In Praise of the Bit Between the Poses: The Vinyasa of Ashtanga
Most students, when they first encounter Ashtanga, focus on the postures. It’s understandable. There’s a lot of them, and they’re not shy about it. One look at Marīcyāsana D or the illogically-named Supta Kūrmāsana (spoiler: you’re not lying down) is enough to keep the average practitioner busy for years.
But somewhere in the slightly sweaty haze of “how the hell do I bind that?”, a subtler thread can go unnoticed. It’s not the poses themselves, but what joins them. The glue. The transitions. The vinyasa.
When Christian Pisano, a deeply intuitive teacher from the Iyengar tradition, first worked with Mandy and me, it wasn’t the big shapes that left a mark. It was how he wove them together. He didn’t treat vinyasa as a mechanical interlude, a kind of postural palate cleanser. It was the practice. Moving through space with attention. Breath as thread. Not a race, but a ritual. For the first time, I saw what flow could mean: not frantic, but seamless. Not hurried, but whole.
Joey Miles, a man who could probably teach pranayama to a rock and get results, has long emphasised the breath as the defining element of these transitions. Not as an afterthought, but as the architect. Ujjāyī not just contained in the chest, but expanding through the limbs, carrying the body between shapes like a current. The exhale lifts you, the inhale places you down. Once you’ve felt it, you realise most of us have been commuting between postures like the Northern Rail of yoga: clunky, delayed, and occasionally on fire.
Then there’s Marque Garaux, a man so strong he makes jump-backs look like he’s just adjusting his cardigan. He doesn’t just teach the transitions, he reveals the hidden architecture within them. The stealth handstand tucked inside a jump-through. The concealed press hiding in a humble vinyasa. The quiet strength it takes to move with control, not to fling the legs, but to float them. His approach reminds us: vinyasa is strength in disguise. Or more accurately, strength in plain sight that we’ve learned to ignore.
So why does it matter?
Because it is the yoga.
The vinyasa is not the bit you do to get to the good stuff. It is the good stuff.
• It’s meditative – The repetition, the breath-count, the rhythm. You’re no longer thinking about how you look, but how you feel. Eventually, you stop thinking altogether. Congratulations: you’re doing yoga.
• It builds strength – Anyone can do a pose statically with enough bolsters and goodwill. Try jumping back with grace twelve times and then see how strong your bandhas are.
• It’s beautiful – Not in a flashy, performative way, but in the quiet elegance of something done with integrity. The flow becomes a kind of dance, not choreographed, but inevitable.
• It’s humbling – You can have a perfect triangle and still look like you’re chasing pigeons when transitioning through chaturanga. Vinyasa levels the playing field.
Ultimately, the vinyasa is where the practice lives, not just in the shapes, but in the movement between. If you treat it as throwaway, it becomes a chore. If you approach it with attention, it becomes the very thing that sustains the entire practice, like the silence between notes that gives music its soul.
So next time you step onto your mat, don’t just focus on where you’re going. Attend to how you get there. Because in yoga, as in life, the magic is often in the transitions.
Jake Duckworth