A Gentler Approach to Ashtanga

Yoga teacher Pranidhi Varshney sets aside the conventional emphasis on perfection and instead values progress of a different sort.

- RENEE MARIE SCHETTLER

There is a perception that Ashtanga is regimented. It's a tradition of yoga in which you progress through a set series of postures, and only when you have achieved a certain level of proficiency in a pose or a series of poses do you advance to the next posture or series.

The Ashtanga world is also notorious for its power structure, since students must sometimes wait for the teacher's permission to move into the next posture or series. That kind of hierarchy can be toxic. Ideally, respect would go both ways between teacher and student.

Some Ashtanga teachers follow the script exactly, but I think most are going off the page. Almost any teacher has seen all kinds of bodies and understands that you have to make the practice accessible.

I was fortunate. I was offered the postures very freely by my teacher, Manju Jois, and that's how I thought I should teach.

It's funny, people often assume because I'm Indian, I started practicing yoga very early on. I actually started practicing along with a VHS tape when I was in high school, and I was very casual about it until I went to college and came across an Ashtanga primary series class at a studio. I soon became hooked.

I experience such benefit in practicing Ashtanga, especially the second series. It would be unfair of me to withhold it from students who haven't completed the primary series. Who am I to say you should or should not come into a pose? You decide! It's a conversation. I want students to feel they have agency.