The rules of yoga

Are you good at yoga?

Are you doing yoga wrong?

Is there a body position you struggle against?

Is there a breath technique which feels hard?

Who made up the rules of yoga anyway?

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Rules are made up by people

Rules are made up by people. They are guidelines that probably helped someone (or many people) to gain more from their yoga practice, and so they keep being repeated and enforced in the hope that they will help you too.

They are often from a book and you don't really know if the person who wrote the book would stick to that rule if they knew what happened with you when you tried to follow it. Or the rule might simply be from a bossy person who likes to tell people what to do.

I do this to my kids quite often, enforce rules and boundaries, sometimes I'll seem bossy. And this has its place. Sometimes they just need to know where to start, and what to do, and how to do it. It is a good place to begin for them, and they like rules ... at first.

But at some point there is a conversation about the rule, when they are ready or when they feel like that rule isn't a great idea, and the rule may well be due for an update as a result of the discussion. Or they may just need to understand what underpins the rule helps it make more sense to them.
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When to break the rules

Rules are there to be helpful. But rules are also there to be broken / updated / changed when they aren't working.

If you come up against a rule in yoga, use it as a springboard for your own enquiry into what it does for you, or what it doesn't do for you. This doesn't give you free reign to do what you like, discipline is a powerful tool in yoga and one that I have high regard for. 

This is where teachers are really helpful. Someone more experienced at understanding this rule than you, with whom you can discuss it. Explore why the  rule would be a helpful one for you to work with (or not). What might the rule offer that your not seeing from your viewpoint.

Be prepared for an outcome either way, or if the teacher doesn't know why the rule is there, and isn't able to explore it with you, then find someone more experienced who is.

Perhaps the rule is generally a good idea, or perhaps the insight you gain from the conversation and enquiry is perhaps more beneficial than the rule itself.