What is Vinyasa Yoga?

The term ‘vinyasa’ comes with a lot of immediate connotations for me, predominantly perhaps a vague mental image of bodies flowing around on mats through warrior postures, the movement being synchronised with the breath. Now that vinyasa is practiced all over the world in a number of increasingly different ways, perhaps a vague image like that is about as all-encapsulating a definition as one could hope for. But when I reflected more on what it means to me personally, I found my thoughts crystallising further.

The word ‘vinyasa’ comes from two Sanskrit words: ‘nyasa’, meaning ‘to place’, and the prefix ‘vi’, meaning ‘in a special/deliberate way’. So one reading of vinyasa would be ‘a deliberate sequence of steps’. This crucial word ‘deliberate’, the ‘vi’ of ‘vinyasa’, is really at the heart of the practice for me. What does it mean exactly?

There’s the obvious way in which we try to move with the breath between postures, transition with control and alignment. Rather than rush between postures, the space between the postures, the transition itself, is treated with the same attention and given the same level of importance as the posture itself. But more broadly, for me it’s about all the qualities that we want to embody in our practice. We can move, we can hold postures, we can breathe as we do it. But what qualities do we want to embody and cultivate as we do these things? 

Control, and alignment are sensible qualities to bring to our practice, because our bodies are not impervious to strain, and we would (hopefully!) like the practice to serve our bodies, rather than be a strain on it. But there may be other deeper qualities we choose to cultivate. Lately for me the quality of peace has been one that I’ve been trying to embody in my practice. Peace with where my body is, peace with where it may or may not go, and even more, peace with what is happening in my life generally. Because it’s not just in class that things are always changing. Whether it’s the teacher telling us to move, or life out there telling us in no uncertain terms it’s time to move or change in some large and perhaps profound way, change happens. We rarely have much control over it, or at least not as much as we like to think we do. 

But what we always CAN choose are the qualities that we try to embody as we move with the changes that come our way. Do we want to sacrifice all alignment to rush towards something, or cling stubbornly to some old ideas? Or can we choose to cultivate stability, alignment, even peace? We may have to remind ourselves of this choice each and every posture, maybe each and every breath. But it is our choice to make. And that is a source of great freedom.

By Kristian