If you’ve ever taken a Vinyasa Flow class or tried Ashtanga Vinyasa, you’ve moved through Warrior I (Virabhadrasana I) pose a lot. Or perhaps you sip from another cup of yoga such as Iyengar or basic Hatha in which you often hold Warrior I longer than the five breath maximum prescribed in Ashtanga. It’s a very common asana, and a very common one for getting hurt. As with any of the 840,000 asanas, we meet and greet Warrior I starting from our immediate condition. There are surely some folks out there– the yogic 1% – who can do pretty much anything physically and only wonder how it might possibly cause strain or injury to someone because they’re condition allows such ease in all human movement and positioning. Then there’s the rest of us.

Why is Warrior I potentially fraught with risk of injury?

Let’s first look at the basic set-up of this asana. With the heel of the back foot turned to the midline around 60-degrees or so and pada bandha awake in both feet, the idea is to interna...

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

         —ANAIS NIN

Healing what ails us, whether physical injury or existential angst, is a leitmotif of yoga dating to ancient times. Today, yoga therapy is emerging from the shadows of intensely vigorous, workout-oriented yoga, reaffirming the healthy transformative potential of yoga. This growing trend might be associated with “leading edge baby boomers,” many of whom caught the largely countercultural 60s yoga wave, but now at an average of 70 years-old are a bit more frail. There’s also growing awareness that yoga can help with everything from alcoholism and PTSD to sprained knees and injured wrists.

Curiously, yoga chikitsa – Sanskrit for yoga therapy – can be a confusing concept. It is the term coined by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya to describe...

 A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

—Lao Tzu

Teaching yoga is at once profoundly personal, predicated on sharing, and shaped by context. It is also inevitably surprising. We have no choice but to start from where we are and who we are, with whatever knowledge, skills, and experience we have in the moment. We also have little choice but to work with whomever shows up for class, teaching students whose conditions, intentions, learning styles, and needs are widely varied.

On any given day, unanticipated events can make a class much different than what you might have envisioned. The changes that happen from class to class also have everything to do with whoever is in the class, the time of day, our own mood, and myriad other factors that invariably come into play in teaching. If your classes are always perfectly predictable—if you feel the same, the students seem the same, the environment manifests as exactly the same—you might benefit from reflecting on...