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Defining yoga adjustment and yoga assist

This is an excerpt from Hands-On Yoga Assists by Kiara Armstrong.

When I first introduced Rubber Band Method® (RBM) assists to existing teachers, they often said to me, “I prefer to use my words rather than my hands to adjust my students,” and I couldn’t agree with them more. We should always use words when we correct a student. But what about when we aren’t correcting a student? What do we call touch that we use to assist stretching, grounding, or ease?

We can’t use the word adjustment for this kind of touch because adjustment literally means “to correct,” which is not our aim when adding stretch, grounding, or ease. So, we’re right to use the word adjustment to refer to the touch we employ to correct our students, but when we use touch in other ways, the word adjustment falls short. A better word to describe employing touch to support added stretch, grounding, and ease is assist because this kind of touch assists the pose rather than corrects the pose.

Touch and Proprioception

Touch, in general, via adjustments and assists, has its place in the yoga practice. As the instructor offering touch interventions, it’s our job to understand the role adjustments and assists play within the practice and when and how we, as instructors, should offer these techniques in class. The foundational benefit of such an understanding is that we can use it to help the student improve and hone their proprioceptive awareness—that is, the level to which the student is attuned to their body.

Proprioception, which involves sensing and interpreting the body’s cues, including postural and positional feedback, as well as knowing where one’s body is in space, is a key aspect of body awareness. We might offhandedly assume that everyone is walking around with keen body awareness, but that simply isn’t true. Proprioceptive awareness varies widely from person to person. In fact, some students are disembodied and feel little to no connection to their bodies at all (more on this in chapter 5).

Yoga strengthens proprioceptive awareness significantly because it challenges the body’s physical strength, flexibility, and balance. All three of these demands on the body provide kinesthetic feedback, or messages from one’s body. Being able to interpret kinesthetic feedback is body awareness. Put more simply, we get a lot of different kinds of signals from our bodies from the various ways in which yoga challenges us. Over time, as we become more accustomed to receiving these cues in practice, we learn to better hear the messages from our bodies, thus improving our body awareness, or proprioception.

When we use an adjustment to correct a student’s alignment, they learn to feel what safe alignment is in that pose. This felt sense of alignment is proprioception. When we assist them with added stretch, grounding, or ease in poses, they grasp a greater felt sense of each; the proprioceptive messages of stretch, grounding, or ease become more pronounced. We may take our proprioceptive awareness for granted as seasoned yogis and instructors, barely noticing our body awareness as a skill. However, for many novice and even intermediate yoga students, attuned proprioceptive awareness is a skill they are still honing. For students with trauma, it’s a skill that’s vital for healing and embodiment.

Body awareness is profoundly important in both obvious and subtle ways, from sensing pain or danger to interpreting a gut feeling (termed interoception) and even being able to tune in to early signs of illness or disease. It’s proprioception that precipitates presence and the yoga bliss that we, as teachers of the practice, have come to know and love!

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Awareness Is Like a Nesting Doll

Body awareness starts with proprioception, or being able to sense your body in space and feel its physical cues. Once you’ve honed your proprioception, you can acquire a subtler form of body awareness, termed interoception. Interoception involves the ability to sense your pulse, heartbeat, and breath. Interoception also involves the ability to sense gut feelings. Both proprioception and interoception, collectively termed body awareness, help you cultivate self-awareness. I like to think of self-awareness as egoception, which is our ability to observe thoughts and emotions and their effect within and on the body.

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Both adjustments and assists are based on alignment. We provide an adjustment when we see that the student is out of alignment. In contrast, we can provide an assist when we see that the student is in alignment. So, adjustments and assists are similar in that they’re both based on alignment, but they differ in that we offer one when a student is out of alignment, and we offer the other when a student is in alignment. Because we offer adjustments for safety reasons, they are necessary. In contrast, because assists merely add something extra to a student’s already safe practice, they are totally optional—a bonus for entraining proprioception and embodiment.

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The RBM Definition of Alignment

Alignment is a general framework with which we build a pose, helping to differentiate between asanas (e.g., distinguishing Warrior I from Warrior II) by understanding how to position the body in various ways to embody different poses across multiple planes and ranges of motion. Without alignment, we wouldn’t have open-hip or closed-hip poses, twists, or inversions; alignment serves as a foundational guide for constructing each pose.

For the most part, the basic alignment of each pose is designed to ensure joint safety while facilitating stretch, challenging balance, and/or building strength. Alignment is intended as a flexible framework that can be tailored by the practitioner to meet their unique needs rather than as a rigid “cookie cutter” structure. Being “in alignment” prioritizes joint safety and honors the individual’s natural range of motion while maintaining the integrity of the intended pose.

In the context of hands-on assisting, alignment ensures the pose provides accessible, stable handholds and demonstrates clear directional lines for the teacher to follow when offering an assist. Being in alignment also indicates the student is in a variation of the pose that is safe, comfortable, and appropriate for an assist to enhance their practice without causing strain or misalignment.

More Excerpts From Hands-On Yoga Assists

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