Two recent New York Times articles on yoga by William Broad suggested that yoga is dangerous, especially for men. See the article here. Personally, I think it is good that dialogue is starting to open up around the question of injuries in yoga. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more lawsuits in this country where litigation often takes the place of personal responsibility. But those newspaper articles presented a rather biased view of yoga. One would hope that good news reporting would include both sides of a story, but that no longer seem to be the case, even with the country’s most influential newspaper.
What is yoga anyway? Stretching, a sport, a workout, physical therapy, a philosophy, a life style…action, devotion, knowledge, meditation…all of these???? The answer can be yes to any of them. The more important questions are: what’s the essence of yoga and how do we find it amidst all the hype and veneer that has been laid on it?
Yoga Myth #2 (Yoga Myth #1):
Yoga has been around for five thousand years. Depending on how you answered the question above your perception of yoga history might be accurate or a bit skewed. If your final answer has anything to do with physical exercise, think again. Five millenniums ago, no one needed a workout. Life required it. People didn’t sit at computers all day and drive around in ergonomically dysfunctional vehicles. They squatted, sat on the floor with their legs crossed, and walked a lot. So the idea of sun salutations coming down through an ancient lineage is an illusion, or what the sages would have called maya. Surya namaskara has only been around for about a century.
We touched briefly on the association of yoga with sport and workout in a past blog. With that approach to yoga, one can expect injury. I don’t know any serious athlete who’s never been injured. It’s hard to play the edge without falling off once in awhile. We can blame the teacher for tweaks, but each one of us decides the style of yoga we choose to do and the person to guide us through the practice.
Speaking of teachers…it is wise to be cautious of teachers who encourage you to push harder. Most of us push ourselves hard enough. The “no pain no gain” attitude is deeply imbedded in our America’s psyche. If you weren’t pushing, you wouldn’t be taking a class in a 95-degree room with an instructor who lies on your back in paschimottanasana (pop there goes the hamstrings) and screams STRETCH FURTHER.
While a skilled teacher can guide a skilled practitioner into a deeper stretch without causing injury, that same physical adjustment can be disastrous for a novice. I suspect there are a lot of inexperienced teachers out there aggressively adjusting beginning students, a recipe for injury. Just because we learn a technique in a teacher-training program, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for everyone.
Yoga saved me from spinal surgery twenty-six years ago. With my back problem, I would have been destroyed by a typical high-energy yoga class with fifty people in it and little assistance from the teacher. When I started yoga in the mid-eighties in Anchorage, Alaska, I was fortunate enough to find a teacher who addressed each student in her class on a personal basis. The Last Frontier might have been the last place one would expect to find an excellent yoga teacher at that time, but Lynne Minton sillfully guided me into an hour a day practice that freed me from back pain. No pushing. Just focus on grounding, alignment and breathing.
In 2004 yoga helped me recover from a shattered collarbone, after an orthopedic surgeon put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So yep, I’m convinced that yoga (at least when done correctly) is good therapy.
The three root causes of injury are: poor technique, lack of attention, and pushing too hard.
The solutions:
Learn proper technique with a good teacher.
Train the mind to pay attention. Just because you touched the palms to the floor yesterday in uttanasana, doesn’t mean your body is ready to do it today. This is challenging but now we are getting to the heart of yoga.
Adjust you own internal attitude. (Ditto on the challenge.) Pushing and aggressive adjustments raise the questions, “What are we striving for,” and, more importantly…”why.” Patanjali clearly stated in the Sutras that we should practice diligently without attachment. Hummm… that makes me wonder where trademarking fits in, but that’s another blog. The deeper meaning of yoga lies in mastering vairagyam (non-attachment) not handstand.
wildyoga 
Good article, Denny! I sustained a knee injury in a yoga class that took 2 years to heal. I had shut out my own sense of what felt right for my body and followed the teacher’s advice to stretch further. There was kind of a pop in my knee and I knew immediately that I’d made a big mistake not to tune into my body and follow my own sense of what was right. I have been through this same scenario in other setting, e.g. taking advice from “spiritual teachers” that was counter to my own sense of what course of action felt like it had integrity for me, with equally bad results. It has been a long slow learning curve for me, but I think I am learning the lesson. There are such strong currents in human culture that teach us not to trust ourselves, that teach us to surrender our innate intelligence and intuition and make ourselves subservient to some exterior “authority.”