Balancing the Scales: Subjectivity versus Objectivity in Ashtanga Yoga Practitioner Development
Introduction
There’s a certain push-and-pull that lives at the heart of every serious Ashtanga practice. On one side, there’s the deeply personal, lived experience—the hum of your own breath, the way your body feels in Kapotasana today compared to last Tuesday, the private territory only you can navigate. On the other side, there’s the mirror held up by the outside world—your teacher’s keen eye, the lineage’s standards, the unblinking honesty of a video replay.
Neither side holds the whole truth. Our inner compass is essential; it keeps the practice from becoming hollow repetition. At the same time, relying solely on our inner sense can keep us circling our own blind spots.
The real magic happens in the meeting place between the two—when our subjective, felt experience meets the clarity of objective observation. Effective Ashtanga practitioner development asks us to honor both without being held hostage by either. It’s about living in that dynamic balance: trusting what we feel while remaining open to what we might be missing.
Objectivity and Subjectivity in Practice
Objectivity is the view from the outside. It’s the measurable, observable reality of your practice: how your feet land in Surya Namaskar, the length of your inhale and exhale, the alignment of your hips in Trikonasana. It’s what can be seen, counted, or compared, regardless of how you feel about it.
Subjectivity is the view from the inside. It’s the felt sense of your breath, the inner texture of a forward fold, the private knowledge that today’s drop‑back felt more grounded than yesterday’s, even if it looked identical. It’s the lived, personal experience of your practice—unique to you and often invisible to others.
When you work with an experienced teacher, you’re stepping into their own storehouse of subjective experience. They’ve spent years developing their felt sense, testing it against objective reality, and refining their ability to help others. They will inevitably bring this into their guidance. That’s not bias—it’s expertise. But it’s also colored by their history, their preferences, their body, and their evolving understanding of the method.
A skilled teacher knows this and holds it lightly. Their responsibility isn’t to replace your inner compass with theirs, but to help you develop your own. They offer their subjective insight as a tool—not a command—so you can compare it with your own sensations, explore where they meet, and notice where they differ.
This is where personal taste enters the conversation. Two equally skilled teachers might emphasize different things: one might value fluidity, another stability; one might love the precision of a set count, another might encourage breath‑led pacing. Both can be “right” within their own systems of practice. Your job is to find what resonates for you without surrendering your agency in the process.
Ultimately, this is about self‑organization. As your experience deepens, you learn to integrate the external feedback you receive with your internal sense of what’s right for your body and mind today. You develop the ability to adapt the practice for yourself while staying anchored in its tradition. That balance—between the teacher’s lived knowledge and your own emerging discernment—is where agency lives, and where the practice truly becomes yours.
The Subjective Experience of the Practitioner
One of the gifts of Ashtanga is how much of the learning happens from the inside out. No amount of anatomical diagrams or verbal cues can replace the moment you feel your own breath lift your sternum in a backbend, or sense the subtle shift when a bandha finally engages without conscious strain. These internal sensations are our compass. Learning pranayama is about feeling the practice, not simply memorizing counts and ratios. The numbers can be useful markers, but the real knowing happens in the body, beneath language.
Over time, the practice develops its own flavor for each of us. There’s a taste that one gets for practice that is deeply personal. It’s not just about poses or sequences—it’s about the quality of attention, the rhythm of the breath, the small, private recognitions that something is different today. That taste keeps us coming back, even on the days when the asana feels clumsy or the mind is restless.
And yet, self-assessment has its limits. The very subjectivity that makes the practice so rich can also make it slippery. Our sensations change not only with our physical condition but with our mood, our sleep, the weather. My ability to sense my feet changes from day to day—sometimes I can feel with my feet as well as my hands, sometimes I can’t. Does that mean my practice is better or worse? Or just different?
Left to ourselves, it’s easy to read too much into these shifts or to ignore them entirely. We might mistake comfort for progress, or cling to sensations that feel good even when they lead us away from balance. The subjective experience is an essential guide, but without outside reference points, it can become an echo chamber. This is where objectivity enters the conversation—not to override what we feel, but to sharpen it, to help us tell the difference between what’s simply familiar and what’s genuinely skillful.
Objective Assessment in Ashtanga
For all its internal nuance, Ashtanga also lives in a world of external markers. Traditional teaching offers clear benchmarks: postures learned in a specific sequence, transitions executed with a certain steadiness, the gradual accumulation of asana over time. These milestones help new practitioners orient themselves within the method. Linear progression is presented early on to help practitioners learn the system, but this needs to be presented as mutable. The map is useful, but it isn’t the territory—and the territory, as any seasoned practitioner knows, is far from linear.
Here, the teacher becomes a kind of cartographer, reading the visible landmarks of your practice in real time. They may note subtle but significant shifts: “Your shoulder blades are now in a different spot,” or “your hips are in such a nice position.” These observations anchor our often-shifting internal experience to something tangible. The practitioner may have felt “off” for weeks, but the teacher sees that the feet are finally aligned in jump-backs or that the breath is carrying them more evenly through transitions.
Objective assessment also makes use of quantifiable aspects of the practice. The Primary Series effectively reveals where inefficiencies exist. Tight hamstrings, a lagging bandha, or a breath that collapses on exhale—these can be seen, noted, and worked with directly. Such measurements aren’t about turning yoga into a sport, but about giving the practitioner clear feedback loops: here is where energy leaks, here is where you’re holding too much tension, here is where you might invite more breath.
In the best hands, objectivity doesn’t reduce the practice to numbers or shapes. Instead, it becomes a mirror—sometimes flattering, sometimes not—that reflects back what’s actually happening, free from our personal storylines. Used well, it deepens the conversation between inner and outer knowing, sharpening our subjective sense rather than dulling it.
The Nature of the Tension
Assessment has always been part of the Ashtanga tradition. In the early Mysore rooms, a teacher’s approval wasn’t written on a certificate—it was in the quiet “yes” that came when they gave you the next posture, or in the steady hand that guided you deeper. That was your evaluation: moment to moment, breath to breath, woven into the practice itself.
Over time, especially as the method has spread globally, assessment has taken on new forms—workshops, certifications, Instagram videos. Somewhere along the way, the subtle art of reading a student’s practice in the round has sometimes been replaced with a checklist of visible achievements. There’s a disconnect between two models of teachers: those who understand the nonlinear system dynamics of Ashtanga and those who don’t. The former see the long arc, the spirals and setbacks, the way strength and softness ebb and flow over years. The latter too often see a straight line from “can’t” to “can,” and judge accordingly.
This tension mirrors another one embedded deep in the practice: the polarity of “doing” and “not doing.” Ashtanga yoga contains an inherent tension between effort and ease. We are told to work diligently, to cultivate tapas, yet also to release into the posture, to let the breath carry us. Both are true; neither is sufficient on its own.
And then there’s the question of what we’re measuring. Some emphasize physical abilities like backbends, while others value a more holistic approach. Is the “better” practitioner the one who can drop into Karandavasana with minimal grunt work, or the one who shows up consistently, breath steady, ego in check? These are not just different yardsticks—they belong to entirely different measuring systems.
The tension isn’t something to be solved once and for all. It’s a living part of the practice, a feedback loop that keeps us honest, that forces us to keep asking: What are we really developing here? Strength? Range? Humility? Presence? Maybe all of them—but not all at once, and never in a straight line.
When Subjectivity Masquerades as Objectivity
Trouble begins when a leader confuses their subjective experience for objective truth. In healthy teaching, a teacher’s lived perspective is acknowledged as personal—valuable, hard‑earned, but not the only valid way to experience the practice. In unhealthy teaching, that personal perspective gets rebranded as universal law.
This is the slippery slope toward authoritarianism. Once a teacher believes their internal sense is the truth rather than a truth, there’s little room left for dialogue. Feedback becomes obedience. Exploration becomes compliance. This is how even well‑meaning yoga communities can drift toward the dynamics of high‑demand organizations: rigid hierarchies, unquestioned authority, and the quiet erosion of personal agency.
In these environments, the student’s own sensory experience is often dismissed or reinterpreted through the teacher’s framework. Pain becomes “purification.” Fatigue becomes “lack of discipline.” Dissent becomes “ego.” The teacher’s map is treated as the only map, and the student is expected to adapt their entire inner landscape to match it.
But a healthy Ashtanga system recognizes that no teacher’s perception—no matter how skillful—is objective in the pure sense. It’s a blend of their training, their body, their temperament, and their evolving relationship with the practice. When leadership forgets this, they risk turning a living tradition into a fixed ideology.
The antidote is humility—on both sides. Teachers must name their guidance for what it is: a perspective, an offering, a pattern they’ve found useful. Students must cultivate discernment: the ability to take in feedback, test it against their own experience, and decide how (or if) to integrate it.
When we keep these roles clear, we protect not just individual practitioners but the integrity of the whole community. Without that clarity, the practice stops being a conversation between inner and outer wisdom—and becomes a monologue spoken from the front of the room.
Community and External Validation: The Feedback Loop We Live In
In systems language, feedback isn’t just the stuff you get from your teacher after they see your dropbacks. Feedback is anything in the environment that loops back to influence the next iteration of your behavior. It can be a quiet nod from a peer, a snarky comment in the shala changing room, or a hundred likes on an Instagram clip of your supta kurmasana.
One of the strange beauties of a yoga community is that it becomes a mirror—often foggy, sometimes distorted, occasionally crystal clear. Hearing my own advice repeated back by someone else can be illuminating and insightful. That’s positive feedback in the purest sense: the system showing you your own output, reframed. It lets you check alignment—not just in your trikonasana, but in the way your teaching and values are landing.
But we don’t practice in a vacuum. We practice in a network of humans, and increasingly in a network of networks. The “Ashtanga Internet culture” is one such system, complete with its own reinforcing and balancing loops. Online discourse plays a significant role in how practitioners are viewed and assessed. The comments section can amplify a single posture photo into a reputation, for better or worse. A post meant as a diary entry can be reframed as a manifesto. The speed of feedback online is intoxicating—it can propel careers or derail confidence before a student has even had time to integrate their last adjustment.
And then there’s the certification controversy—a recurring system flare-up that says as much about our feedback loops as it does about teaching standards. Concerns about new teachers, calling it a “cash grab”, suggests their skills are lacking. This isn’t just about who “deserves” a piece of paper. It’s a classic case of shifting baselines: as more people enter the system quickly, the historic markers of readiness change. The critiques often hide a deeper systems fear—if the boundaries of who is “qualified” are porous, the identity of the whole community feels at risk.
The MJH lesson here: if you want to change a system, you have to pay attention to its information flows. Who gets to give feedback, and how quickly it moves, determines what the culture values. In Ashtanga, peer feedback—whether whispered over post-practice coffee or posted on a global platform—isn’t just commentary. It’s structural. It shapes who teaches, who’s trusted, and even how the method itself evolves.
Systems Thinking in Practice
If Ashtanga were a straight staircase, we’d all be at the same landing by now—primary, intermediate, advanced, maybe even levitating over the bannister for dramatic effect. But real practice is not linear; it’s a looping, spiraling, occasionally backtracking process. Progress in one area can reveal hidden blockages in another. That’s why linear thinking—do A, then B, then C, and you’ll be “done”—so often disappoints. As Meadows might remind us, the path is shaped by feedback loops, delays, and hidden interdependencies.
In teaching, I’ve noticed that those who can’t handle the broader behavioral analysis often don’t examine their own behavior. It’s easier to measure the external—how deep the backbend, how steady the headstand—than to assess the subtler shifts in attention, patience, and self-awareness. But if you ignore the behavioral patterns driving the system (the why behind the what), you risk optimizing for the wrong thing. That’s like adjusting the thermostat in a drafty house without fixing the broken window.
Adapting the practice is where systems thinking becomes personal. Different body types experience yoga in different ways. My own large pelvis and feet initially hindered my asana practice. The “system” here is your whole lived body: its levers, hinges, and distribution of mass. What’s a stabilizing base for one student is a tipping hazard for another. This is why one-size-fits-all adjustments are as ineffective as one-size-fits-all economic policies—they ignore the structure that’s producing the behavior.
For the teacher, the real artistry is in finding balance in instruction. Push too hard and you introduce destabilizing feedback—students burn out or get injured. Offer too little challenge and you risk stagnation, where reinforcing loops of comfort keep people exactly where they are. The goal is shared evolution, not perfection. That means designing the learning environment so that both teacher and student are adapting in response to each other, co-shaping the practice over time.
When we view Ashtanga through a systems lens, the mat stops being a checklist and becomes a living laboratory. Every adjustment, every modification, every pause is a nudge to the system—sometimes small, sometimes transformative. The trick is to watch not just the nudge, but the ripple it sends through the whole organism of practice.
Mental Models and Objective Reality
Every practitioner arrives on the mat carrying an invisible backpack: their mental model of what practice is and what it’s for. In systems thinking, mental models are the internal maps we use to navigate reality—but they’re not the terrain itself. If those maps are inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, our experience of the landscape will be skewed.
In yoga, that skew can be as subtle as the way you approach a posture. Struggling with balance poses often mirrors self-doubt. The pose itself isn’t “hard” or “easy”—it’s the nervous system translating your mental state into micro-adjustments (or micro-wobbles). Here, belief shapes experience in a closed feedback loop: the thought “I can’t balance” increases tension, which destabilizes the pose, which reinforces the original belief.
Ashtanga can help break that loop because it forces a regular confrontation between expectation and reality. Over time, Ashtanga yoga can be a tool to mitigate cognitive bias. The set sequence means you can’t explain away a bad day on the mat as “just a new pose” or “I didn’t feel like it.” Patterns become visible. You notice when your assessment of your abilities doesn’t match what your body is actually doing—whether that’s overestimating your depth in a forward fold or underestimating your capacity to hold a handstand.
This is where critical thinking is essential in evaluating the practice. It’s not enough to accept feedback blindly—whether from your teacher, your inner critic, or your adoring Instagram followers. You have to ask: Is this assessment based on observable reality or filtered through someone’s mental model, including my own? The goal isn’t to reject all feedback, but to triangulate it—check it against direct experience, anatomical knowledge, and the longer arc of your progress.
In Systems thinking’ terms, refining your mental model is one of the highest-leverage interventions you can make in a system. Change the way you see the practice, and you change the practice itself. Change the practice, and you change yourself.
The Artistry of Practice
An Ashtanga sequence can look, from the outside, like a set of fixed steps—do this posture, in this order, for this many breaths. But from the inside, it’s more like a painter working within a particular palette or a musician playing inside a scale. The practitioner is an artist, making choices within structure. The vinyasa count and drishti points are not shackles; they’re the frame that makes the painting possible.
The creativity emerges in how you inhabit the form: the way you emphasize a breath, linger in a transition, or bring softness to a challenging bind. Everything we do is optional—creating a space where participants can choose their level of participation. That doesn’t mean ignoring the sequence, but rather recognizing that the artistry lies in responding to the day’s energy, injuries, and insights without losing the thread of the form.
In any living system, tradition acts as the balancing loop—it holds continuity, keeps the practice from dissolving into chaos. Innovation is the reinforcing loop—it keeps the practice relevant and responsive to the environment. Traditions should be honored while allowing for necessary evolution. To hold only to tradition risks stagnation; to chase only innovation risks losing the integrity of the lineage. The sweet spot is dynamic tension, where stability and adaptability dance together.
Seen through the systems lens, the artistry of practice isn’t just aesthetic—it’s functional. A practice that allows for individual creativity within collective form is more resilient, more inviting, and more capable of evolving without losing its center. Like a great jazz ensemble, the Ashtanga community thrives when each practitioner knows the score, listens to the others, and is unafraid to add their own voice.
