Teaching flow yoga classes to beginners requires a certain amount of creativity and thinking on your feet – at least if you don’t want people to get bored. There are only so many poses that are approachable from a beginner level, so how to keep things interesting, yet avoid doing the same thing every day?

This has been one of my challenges. Padahastasana helped me solve it, somewhat. It has to do with permutations. Forgive me for a little digression into very basic maths:

Take a deck of cards. There are only 52 cards. You’d think, then, that any game based around those cards would get boring after a while. Of course, everyone reading this book knows that it doesn’t, and why – the possible permutations in that deck of cards is enormous. While after a night of poker you’re likely to see every card in the deck many times, you’re also not likely to see the same five card hand even twice!

The same is true of a yoga practice. Keeping things interesting isn’t about finding a wacky new pose to do every day. Instead, the order is important. Now, yoga is different from a card game in that not all combinations are workable. You’re not going to start a practice with Leg Behind the Head pose, then go directly into Upward Bow, before moving on to triangle pose, for instance (not least of which because you’ll likely end up screwing up your back that way). So there are connections between poses that need to be followed. Each one depends on what’s gone before.

Once you figure this out, it’s easy to design a practice that’s both effective (building up from a good warm-up to more challenging poses, stretching an area with an easier pose before going on to work it more intensely, counter stretching after those intense poses, etc.) and fun. Padahastasana was one of the poses that taught me a thing or two about the versatility of such linkages. There are many simple options available from padahastasana, and moreover, they are seldom used, as far as I’ve seen.

I started my yoga practice with Astanga Vinyasa. One of the most noticable aspects of Astanga is that it follows a specific sequence of poses. There are a lot of really great reasons to do this, and I really enjoy the sequence. You learn the vinyasa – the specific breaths used to connect one pose to another – to the point that you never have to think about them anymore, and the practice becomes a fluid movement from pose to pose over the landscape of the breath. It’s really nice, and it’s something I want all of my students to get a chance to experience.

On the other hand, after a few years of practicing primary series, I started to get bored. It’s the same poses every day, after all. Even when you start doing second series, or going on to the advanced series, it’s still somewhat limited. And sometimes this practice needs a little spice added to it.

So I invite you to try a little bit of both – learn primary series and practice it enough that it becomes second nature to you. It’s an experience that’s worth having – particularly in the way that the mind slows down. But every don’t be afraid to try something new from time to time as well. If your hips feel tight drop into malasana from Padahastasana, and just see where your breath takes you from there. If you’re feeling light and strong, you might try working on lifting up into a handstand from here. If your hamstrings are loving the stretch and just want a little more, why not move into Urdva Prasarita Eka Padasana. But most of all, have fun with your practice, as you discover its depths.