our-yoga

So much of our regular Ashtanga yoga practice relies on being able to bear weight with our hands: Chaturanga, vinyasas, jump-backs and jump-throughs, you name it. Because of this, injury to the wrists can often be a very debilitating and demoralizing blow to our practices. It's easy to become discouraged when a particular body part that has served us so well and whose reliability in carrying us from point A to point B on the mat we have virtually taken for granted suddenly breaks down and becomes the source of great pain rather than pride. 

But if you are suffering from wrist pain or injury, fear no longer! In response to my recent call for guest posts about healing from injuries in the practice (I'm still accepting guest posts, by the way, just so you know...), La Gitane from Yoga Gypsy has written a very illuminating post in which she describes in great detail her journey of healing from a recent wrist injury. She includes some very useful suggestions on how to modify your practice to work with this great bane to Ashtanga practice; now we will have no excuse not to practice if and when, God forbid, we injure our wrists. Sigh...

Before I shut up and let you read her article, I feel that I should also say a couple more things about La Gitane. In my mind, she is most famous in the Ashtanga blogosphere for writing that infamous open letter to Ashtanga back in June, in which she admits that she's, ahem, seeing other yoga. Ha! Talk about Brahmacharya violations... (Bad Lady!) I don't know if she's now back with Ashtanga, or if she's still persisting with her Ashtanga infidelity; in either case, what other people do (or don't do) behind Ashtanga's back is none of my business, so I'll leave it at that :-)

In "real" life, La Gitane works in international development as a communications professional, and is based in East Timor. She also teaches yoga.

Alright... now that I have gotten my daily ramble out of my system, I shall leave you in peace to enjoy La Gitane's post. More later.

• Practiced (wearing the brace) without putting any weight on the wrists
• Instead of sun salutations A, I warmed up my back and hamstrings by simply moving through tadasana - urdvha hastasana with a backbend - utanasana - looking forward - utanasana - urdvha hastasana with a backbend – tadasana.
• I practiced the standing poses as normal, except without placing any weight on my injured wrist in poses like trikonasana, parvritta trikonasana, parsvakonasana etc., and I avoided any odd angles for the wrist like bringing the hands into reverse prayer in parsvottanasana, or grasping the foot in ardha baddha padmottanasana.
• For all poses that required putting weight on the wrists, I substituted others that targeted similar areas of the body. So for example, I substituted cobra or shalabasana for upward dog, dolphin pose for downward dog, dolphin plank for plank pose, fish for purvottanasana, bridge for urdvha dhanurasana, and so on.
• Instead of taking the traditional vinyasa between seated poses, I practiced the following standing vinyasa that was taught to me by one of my Ashtanga teachers. It doesn’t place any strain on the wrists but still emphasizes core strength and stretches out the back between poses. (You might want to add halasana between navasana and standing up to help get some momentum!)

• Once my wrist was generally pain-free and stable, I began to gradually and mindfully re-introduce weight bearing poses, while continuing to wear the brace.
• Before practice, I warmed up my wrists with some gentle wrist stretches. (See this old blog post for details: http://yogagypsy.blogspot.com/2012/04/simple-excercises-for-wrist-pain.html)
• In addition, I used extra padding under my wrists at all times I was putting weight on them. An extra yoga mat is perfect for this. Place it under the palm of the hand with the fingertips hanging off the support. This reduces the angle between the wrists and the floor and helps line up the arm bones. For a vinyasa practice, two extra mats is ideal, because you can place one either side of your feet and it won’t interrupt your flow.

• No jump backs / forward / throughs
• Plank and chaturanga with knees on the ground
• Fewer breaths in downward-facing dog, or dolphin pose instead
• Replace upward facing dog with cobra / shalabasana
• No arm balances
• For all vinyasas between seated poses, I continued with the standing vinyasas shown previously

Week 6

Part II: Identifying the root causes

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I just watched this video that Kino posted, in which she answers a student's question about practicing with a chronic injury in yoga. In the course of answering the student's question, Kino uses the question as a jumping-off point to talk about the deeper aspects and purpose of Ashtanga yoga practice.

