Adjusting

By Sandra Schultze

Most of us begin our yoga journey in led classes, where the teacher offers detailed instructions: how to place the body, where to turn the feet, how to twist the arms. The mind learns first, guided by words and demonstrations.

In self-practice and in the Mysore room, the experience shifts. You are left with yourself—with what you remember from those led classes, and with what you feel in your own body. Practice becomes more intimate, more internal.

Yet you are not truly alone. Around you, fellow students move and breathe in a shared rhythm, and a teacher is present to support you through hands-on adjustments. These physical adjustments are not meant to explain, but to help you feel. They invite the body to understand directly, beyond analysis, so that the practice can continue as a form of meditation—what Patanjali describes as “meditating on the infinite.”

Verbal guidance still has its place, but hands-on adjustments transmit alignment through experience rather than thought. When Lino Miele was once asked whether, in Ashtanga Yoga, the body should find the posture instead of the mind understanding it, he replied simply: “It has to find the breath.”

With the breath comes a feeling of openness, stability, and often alignment. The breath sets the pace and creates inner space; it shapes awareness and gives direction, carrying you naturally from one vinyasa to the next. It becomes your compass, quietly informing you of where you are.

When the body finds the breath, it finds the flow. When the breath flows freely, alignment is present. When it becomes strained, adjustment is needed. In this way, your most reliable teacher is always with you: your own breath. 

In the Ashtanga series, as a base for inquiry to a self adjustment there are clear instructions for all asanas, almost like a DNA of the system, which defines how to work with the breath. As shown here for Prasaritha Padothanasana in the glyphs created by John Scott in the 1990s you can see that for each asana are indicated:

• the sanskrit name

• the number of Vinyasas (5V: 5 breaths from Samastitihi to Samastitihi)

• the State of the asana (S-3: the full pose is entered on vinyasa 3, where five breaths are taken)

• the Drishti (nasagrai: nose)

There are two graces in breathing:

drawing in air and letting it go.

The former constrains, the latter refreshes:

so marvelously is life mixed.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe