Why this, why now?
Because something about modern Yoga doesn’t quite make sense
Most Yoga writing online falls into two categories:
Lifestyle content that makes practice look appealing.
Technical content that makes practice look complicated.
Neither necessarily helps people understand what Yoga is for.
I’m writing here because the purpose of practice has become surprisingly unclear.
Yoga students are often given sequences of postures without any explanation of what those postures are intended to do. Yoga teachers are told to be creative, intuitive, or authentic, but rarely shown how to make informed decisions about practice design.
We talk a lot about variation. We talk much less about direction.
Over time, this creates a strange situation. Practices become increasingly elaborate, yet their effects become increasingly uncertain.
When I first encountered the Viniyoga approach, one idea stood out immediately:
Yoga practice is not a random collection of techniques. It is a method designed to produce specific effects.
Breath is not simply an optional accompaniment to movement. It is the organising principle that determines how a practice functions.
Change the breath, and the effect of the posture changes.
Change the structure of the practice, and the overall direction changes.
In other words, practice is not just what we do. It is how and why we do it.
Much of my work as a teacher now focuses on helping students and teachers rediscover this clarity.
Rather than asking “What poses should I include?”, we can ask more useful questions:
What is this practice trying to cultivate?
What direction of change is appropriate right now?
How should breath shape the structure of what we do?
Traditional frameworks such as the Yoga Sūtra and Sāṃkhya philosophy provide a surprisingly practical lens for these questions. They remind us that Yoga was never primarily concerned with performing shapes. It was concerned with understanding how experience is constructed, and how practice can clarify the relationship between awareness and what is changing.
The Viniyoga approach is particularly helpful here because it emphasises adaptation. Practice is not fixed. It evolves according to the needs, circumstances, and stage of life of the person in front of us.
This is both liberating and demanding.
Liberating, because there is no need to force the body into idealised forms.
Demanding, because it requires us to think carefully about the purpose of what we teach and practise.
Over the past fifteen years of full-time teaching, I have found that students often experience the most meaningful progress when practice becomes simpler, not more complicated.
Fewer techniques. Clearer intention. More attention to breath.
This often runs counter to the way Yoga is presented online, where novelty tends to attract more attention than refinement. However, refinement is where change becomes sustainable.
Here on Substack, I will be writing about how breath-led practice design influences the effects of Yoga over time. Some articles will explore practical questions about sequencing. Others will look at underlying philosophical ideas and how they inform the structure of practice.
I am particularly interested in the relationship between breath, attention, and energetics, and how these shape outcomes such as steadiness, clarity, and the capacity to respond to challenges.
You do not need to be a Yoga teacher to read this publication. The ideas apply equally to anyone interested in understanding how practice can support meaningful, sustainable change.
Yoga has always been more than a set of exercises. It is a framework for working intelligently with the conditions of our lives.
The clearer we are about what practice is for, the more useful it becomes.
That is why I am writing here.