If you engage in any sport or activity, chances are you have, or will have injured yourself. Yoga is no exception.
But, yoga may not really be at fault. Often, it is how you practice yoga.
I have a friend who was praticing yoga by himself at home. He was doing Ardha Matsyendrasana (seated twist).
It felt so good that he decided to go deeper. He came out of the pose, wound himself up and twisted himself deeper using momentum. He didn’t feel anything at the time, but he woke up in the middle of the night with pain in his chest. He thought he was having a heart attack. He took himself to the emergency room where he found out that he had strained his diaphragm muscle. Now he goes around telling people that yoga is dangerous.
That could be a good case for practicing with a balance of effort and ease and for practicing with an experienced teacher.
However, there are some styles of yoga that are safer than others. I know a lot of people really like Vinyasa Yoga. I used to like it, too. And I taught it for many years. But over the years, I developed injuries. Part of it was my ego, of always trying to push myself to improve, to get more of a work out. Some of it was the pace of the class. Often when you are flowing from one posture to another, you have little time to check to see that you are aligned.
Very few people are naturally symmetrical and perfectly aligned. (Especially after middle age!) We mostly develop habits and patterns over the years that cause asymmetries. These asymmetries are often due to our jobs, habits, sports we choose to engage in or our psychological state. Because these changes happen gradually, we often assume that it is just how we are made. Often, it is not. It is how we have become.
We have all discovered that in any yoga pose, one side is easier to do than the other. This is one symptom of our asymmetries.
Moving through a vinyasa flow practice without awareness of these asymmetries can cause trouble on one side of the body. We often label that side of us as ‘the bad side”. But, it really isn’t the bad side. It is just a different side. The joints are moving differently on that side, the muscles are not as developed as the other side. If you don’t understand this and correct it, you’ll convince yourself that yoga is hurting your body. However, you can learn to see this side of your body as your teaching side.
This is why I got back into Iyengar Yoga. I was getting injured doing Vinyasa Yoga. Iyengar yoga healed me. In his book, “Yoga for Sports”, B.K.S. Iyengar states:
“Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. Even when pain has to be endured, yoga teaches us how to use the affected part so that we can function with ease and prevent it from deteriorating further.”
I got out of Iyengar yoga because the people I was working for hated it. The discouraged me from teaching it. And even a lot of my students preferred the flow of vinyasa over the static work of Iyengar.
But, I couldn’t bear to watch my students misalign. It came to a head one day a few years ago when someone asked me to go back to teaching Vinyasa Yoga and I obliged only to have 2 students pull out of class because they hurt themselves. I could see them misaligning in their poses and I thought to myself, “I know better. I just can’t watch that anymore.”
I run into people all the time who no longer do yoga because they say it hurts their bodies. It may be arrogant of me to think that I could help them do yoga and not be in pain. But I feel that I can. I know how much Iyengar yoga has helped me. I feel that I can share that with others.
When I was younger, I was able to muscle myself into poses. However, I lost my ability to do some poses because of that. Now, in my mid 60’s, I am amazed at what I can do.
I have to credit working directly with a teacher who was willing to help me, watch me and correct me in my practice, even to this day, as the factor that got me out of pain in my practice.
Practice has to start with the basics. The form and alignment has to be maintained as the poses get more challenging. Otherwise injury can occur. It is not that practice makes perfect. It is perfect practice that makes perfect.
Often people get impatient and they want to get to the more advanced poses.
"Start with the right actions. It is better to start with the right actions than to try to correct later. If you perform wrong actions repeatedly, they become habits which are very hard to fix."
Mr. Iyengar did yoga up until the end of his life. His practice changed so that he was doing more supported poses, but he could still practice advanced poses.
BKS Iyengar doing Setu Bandha Sarvangasana at the age of 92. Click on this link to read an article about aging and practice.
I want my students to understand the hierarchy of poses and the sequential steps you need to take to get to advanced poses. For instance, most of my students want to be able to do Urdhva Dhanurasana (Wheel). But most of them cannot do Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (the pose Mr. Iyengar is in), which is considered a pose you learn how to do before you do Wheel.
Starting in September, I will be teaching a series of 2 hour classes to work on building a solid foundation in Iyengar Yoga. This class is longer because we will spend about 30 minutes on reading and discussion. We will spend 90 minutes on asana. Our work will be based on the books: Preliminary Course and Intermediate Course by Geeta Iyengar. If you are interested in understanding your body and deepening your practice, I hope you will join me.