WHY ASANA? WHY POSTURAL YOGA?

Yoga has been around for thousands of years, and the most ancient scripts that were found during the Vedic period (1500 BCE) were dedicated to ritualistic practices, meditation, chanting, mythology and the importance of being attuned to nature. It’s only in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which dates between the 11th and 15th centuries CE that more postures were described as part of the yogic cosmovision for self-expansion and self awareness. And then with Krishnamacharya around the year 1800 CE that asana begun to have a lot of importance.

I believe that because we started to live in cities and working so many hours while becoming more and more disconnected from nature, asana and embodied practices became a way of keeping that intimacy with our wilderness, with our bodies.

Our body is the vehicle through which Prana (life force) flows. Posture influences the conditions for prana to move harmoniously. Through intelligent alignment, breath, attention, and energetic action, asana can:

• remove unnecessary obstruction

• balance effort and receptivity

• regulate breath

• create steadiness and internal spaciousness

• prepare the system for subtler energetic practices

The body reflects not only physical structure, but also lived history. Not necessarily as narrative memory, but as organisational patterns that have gradually consolidated in response to past experience:

• ways of protecting ourselves

• habitual breathing patterns

• chronic tension

• tendencies to collapse or over-hold

Over time, these responses become automated and no longer feel like choices. They become “who I am.”  A well-aligned and embodied asana practice, that doesn’t force the body, but cultivates strength and ease while in connection with gravity, interrupts these automatisms. Conscious alignment educates perception. It begins to reveal:

“What I experienced as freedom was compensation.”

“What I experienced as effort was unnecessary resistance.”

“What felt like support was actually defensive tension.”

And this is where real transformation begins…

Breath is central to this process because it is perhaps the most direct bridge between the nervous system, emotion, physical structure, and states of consciousness.

When postural organisation changes, breath changes. And when breath changes, deeper layers of experience often become perceptible.

At times, this may reveal:

• held emotion,

• vulnerability,

• resistance,

• unexpected clarity,

• or relief.

  
  

Not because the posture magically “releases trauma,” but because reorganisation allows what was previously encapsulated to become available to awareness.

In this way, asana becomes far more than physical exercise. It becomes a practice of self-study, refinement, and the gradual restoration of coherence within the whole being.