From Shape to Function: Rethinking Posture in Somatic Yoga

Somatic Yoga

In a Somatic Yoga practice, how a posture looks is less important than how it feels and what it does for your body. Visual cues are used to help you stay safe and oriented, but there is no single “right” shape. Bodies differ, and your posture may look different from someone else’s while still being effective.

The most important guide is sensation. As you practice, you are encouraged to notice where you feel support, tension, compression, or ease. These sensations help you sense whether you are using too much effort, too little support, or forcing yourself toward an endpoint that does not serve you, in that moment. Over time, this awareness strengthens communication between your body and nervous system, allowing you to adjust more skillfully.

A posture is working when it improves how forces move through your body, when you feel stable without rigidity and effort without strain. This sense of function may not always feel dramatic, and it may not look impressive from the outside, but it builds real strength, adaptability, and confidence in movement.

By paying attention to sensation and function rather than appearance, practice becomes more sustainable and personal. Yoga shifts from trying to “get into” poses toward learning how to inhabit them intelligently, supporting ease, resilience, and awareness both on and off the mat.

Approaching Postures in Somatic Yoga

In a Somatic Yoga practice, postures are approached as dynamic systems rather than fixed shapes. The aim is not to reproduce idealized forms, but to organize forces within the body in a way that supports safety, adaptability, and nervous system regulation.

Human bodies are not uniformly structured. Patterns of tension and ease vary widely between individuals and even within the same body. Because of this, rigid alignment rules and visual ideals cannot reliably guide effective practice. What matters more than how a posture looks is how tension, compression, and support are distributed internally.

This leads to an approach centered on myofascial tuning. Postures become tools for adjusting internal tension so that specific tissues are engaged, stretched, or supported as needed. Rather than placing bones into predetermined positions, practitioners are guided to modulate effort through opposing forces within the body, grounding and lifting, stabilizing and expanding.

This principle, described by Eion Finn as “dynamic unifying opposition”, allows load to be directed precisely without collapse or strain.

In this model, sensation becomes an essential source of information. Teachers encourage students to feel whether forces are being applied intelligently rather than forcing endpoints or chasing aesthetic outcomes. Alignment remains relevant, but as a flexible reference that adapts to the individual rather than a rigid standard to be imposed.

By shifting emphasis away from visual geometry and toward force organization and sensation, somatic posture practice evolves into a physics-based inquiry. The teacher’s role is to guide attention, refine perception, and support each practitioner in finding an optimal internal organization rather than a uniform external form.