Equity in the Practice Room
A student in the front row can’t hinge forward. She’s seated, legs extended, trying to reach toward her feet. Her pelvis won’t move. Her spine is rounding from the base. Her face is doing the thing faces do when the body refuses and the person inside has decided this is a personal failure. I tell her: put something under your butt. She looks at me like I offered her a reduced sentence.
The prop mythology runs deep. Blocks are for beginners. Props are for people who can’t do it yet. Put the block away when you’re ready. Some of this comes from lineage — traditions where the shapes were sacred, where modification was equivalent to deviation. Some of it is aesthetic. A room of people all in the same shape has a visual authority that a room full of blocks and blankets and folded mats doesn’t. And some of it is gatekeeping: the form is the standard, and your ability to achieve it is the measure.
All of this confuses uniformity with fairness. Those are not the same thing.
There’s a cartoon that circulates in education circles. Three people at a baseball game, standing behind a fence. One is tall. One is average. One is short. In the equality panel, each gets the same box to stand on. The tall person and the average person can see. The short person still can’t. In the equity panel, the boxes are distributed by need. Everyone sees the game.
Yoga applies this problem constantly, and calls the result good instruction.
Every cue I give produces a different result in every body in the room. Same words, wildly different physiological events. Two people doing what looks like the same seated forward fold might be accessing completely different things — one is actually lengthening through their posterior chain, the other is loading a lumbar spine that’s already under stress. Same box. Different game.
The goal was never the shape. The goal is the physiological event — the tilt of the pelvis, the lengthening of the hamstrings, the decompression through the posterior chain. A block isn’t a shortcut to that event. A block is the access point to that event, for a body whose geometry doesn’t make the event available otherwise. Taking the block away doesn’t accelerate development. It removes access and teaches the body to compensate with whatever it has — usually something that reinforces the exact restriction you’re trying to change.
If you’re not moving, put something under your butt so you can see what I’m talking about. That’s not accommodation. That’s precision. The seat gets elevated, the pelvis tilts, the movement becomes available, and suddenly the student isn’t performing a shape from the outside — they’re experiencing something from the inside. Make it close to the simple version. Further away from complicated, closer to simple.
Don’t let the forces of good or bad get in the way of pragmatism for development. The teacher who trained in a tradition where form was sacred isn’t being malicious when they take the block away. They’ve identified the visual shape with the thing itself. Their body probably got there through years of persistence. They’re offering everyone the same box because they genuinely believe the box worked — and for their specific architecture, it did.
Good teaching is not clear instruction. Clear instruction is table stakes. Good teaching is knowing which box each student needs to stand on. That requires giving up the idea that your job is to transmit a shape, and replacing it with the idea that your job is to engineer access. Different proportions, different histories, different tolerances. The physiological event is the same. The path there is not.
This isn’t a yoga problem. Any system that mistakes uniform treatment for fair treatment fails the same way — hiring, education, medicine. Yoga just makes it visible, because the bodies are right there in front of you. You can see who’s in the pose and who’s performing the pose. You can see who sees the game and who’s staring at a fence.
The prop doesn’t make the practice easier. It makes the practice available. The fence is not the game.