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Yoga practice is filled with dualities, with polar limits. We start as beginners and advance towards mastery. Some of us have pelvises that are habitually held in a backward tilt, some of us in a forward tilt. Some of us are tightly-ligamented, some of us are loosely held in our joints. Some of us are really good at back bends, some of us at forward bends. For centuries, the practice of yoga was imparted one on one, teacher to student, so that the vast possibilities of the te

If vinyasa is the orderly placing of one pose after another in a specific sequence, what could the opposite of vinyasa be? In his article on Vinyasa Yoga in volume 8 of Ashtadala Yogamala, B. K. S. Iyengar coins the term “vishamanyasa” as “placing in an odd or irregular manner,” as a way of challenging the student. The flow from one pose to the next is maintained, but poses from different categories, even ones that might seem opposite, are intermixed. In the article, Iyengar

One thing yogis with some experience of different styles can say for certain is that Iyengar Yoga is most definitely not vinyasa. These days, the two styles almost exist as two opposite poles of the yoga spectrum. In an Iyengar class, poses are held for more than a few breaths, sometimes minutes at a time, and each pose is practiced discretely, with no linking other than perhaps coming back to a central pose such as Tadasana (Mountain Pose) or Dandasana (Staff Pose). In a Vin