

Since yoga is more than the poses, the poses shall be broadened, expanded, deconstructed, regressed and recreated to fit the practitioners needs. Without limit. So mote it be.

Previously, the postural yoga I taught included just a few dozen poses. They were presented to me in a way that I wholesale believed in their superior link to mindfulness, their “realness” and their potential to fix and heal. No matter the group - a studio full of stretchy spandex wearing folk, newbies, corporate desk dwellers, athletes. There was little that set the yoga apart even though the populations were vastly different. Yet applying the same few dozen asanas into every teaching scenario does not work.

2019: The response is mostly good. Sometimes people pass and wait for the next recognizable yoga pose. Sometimes people are intrigued and ask questions mid move or after class. I get a lot of, “that was...so different.” Still I get nervous, because I have a human brain which cares what people think, but I can’t go back to homogenous, on-way asana.