When I was in Yoga Teacher Training, my teacher did an illustration that I think is completely valid. In Ashtanga, we do this jump-back and jump through maneuver. For the jump-back, imagine being seated with legs crossed. You press your hands down and lift your body off the ground and then rotate shooting your legs back into chaturanga (like a half-pushup). Then for the jump-through, you bend your knees in downward facing dog and jump your legs through your arms coming to seated without touching feet to the ground. So to show that everyone can do it and we don’t have T-Rex arms, you sit, lift legs crossed and pull them close to your body, and then push your hands forward beyond your legs to show you that are actually long enough for your legs to fit through. Hmmm?

I think there is more to it than that. As much as we want to say bodies don’t matter, they do. It goes beyond strength and flexibility. In Olympic weightlifting and Powerlifting, they study femur and humerus length and calculate ratios to evaluate bodies and the best variations for success. I attended a seminar by the former Olympic weightlifting team coach, Zygmunt Smalcerz. He was supposed to talk about how to get kids into Olympic weightlifting. But in former Communist Poland where he was raised, they did things differently. You measure kids proportions at an early age and then place them in the program where they would find the most success. Some kids started an intense career in Olympic weightlifting, while another kid started their career shoveling coal. He was very matter of fact about his ideas. We were there to hear about opportunities for kids, but ended up with measurement standards.

So, I’m sitting down watching mixed martial arts on TV. Fighters have to qualify at the same weight class, which are almost exactly the same. They may be very different in height. But what is weird is that height isn’t completely correlated with a fighter’s reach (how long his arms are). So I looked up how they measure reach. They extend arms wide like a condor from fingertip to fingertip. It is basically a measure of wingspan, which a condor’s is about 10 feet wide. Common measurements are 70-78 inches. If I did it correctly, mine is like 63 inches. What?!! I know when I buy suits, I sometimes buy a 44 short so that the sleeves don’t extend past my hands. There really is something to this wingspan thing in yoga.

I don’t want to make excuses for successes or failures in what we do. But bodies do matter. If a person is overweight, it can be much harder to do some twists and folds. If a person is very thin lacking muscle mass, poses like chaturanga and planks can be difficult. I wish I measured a colleague of mine in yoga teacher training. He had very long arms and legs. He could jump back & through like a BOSS! Whereas, I’m sure I could out bench press him easily, but I couldn’t do a jump back at the time one bit. Flexibility and strength in bandhas play a huge role too. But structure still matters.

So in all things yoga, we need to be happy where we are. There are some things we may never do. We may never bind in Marichyasana C, so that’s the furthest we’ll ever go in Ashtanga. We may never do jump throughs. And that’s completely OK. We walk our own journey and make it our own. We find contentment, santosha, with where we are. We live in the now and find our bliss wherever we are. Forget comparisons and judgments. We are where we are.