"I'm not flexible enough to do yoga!"

This is something I hear all the time, and to be honest, neither am I!

Flexibility doesn’t come easily to me at all, it never has. Whether that’s down to hip mobility, the tilt of my pelvis, tight hamstrings, or just the way my body is built, I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that no matter how regularly I practice, there are some shapes my body just doesn’t want to go into.

I used to hate forward folds, especially seated forward folds, because of this, and I’d actually feel embarrassed that even after years of practicing yoga I couldn’t get my chest closer to the floor. A seated wide-legged forward fold (Upavistha Konasana) was my arch nemesis (see the concentration on my face in the picture below😅), and I was convinced that I just wasn’t trying hard enough, even though no matter how hard I tried, my body didn’t want to fold any deeper than basically sitting upright.

Me practicing Upavistha Konasana during my yoga teacher training

Eventually I got sick of dreading this pose. I started to get curious about why I wanted to fold deeper so badly. What was I trying to achieve? What was I chasing?

And the honest answer was I thought that’s what the pose was supposed to look like, and that I must be doing it wrong if I couldn’t get my chest even a little bit closer to the ground, or maybe I was just rubbish at yoga (ouch!).

What I thought Upavistha Konasana was 'supposed' to look like

It had nothing to do with how the pose felt in my body. I was already feeling the stretch, this pose was already really challenging for me. So what would I achieve by fighting against my body to go ‘deeper’ into the pose, other than frustration and potential injury?

Approaching this pose with curiosity helped me realise that maybe I’ll never fold further, maybe that’s just how my body is, and that’s absolutely fine! I could stop chasing the ‘perfect’ version of the pose and embrace my version. I could breathe and be present in this pose, even more so without the weight of thinking I needed to force myself to be any different!

And that's where the bigger issue comes in. So much of the yoga world, especially in advertising and on social media, centres over-flexibility. There’s this unspoken idea that you have to be flexible to do (or enjoy) yoga, and that the furthest expression of the pose is the best expression of the pose. It’s no wonder so many people think they’re not flexible enough to do yoga, and feel excluded from the practice.

But yoga isn’t a performance. It’s not about 'aesthetics', how it looks, or how ‘deep’ you can go. The real challenge is often mental - accepting that your version of a pose might not look anything like the google image/instagram version, and that’s more than okay!

And while regular practice might increase your range of motion a bit, yoga offers so much more than that. You can be stiff, or creaky (as we like to say in my Monday class), you can sit upright, you can wobble, adapt, rest, and still be doing yoga. Yoga meets us where we are, not where we think we should be.

This is the approach I encourage in my classes too, letting go of how we think poses should look, and making room for joy, intention and curiosity in every shape.

So if you think you’re not flexible enough to do yoga, welcome to the club! 🌞