When teaching yoga, we all want our students to enjoy their practice and to be safe.
In a functional approach we are not worried about how a pose should look but instead we focus on what a pose should be doing, or in other words, where you should be feeling it. We communicate to our students what we want them to feel and give them options to adapt the pose until the pose works for them. Instead of working towards an aesthetic ideal we are making the pose available and beneficial to everybody in class, respecting their differences and abilities.
Functional Yoga is not about alignment because it respects the differences in personality, temperament but most importantly the enormous differences in every body and bone structure. Adjustments that makes someone feel amazing in a pose can hurt others or even damage them. That is why we teach students to identity and get to know their own bodies and make their practice an enjoyable experience where they learn to reach their target areas in a safe posture.