On a purely physical level, it is an undeniable fact that the practice of Ashtanga yoga is a very intensely demanding activity. Like any physical activity, the possibility of injury arises if you are doing it on a regular basis (say, six days a week). Ideally, if you are blessed with a Perfect Ashtanga Body that has not been corrupted by the demands of everyday living (sitting in chairs, driving cars, sitting in front of computers, being in agitated and anxious states of mind while sitting in chairs, driving cars, sitting in front of computers, which makes the muscles of the body even more tight and thus more injury-prone) and have perfect awareness in every minute of every practice, you should be able to complete primary series all the way up to sixth series within a year without incurring any injuries. Alas, this is not true of most of us; actually, I don't know a single Ashtangi who fits the above description--not even Kino. As you can see from the video, she actually had to work with a chronic back injury for three to four years.

So unless you happen to be one of those rare people with perfect Ashtanga bodies who practice all the time with perfect awareness (if this is you, please email me right away: I want to meet you! ;-)), you will almost invariably suffer some kind of injury (chronic or otherwise) in the course of your Ashtanga career. I'm not saying this to scare anybody or to give anybody license to "crank" their bodies recklessly into postures that they are not ready for. I'm just saying... well, actually, Kino says this better in the video: If you walk up and down stairs everyday, you will invariably trip and fall at some point in your illustrious stair-walking career. The thing is to pick yourself up and learn to walk with greater awareness while modifying whatever needs to be modified to allow your injury to heal. The same thing goes with Ashtanga practice. In fact, the incidence of injury in Ashtanga is made even more likely by the fact that Ashtanga practice (especially primary series) has this way of highlighting every single imbalance in your body and throwing it in your face. I think Richard Freeman said somewhere that doing the primary series is kind of like running through your body inch by inch with a fine-toothed comb.

Damn! I just read through everything I have written so far in this post, and realized that somebody who is new to Ashtanga and who has stumbled upon this post "cold" from the nether regions of google-search-land would be wondering: If Ashtanga is so dangerous, as all those detractors out there say, why bother to practice it? Well, let's look at it this way. If, as Freeman says, doing this practice is like running through your body with a fine-toothed comb, this means that it is not the fault of the practice when you discover imbalances in your body in the course of the practice; imbalances that you would probably rather prefer not to have known about. It is not the fault of the practice, because the imbalances were already there; the practice merely alerted you to them: As some wise guy once said, "Do not shoot the messenger."

The question, then, is what to do when you encounter such imbalances. Ideally, if we are always practicing with perfect awareness, we will be able to sense the imbalances every single time they appear, and do the appropriate things (modify the posture, experiment with different ways of entering and exiting the posture, etc.) to address the imbalance without injuring ourselves. But again, alas, most of us (including yours truly) do not have such perfect awareness all or even most of the time. Which means that we will only know about the existence of the imbalance when it has already manifested as an injury. Which means that we will have to deal with the imbalance on the level of an injury, and modify our practice accordingly while allowing the injury to heal. Of course, one could also quit practicing altogether and go do something else, but if one does this, then whatever imbalance it is that caused the injury will linger and cause possibly more pain and injury in the future (yeah, you may not find this to be very palatable advice, but what else do you expect to hear from an Ashtanga Fundamentalist? :-)).

What is the best way to go about working with injury? In his recent answer to Erica's question about practicing with injury, Richard Freeman says that

"Working carefully and intelligently with injury is an important part of any yoga practice. Yoga should make the body healthier rather than harming it. Though one has to be intelligent rather than fanatical and mechanical."

But how do we cultivate a practice that is "intelligent rather than fanatical and mechanical"? I think a very important thing to do is to learn to listen to the body and understand what is causing the imbalance. Acquiring more detailed anatomical knowledge of that part of the body will probably help. But from my own experience, I have come to feel that injury-healing in Ashtanga is almost always more than a purely physical process. In the course of working with an injury, we will usually discover certain lifestyle habits or ways of seeing the world which inevitably translate into our attitudes towards our practice on the mat. Which means that ultimately, healing from injury involves more than modifying postures; it also involves modifying our attitudes towards things and adopting more productive and healthy mind/body habits. I believe this is what Kino was alluding to when she speaks of seeing injury as your body "asking for a vibrational shift or transformation." In the course of undertaking this shift, we will find ourselves shifting from a goal-oriented view of the practice (and maybe, of life itself) to a healing-oriented practice.

