The Second Circle Method

Yoga For Human Beings

You’re a human being. Your body evolved (primarily) to run, walk, swim, climb, squat, carry, and throw. This evolution occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, way before Yoga was developed.

At Second Circle we believe Yoga should support the design of the human body, not seek to alter, transform, or “improve” it. We call this idea “body-first” Yoga. Your body determines the success of the practice, not the other way around. Following this idea, we have aligned traditional yoga practices with modern theory to create a system for empowered, healthy, human movement.

We focus on three core principles of body work:

1) Body First, Posture Second

Your body is a marvel of evolutionary engineering. A healthy yoga practice does not try to transcend or escape the body, it seeks to empower it. The function of a yoga pose must always follow the design and form of the human being doing it. The more information we have about human bodies in general and individual students in specific, the more powerful the practice becomes.

2) Stability supports mobility

“Pretty” yoga poses can be deceptive. Just because something looks impressive doesn’t mean it’s good for you, so we aren’t interested in super-bendy yoga poses at Second Circle. (We did them all before, we didn’t attain Nirvana. We did, however, attain some hamstring injuries.) Instead we focus on functional movement, a dynamic combination of strength and mobility. We will help you become more flexible in service of healthy, long-term, well-supported body patterns.

Basically, there’s no real reason for you to put your leg behind your head. There are, however, myriad excellent reasons for you to develop dynamic core strength.

3) support the center

Just like a healthy root structure supports a healthy tree, a healthy center body is the key to functional movement. This will change the way you walk, run, swim, climb, throw, and even sit in a chair. Most importantly, it will change the way you breathe. Our practice isn’t about the poses, it’s about your life in motion.

Influences

Our practice primarily combines Bikram, Anusara, and Kripalu Yoga. It is heavily influenced by Thomas Myers’ work on ‘Anatomy Trains’ as well as Katy Bowman’s theory of ‘nutritious movement.’ There’s a dash of Yin, a sprinkling of Qi Gong, and even a smidge of Baptiste Yoga in there for good measure. Thousands of hours of study, in-class student work, and annoyingly nit-picky inquisition have gone into making this mixture into a unified, invigorating practice for students of all levels.

If you’re really interested, there’s a whole book about the method. It’s called Beyond Hot Yoga and it was published by North Atlantic Books in 2021.