Let me bust a myth that's been quietly misleading yogis for decades. If you've ever watched someone else fold effortlessly into lotus or drop their hand flat to the floor in triangle, and thought what am I doing wrong? — this one's for you.
You're not doing anything wrong. And you never were.
Here's the thing: flexibility isn't just about tight muscles. For many of us, the thing stopping us from achieving certain poses isn't tension in the soft tissue at all — it's bone. The literal shape of our skeleton.
This is the revolutionary work of Paul Grilley, one of the pioneers of modern Yin Yoga, and it changed the way I practise and teach.
Your Skeleton is Unique — Radically So
When Grilley began studying human skeletal specimens in anatomy labs, he was struck by something that yoga culture had been ignoring: no two skeletons are the same. The depth of your hip sockets, the angle of your femur, the shape of your vertebrae — these vary wildly from person to person, and sometimes dramatically so.
And no amount of stretching will change the shape of your bones.
So when you ask why can she do lotus and I can't? — the honest answer is often: her hip socket sits differently to yours. It has nothing to do with dedication, effort, or how long you've been practising. It's anatomy.
Functional vs. Aesthetic Alignment
Traditional yoga has been obsessed with how poses look. Get your heels to the floor. Get your hand flat. Get your forehead to your shin.
But Grilley's work — and the teaching I've built my training around — asks a completely different question: how does it feel?
This is the shift from aesthetic alignment to functional alignment. Rather than chasing a shape, we ask: what is this pose trying to do, and can I feel it doing that in my body?
When we stop measuring ourselves against an external ideal and start listening to our own internal experience, something profound happens. We stop fighting our body and start trusting it.
Props stop being beginner tools and start being intelligent choices. Modifications stop being compromises and start being expressions of self-knowledge.
As I always say: we don't use the body to get into a pose. We use the pose to get into the body.
The Freedom in This
I've been teaching for many decades, and I've watched this understanding transform students — not just their physical practice, but their relationship with themselves. When you genuinely understand that your body is not broken, that you are not behind, that your version of the pose is the pose — something softens that goes way beyond the fascia.
This is the body-positive, deeply humanising approach at the heart of yin yoga. We go into Grilley's work on tension, compression, and skeletal variation — not as dry anatomy, but as lived, embodied liberation.
