Beyond Alignment: Rethinking How We Move in Yoga

From Mechanical Cues to Embodied Integration

For a good while now, the yoga community has been taking a more critical and nuanced look at what alignment actually means in the context of yoga asana. It’s a conversation worth continuing. Many of us have been practicing and teaching for decades, only to find that popular alignment cues often contradict one another — and in many cases, create more problems than they solve.

Some of the most common joint, muscle, and ligament issues we see today stem from our own misplaced confidence that we know the correct ways to move — both for ourselves and for our students. Most traditional alignment cues are based on mechanical, musculoskeletal concepts: stack this, square that, draw this in, pull that back, rotate this. Despite our precision — or perhaps sometimes because of it — we continue to see a high incidence of injuries, especially among experienced practitioners with years on the mat. It may be time to question some of our core assumptions.

The thing that no one wants to say is that so many of us who have practiced with the most precision and “alignment” for many, many years have ultimately done harm to our major joints…including our spines. It’s just a fact. Sure, there are serious “asana” practitioners now in their 70s and 80s who never developed joint problems — of course. And yet, we should not turn our gaze away from how much harm was done by so many of us to ourselves — not because we were stupid, but because we were devoted and committed. We were experimenting! We wanted to go all the way with yoga, and that included asana.

What Does "Alignment" Actually Mean?

Let’s start with the term itself:

align | əˈlīn | verb

• Place or arrange things in a straight line

• Put things into correct or appropriate relative positions

• Lie in a straight line or in correct relative positions

alignment | əˈlĪnmənt | noun

• Arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative position

• The act of aligning parts of a machine (e.g., oil changes and wheel alignments)

These definitions highlight an important point: the very word "alignment" evokes images of straight lines, angles, and mechanical positioning. Even if we intellectually understand that the body is not a machine, the language we use inevitably influences how we think and teach. The idea of achieving correct angles and precise positioning misses something fundamental — the human body is not a static structure, but a dynamic, living system.

A Flawed Paradigm

For decades, yoga alignment has been taught like engineering: dissect the body into parts, stack the bones, align the joints, and create a "correct" shape. A common cue like "stack your bones" in tadasana (mountain posture) exemplifies this approach. It treats the joints like mechanical hinges that transfer force from one segment to the next — a linear, isolated chain.

But this is an incomplete and even misleading way to understand human movement. Joints, especially, should not be the primary structures responsible for bearing and transferring movement forces. Instead, forces should be distributed through a much more integrated, whole-body system.

Our joints, muscles, and bones are embedded in a vast, responsive network of fascia and other soft tissues that dynamically adapt to load and movement. When we fixate on mechanical stacking or placing, we miss the opportunity to work with this adaptable support system — and we may inadvertently overload vulnerable areas by forcing them to act as rigid conduits for force, rather than allowing force to flow through and around them.

Rethinking Alignment: Is It Even the Right Word?

This raises a fundamental question: Is "alignment" even the right concept for what we are trying to cultivate in yoga? Can we actually arrive at alignment through a prescribed set of musculoskeletal actions? Is alignment a fixed place — a destination — or is it something more fluid and relational? Might it be something deeper — a dynamic state of integrated balance between inner and outer forces, consciousness and movement?

You might already sense this shift happening in your own practice — the times when a posture or movement feels less like arranging body parts and more like riding a current, a wave of breath and prana moving you. That’s the beginning of this deeper relationship. The process may begin with glimpses of joy arising in the body.

Beyond the Mechanics

To be clear, considering the relationship between bones and joints isn’t inherently wrong. Emerging research into biomechanics and movement science offers valuable insights. But the problem arises when we cling too tightly to any fixed notion of what alignment "should" look like or “how to do it”. When we think we know how a pose is supposed to be, we risk overriding our body’s natural intelligence — the innate, dynamic flow of prana that supports healthy, adaptable movement.

Far too often, rigid alignment principles disrupt rather than enhance this natural flow. They can lock us into shapes that feel technically "correct" but block the subtle, intelligent support of prana and fascia working in harmony.

The Call to Go Deeper

This is an invitation to step back and examine the assumptions we’ve inherited about alignment. Many of these assumptions come from mechanistic, Newtonian models of the body — useful in their time, but increasingly outdated as we deepen our understanding of the body’s holistic, biointelligent nature.

Newtonian physics gave us invaluable insights into the external, structural world. But today, we know that beneath that structure is a world of energy, vibration, and relational dynamics. The human body, like everything else in the universe, is fundamentally an energetic system — not a collection of isolated parts.

A Softer, More Resilient Support System

Shifting from a mechanical to an energetic paradigm requires a significant adjustment in thinking. But the good news is that our bodies already contain tissues that know how to work this way. The fascia, a continuous web of connective tissue, offers precisely the kind of adaptable, whole-body support we need.

The fascia’s biotensegrity — its ability to distribute forces across the entire system — allows us to move with greater resilience and ease. This is the kind of support we should be cultivating in our practice: fluid, responsive, and integrated.

Moving as a Whole, Not in Parts

A critical shift in how we approach movement is to truly understand that nothing in the body acts alone. While we have many distinct parts, our natural state is not one of isolated actions, but of interconnected wholeness. Over-differentiating the parts — “Place this here, now lift through this, swing that around, but don’t let it disturb what you just did… now breathe” — fragments our experience and disconnects us from the larger intelligence of the body.

There’s nothing wrong with focusing on musculoskeletal actions, but they are only a small part of the whole-body story. Moving individual parts can be useful, but without integrating them into their natural, fluid context, we miss the deeper experience of embodiment. Movement is always a whole-body-mind-spirit event.

Asana, when approached with curiosity and presence, becomes a powerful tool for embodied inquiry — a way to sense and explore not only how we move, but who we are as moving, breathing beings. Our tissues, our breath, our awareness — they are all woven together, offering us insight into our patterns, our stories, and our evolving sense of self.

When we release the urge to micromanage every joint, angle, and muscle, we open to a more natural, holistic experience of movement — one where prana flows freely through the whole body, not just through isolated pathways. This shift invites us to experience yoga not simply as the arrangement of body parts into shapes, but as a living inquiry into how we inhabit ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.

A New Paradigm: Embodied Integration

The future of alignment — if we even keep that word — lies in integration.

• Movement that arises from and supports the whole system.

• Movement that flows relationally within the body and its environment.

• Movement that knows the richness of its own humanity.

• Movement that is expressive of consciousness into form.

• Movement that is fed and supported by embodied wholeness even as it expresses differing facets of itself.

• Movement that arises from embodied curiosity about life and meaning.

Embodied integration may not be possible as long as we are so fixated on viewing our bodies’ functioning and movement in mechanical ways. Our western culture remains committed to the superstition of materialism. We are born and raised into thinking that solidity is real. We feel in control of things when we think we know how they work, even if the oversimplification is so powerfully limiting to our lived experience.

This is especially tough when applied to our bodies; our bodies are not machines and do not function with mechanistic principles…at all. When we continue the mechanistic ways of perceiving and moving our bodies, unfortunately we lock ourselves out of what might be a fuller experience of who and what we actually are.

A Journey Worth Taking

This is your invitation: let go of the notion that alignment is a fixed destination, and instead embrace the unfolding, beautiful journey of embodied integration.

Most importantly — be kind to yourself along the way. None of us had all the answers when we started, and we still don’t. We’re all navigating this path together, learning and growing with every step.

Learning and growing is the heart of the journey. Explore, absorb, take it all in, and when the time feels right — offer back what you've learned. Your work, your dharma, your love — your gift to the world, born from your dedication and your passion for life.