This entry was posted on Oct 20, 2025 by Charlotte Bell.
Typically after I look again at my early yoga educating, I’ve to cringe slightly (or typically, so much!). Like most yoga academics, I’ve by no means taught courses filled with cookie cutter practitioners. That ought to have been a inform early on. But additionally like many yoga academics, I assumed that the scholars whose ahead bends and backbends had been lower than “excellent,” or whose knees had been excessive within the air in Baddhakonasana (Certain Angle Pose) simply wanted to develop extra smooth tissue flexibility. I usually acknowledged that if these college students practiced lengthy sufficient, they’d ultimately be capable of carry out Instagram-worthy hip-opening poses.
Enter Paul Grilley’s Anatomy for Yoga. Whereas representing Hugger Mugger Yoga Merchandise at a yoga convention within the early 2000s, I took a break from the sales space to take a category with Paul Grilley. I’d by no means heard of him and knew nothing about his work, however Anatomy for Yoga sounded fascinating.
Baddhakonasana—Together with Most Different Yoga Poses—Is All within the Bones
Grilley’s 90-minute presentation modified the best way I considered yoga apply. Armed with an assortment of human bones, he confirmed how the methods our joints are formed and put collectively are simply as distinctive as our facial options, hair colour and predilections.
Let’s discover hip joints for example. The quantity of hip joint mobility in any particular person is set by the depth, location and orientation of the hip sockets. The form and angle of the femur bones additionally influences hip mobility.
Folks with shallow sockets will naturally have extra mobility—together with a larger tendency for cartilage injury, however that’s a topic unto itself. Practitioners whose sockets are extra lateral will discover larger ease in Baddhakonasana, Sukhasana (Simple Sitting Pose) and Upavista Konasana (Seated Angle Pose). In different phrases, these folks’s hips will externally rotate simply.
Others’ hips are likely to internally rotate extra simply. In case your hip sockets are deep and positioned anteriorly on the pelvis, your femur bones will are available in contact with the outsides of your sockets while you apply Baddhakonasana. When bone is available in contact with bone, no quantity of flexibility will permit your thigh bones to achieve the ground. Our bones actually have the ultimate say.
There are additionally folks whose hip joints simply internally and externally rotate. The vary of potentialities for mobility in our yoga college students is the same as the variety of college students in our courses.
It’s All Good
Right here’s the excellent news: it doesn’t matter in any respect how shut your thigh bones come to the ground in Baddhakonasana. It doesn’t matter if Sukhasana won’t ever be your go-to meditation place. Sukhasana is just not the one appropriate meditation place. Vajrasana (Lightning Bolt Pose) is nice for folks whose hips are rotate internally extra simply.
As academics, it’s necessary to do not forget that every pupil is exclusive. There are not any cookie cutter yogis. And the scholars whose thighs attain the ground in Baddhakonasana are not any “higher” or “extra superior” than the scholars whose thighs won’t ever attain the ground. The longer we train, the extra we perceive that onerous and quick guidelines merely don’t apply to everybody. The flexibility to satisfy every pupil as a person, and to be taught from their distinctive qualities, is what retains our educating very important.
About Charlotte Bell
Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and started educating in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Observe and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed by Rodmell Press. Her third ebook is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and people sextet Crimson Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards.