Aka Ruminations on Alignment, pt 3
Is alignment — the shape of one's body in any particular situation — important?
I'd love offer up: it's really not.
Alignment is not important; tone is.
The funny part is, in many ways they are synonymous — and thus it’s an easy distinction to miss.
It’s like mass and weight. On earth, those two are synonymous. Go to another planet, though, and while your mass remains the same your weight changes.
I’d say, in this analogy, tone — i.e. the dance between what is engaged and what is not — is mass, and alignment is weight. And the planets are positions, movements, traditions.
Alignment, in other words, is entirely circumstantial. It’s important as an indicator, absolutely, but it’s not cause; it’s effect.
If you get to know the tonus of a position, through and through, then it’s yours; you‘ve got it.
If you only come to know the position, ie the alignment, then you know that alignment but it doesn’t translate per se. It’s learning to stand with this particular weight, specific to this planet.
All this, of course, is simplified ...
... but I would contend that getting into good alignment is actually not at all about getting into good alignment, but about all you need to find in your own body in order to get into that good alignment ...
Do you need to make this distinction as a teacher each time? Of course not. You might say the exact same words, do this movement this certain way, i.e. in this certain alignment.
The difference is : you will know you are teaching something that’s about what is happening on the inside — which can indeed refer to all sorts of things but here I am talking about what’s happening on the inside just straight up biomechanically, i.e. what is engaged and what is not, i.e. the tone — which just happens to look like this particular alignment but that’s not the important part ...
... even though, for all intents and purposes on this planet, it is.
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Before we go, just to offer that another way of saying this is: alignment is very important ... as an indicator.