Jeffrey Reiff

There is no such thing as perfect posture! Seek a posture that works, not one that is aesthetically pleasing. As an overall concept, posture is not easy to define. It can refer to the alignment of the body’s parts, the average orientation of body parts over time, a particular position of the body, or the angular relations of the body parts.

The one overriding comment I would make when looking at yoga past, present, or future is that people should realize that there never was “one” yoga. Yoga has meant a variety of things to a host of people over the millennia: it can be a practice or the end result of a practice; it can be union or it can be divorce and liberation from a non-dualistic world view; it can be Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sufi, Christian, etc.

Modern yoga teacher training programs offer many standardized cues for each posture learned. Standards are nice—they make it much easier to learn how to guide students into the large number of poses taught in yoga classes, but unfortunately students are not standardized. There is no average student. The alignment cues absorbed by teacher trainees are approximations: at best they can serve as guidelines but they should never be used as dogmatic requirements.