ADAPTED YOGA

How changing times have changed our bodies and the practice of yoga.

Adapted Yoga Teacher Training - Sivananda Ashram, Neyyar Dam, Kerala

The human body has changed. For most of human history, everyday life demanded a level of physical effort that simply isn't required anymore. We now have machines and technology to do much of that work for us, and our bodies have adapted accordingly, to longer hours seated, to screens held close to the face, to a pace of life built around instant response rather than sustained effort. This isn't a judgement on modern life. It's just a physiological reality, and it means the way we practise yoga needs to adapt with it.

"When I started teaching the yoga open class, I could teach anyone. Absolutely anyone could do the postures. Over the years I saw a drastic decline in people’s ability to do the postures, and this caused me to start adapting the yoga I was teaching."

Lila Lolling, on why she created the Adapted Sivananda Yoga course.

With Lila Lolling

Lila Lolling and the Adapted Yoga course

Lila Lolling has spent decades advocating for the healing effects of yoga across different communities, including Deaf and Blind communities. The Adapted Sivananda Yoga course grew out of the adaptations she found herself making more and more often in her own classes, to meet the real physical limitations of the students in front of her, rather than teaching to an idealised body that fewer and fewer people actually had.

I had the privilege of training under her, and of witnessing a kind of unguarded passion for sharing yoga that's rare to see. I also had the chance to spend time with her afterwards and learn more about her path from teaching classical yoga to becoming an advocate for adapted practice.

Understanding the conditions of the spine

I came to this course not long after leaving a corporate job to teach yoga full time. I'd barely begun working with clients before I understood that conventional, asana-based practice simply doesn't work for everyone. I found myself researching and building variations of postures and sequences for each person I worked with. Clients with injuries. Clients who lacked strength or mobility because of how their lives had shaped their bodies. Clients with back pain that had built up from years hunched over phones and laptops. Clients who were overworked, or carrying more weight than their joints were used to. And clients who weren't convinced yoga could do anything for them at all, often for good reason, given what "yoga" had looked like to them until then.

I started looking for ways to build my own understanding further, and within a couple of weeks, a notification for the Adapted Sivananda Yoga course appeared. It felt less like coincidence and more like timing.

We were a group of thirty-five students from different backgrounds, some from the Sivananda lineage, others from elsewhere in the yoga world. Nine days together taught us about the body and its real limitations, and about the far greater range of possibility within yoga than most of us had been shown before. We learned as much from each other as we did from the course itself.

Blind Yoga class in practice

Adapting yoga for real bodies

The course covered anatomy in depth, different formats for teaching, and variations of classical Sivananda postures for conditions including back pain, joint issues, asthma, higher body weight and pregnancy. For me, the most significant part of the course was the sessions on teaching yoga to Deaf and Blind communities, which asked me to rethink almost everything I assumed about how a pose is taught and understood.

The course made me a safer, more responsible teacher and practitioner. It gave me the confidence to trust my instincts when adapting a pose for someone in front of me, rather than defaulting to a version of the posture that didn't actually fit their body. It also made clear how much I still had to learn, and how much further that learning would need to go.

Most importantly, it gave me a direction I'd been searching for without quite knowing it. Looking back, this course was really where the path toward yoga therapy began for me, and what eventually led me toward formal training as a yoga therapist. Toward wanting to work with people who assume yoga is beyond their reach, so the practice can meet them, rather than the other way around.