[WARNING: Today's post is kinda yoga-geeky so I suggest you go elsewhere right now for more excitement.]
First some background. I've been doing Ashtanga for about 6 years, I know all the Primary and bit less than half of Second Series. Though Primary is called Primary it's pretty damn hard but I can do about all of it with no big troubles. Sure I don't breeze through it easy like Sharath or anything but I can pretty much execute and/or self-bind every asana, including hard customers like Supta Kurmasana and Mari D, also hard vinyasas such as floating seated jumpback and floating seated jumpthru. Just giving you this background so you'll know that I'm not a complete neophyte even though not a pro teacher or shala owner. I can do this stuff because I have above average flexibility and overall body-weight handling strength for an older male.
Anyway, though not a pro teacher I have an idea for solving an age old connundrum that bedevils Ashtanga pedagogy. Sometimes the best ideas come from the periphery you know. Look at Napoleon - did any native Frenchman come up with the bright idea of invading Russia and conquering the world? Noooo, it took a Corsican....
So in that spirit I want to suggest something. But first, what the fuck is the Ashtanga Pedagogical Dilemma anyway? It is that on one hand, the traditional injuntion has been that you never teach a student the next asana in the sequence until the can execute everything up to that point, what they've already been taught, pretty much perfectly. But other hand, reality is that students just won't stand for this. The Ashtanaga Primary has something like 70 asanas, but most Westerners would be stopped somewhere within the first ten in their first week and then if going by the tradition it might be six months or a year or never before they could learn the next move. Marketing suicide!
And yet, from aspect of safety and just respecting the art, the tradition does seem to make some sense. It seems like an irresitable force (marketing) meeting an immovable object (tradition and safety common sense). This collision has resulted in a total victory for marketing over the tradition resulting in lots of injuries and pain.
But I now have the solution. To understand it you just need a bit of number theory background. In math, a element can simultaneously be a member of more than one nested ordered sequence. For examlpe, 7 is a member of the normal ordered sequence of integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ... but it's also an element on the embedded subseqeuence of primes: 3, 7, 11, etc.
So the way to solve the Astanga teaching problem is to code the poses for particular skills that they require. You keep them in the same overall general sequence as they are now, in Primary for examlpe. But a student would learn as many postures as s/he can actually perform, following the general sequence as closely as possible. When the student hit a posture s/he could not yet do, his/her progress thru the sub-sequence of the moves requiring that skill would halt. But s/he could continue learning any other new poses (in their normal sequence) as long as able to perform them.
An example may help. It isn't all that complex. This isn't rocket engineering!
Let's consider a possible (example only) of a potential sub-skill for which some asana's would be tagged. Even though all aspects of body condition are related, it's surprising how far some people can go with one kind of flexbility yet be horrile at another.
For example, there is hip openness as opposed to hamstring. Some people can easily touch nose to shin with straight leg, while unable to sit in lotus due to hip opening stiffness or vice versa (of course some people can do both or neither).
Under this proposal, every pose would be tagged for + or - (plus or minus) the feature [HIP] according to whether it calls for that particular kind of hip openness (required in Lotus sitting pose and lacking which you can wreck your knees).
The first pose in the [+HIP} subsequence would obviously be Ardha Baddha Padmottānāsana:
This pose would be the first +HIP. When it came time for the student to learn this, if they could not do it, ok no problem they could still just try that as best they could, but be allowed to continue on to the next pose, which is coded [-HIP]. It is Utkatasana:
No problem. They would continue along until time for the next pose in the normal general sequence that is coded [+HIP] which is Ardha Baddha Padma Paścimottānāsana:
Here they'd be checked: can they now perform Ardha Baddha Padmottānāsana (above) the first [+HIP] asana? If so then fine they can learn this one and continue. But if not, they would NOT learn Ardha Baddha Padma Paścimottānāsana, in fact they could not learn it until they are able to perform Ardha Baddha Padmottānāsana, just as the tradition dictates. But with the twist that they could still continue with the general Series, skipping any poses that the are temporarily blocked on due to lack of some kind of basic skill or prior pose requiring that skill.
So in this example the given student could breeze right on into Tiryaṁ-Mukha Eka-Pāda Paścimottānāsana, which happens to be coded as -HIP (requiring a different type of flexibility for which the student would be separately tracked, this particular pose just happens to be -HIP but +HAM for hamstring flexibility)
In my example this proposal would allow a student the fun of learning and mastering most of the 70+ asana of the Primary but without any danger of premature attempt at the potentially knee wrecking Padmasana and all its half dozen or so cousins in the sequence. The HIP feature here is just one example, you could easily come up with another 5 or so basic skills/properties for which poses would be tagged + or -.
Sure this scheme would require a bit of historical book keeping on the part of teachers and students but will worth it in my opinion as the best compromise in the fight between tradition and student retention.