Ethical Dimensions of Assessment
Every system has gatekeepers—people who decide who “passes,” who is “ready,” who belongs. In Ashtanga, those gatekeepers are often teachers, senior practitioners, or the institutions that certify them. But the act of assessment isn’t neutral; it happens inside a web of human relationships, cultural norms, and historical baggage. We need to be careful about the power dynamics between yoga teachers and students. When authority is absolute and feedback flows only one way, the system risks tipping into imbalance, where fear or dependency—not genuine growth—drive the practice.
One shadow side of the assessment process is the subtle addiction to external validation. Some instructors may have a delusional sense of their own infallibility. In systems terms, this is a reinforcing loop with no balancing mechanism: the more a teacher’s authority goes unchallenged, the more certain they become of their own correctness, which further silences dissent, which strengthens their certainty. Without feedback loops that include student voices, this can calcify into a rigid, self-reinforcing hierarchy.
That’s why changing the structure matters. We’re transitioning from indentured servitude models to equity models in yoga teaching. Historically, the “indentured” model concentrated power and knowledge in a few hands, with access determined more by loyalty than transparency. An equity model, by contrast, redistributes decision-making, values peer-to-peer feedback, and ensures assessment criteria are clear and mutually agreed upon. This doesn’t dissolve the teacher’s role—it reframes it as a facilitator in a collaborative learning system rather than a sole authority in a command-and-control model.
For an Ashtanga yoga practitionner, the ethical dimension of any system isn’t an afterthought—it’s part of the system’s design. Build in diverse feedback channels, transparency in criteria, and reciprocal accountability, and the assessment process can become a tool for shared evolution rather than a mechanism of control. Change the way information flows, and you change the culture.
Integration: Beyond the Dichotomy
In yoga—and in life—the temptation is always to choose sides: strict discipline or gentle adaptation, tradition or innovation, self-focus or service. But most systems don’t thrive at the extremes; they flourish in the space between them. The practice becomes sustainable when we balance discipline with individual needs. In systems terms, that’s finding a steady state where reinforcing loops (effort, ambition, growth) and balancing loops (rest, self-compassion, injury prevention) coexist without one overpowering the other.
One tool for navigating that middle path is intention. Kalpa and San Kalpa (intentions) provide purpose and direction, especially for driven or competitive students. Sankalpa isn’t just a nice idea—it’s a steering mechanism. Without it, the system can get stuck in oscillations of overexertion and burnout, or stagnate in the comfort zone. With it, each practice becomes a conscious adjustment toward the kind of practitioner—and person—you aim to become.
No system is self-contained. Our Mysore community benefits from the collective energy and the act of serving others. Community provides both energy inputs (motivation, encouragement) and regulatory functions (reminders, reality checks). It’s a feedback network where your growth supports others, and theirs supports you in return. Meadows would call this a reinforcing loop with positive externalities—each act of service or encouragement magnifies the whole group’s capacity to thrive.
Integration means seeing that these elements—discipline, personal adaptation, intention, and community—aren’t separate levers you pull one at a time. They are interlinked flows that shape each other. Strengthen one, and the others often respond. Neglect one, and the system wobbles. The artistry is in adjusting them continuously, so the whole stays alive and balanced.
Conclusion
In the end, practice is a conversation—sometimes a duet, sometimes a full chorus—between your own inner compass and the voices of your teachers, peers, and tradition. The art lies in knowing when to lean into internal wisdom, and when to let external guidance nudge you in a new direction. Like any complex system, the Ashtanga community thrives when information flows both ways, when feedback is not just given but received, adapted, and integrated.
Assessment, once a simple pass-or-fail moment at the hands of a single authority, is evolving. In modern Ashtanga, it is becoming less about fixed checkpoints and more about ongoing calibration—looking not just at what you can “do” but how you adapt, sustain, and grow. Creating a sustainable, enjoyable practice requires balancing discipline with individual needs. That balance isn’t static; it’s an ever-adjusting feedback loop, guided by intention and informed by honest reflection.
Meadows would remind us that no system ever reaches a final equilibrium—it stays alive by dancing at the edge of change. Your practice, your teaching, and your community will keep shifting as the conditions around them shift. The invitation is not to resist that change, but to participate in it—intentionally, creatively, and with enough humility to keep learning.