Whew! That was quite a bit to say about one video! I can't thank Kino enough for constantly giving me new things to blog about; actually, come to think of it, probably more than half of the most read posts on this blog have something or other to do with Kino. At the risk of sounding very creepy, I think Kino is this blog's main muse. 'Nuff said.

Actually, something else just occurred to me: From reading everything I just wrote above, I get the sense that this whole post has been rather theoretical so far. With injury healing and practicing with injury, it is always best to hear from the real-life experiences of real practitioners. If nothing else, reading these experiences can serve as a source of hope and encouragement to others on the path of practice.

With this in mind, I am going to do something I have never done on this blog before: I would like to solicit guest posts about the process of practicing with injuries and healing from them from any of you readers out there who would be interested in sharing your healing experiences with others, and in this way, providing a source of spiritual and psychological support for everybody along the path. If you are interested in guest-posting on this blog about this topic, please email me at the email address on the top-right-hand corner of this blog. I can't guarantee that you will become famous or attain the lofty heights of Ashtanga Yoga Rockstardom by posting on this blog, but it is definitely very good karma, and you will gain the eternal gratitude of many, including yours truly. So yeah, think about it.    

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Earlier today, I went to my now-monthly acupuncture session. I had originally started going to acupuncture sometime last November/December, after I injured my left knee (see this post for the gory details). Over the last few months, my knee has been slowly but steadily getting better. On most days, I can now get into lotus with little or no discomfort, if I move into it slowly when I bring the left foot into the right hip crease. I am no medical doctor or body worker (this is by way of a disclaimer, so you know I am not trying to proffer medical advice here. I'm just sharing my own very personal experience), but over the path of healing over the last few months, I have found doing the following things to be useful:

(i) Doing hip openers such as baddha konasana (modified to whatever degree you need to modify to avoid the knee pain), double pigeon and (very, very slowly and carefully) siddhasana outside of the practice. For the last few months, I have been doing these postures for between 20 to 50 breaths each before I begin the Surya Namaskars in the morning. Which usually adds about 20 minutes to my total practice time. But I have found it well-worth the effort: Doing these postures mindfully help to open the external hip rotators and lengthen the quadriceps and adductors, taking the pressure off the knee joint.

(ii) In the first few weeks (for me, it was around 6 to 8 weeks) of the injury, when the knee joint is still very inflamed, it is a good idea to modify anything involving lotus or half-lotus postures. Acupuncture really helps to reduce the inflammation, speeding up the healing process. More on acupuncture in a little bit.  

(iii) When the inflammation began to subside after a few weeks, I started slowly reintroducing the lotus and half-lotus postures. I have found it very useful  to move into these postures by engaging the external rotators and lengthening the adductors and quadriceps rather than simply pulling the foot or ankle into the hip crease. Respect the body's limits; resist the temptation to pull the foot or ankle further into lotus when the hip rotators can bring you no further into the posture.

(iv) If there is pain, you basically have two options: (i) Go no further, (ii) try to see if you can move around the pain rather than through the pain: Depending on the extent and location of your knee injury, it may be possible to bend your knee and move the foot at a particular angle such that you are able to move into lotus or half-lotus without pain (hence "moving around" the painful area). For instance, during a certain phase of the healing process, I discovered that if I close my knee joint first (as if I am going into Mari A) and then slowly move the foot towards the hip crease, I can get into lotus without pain.

Well, it is very difficult to describe things properly on a blog: Maybe I shouldn't even have brought up this idea of moving around pain in the first place, as it can be quite difficult to distinguish between moving around pain and moving through pain sometimes when one is in the heat of practice on the mat. But take this for what it is worth. Remember: I am not proffering medical advice here. So don't come and sue me if you break your knee! And remember: This approach may not work with all knee injuries. It seems to work with mine, so I thought I'll share. If in doubt, simply go no further. Remember, it's your body, when all is said and done. Take good care of it.  

Well... I originally started this post intending to talk about acupuncture, but went into this giant segue about practicing with knee injuries. Oh well. You must already know that I am famous for such digressions, if you read this blog regularly; so what's new? Anyway, I guess I should also say a couple of things about acupuncture now, while we're at it. So, as I was saying at the beginning of this post, I started acupuncture to help treat my knee injury. I have found that acupuncture is not a quick fix, at least not for me: When I first started acupuncture, my knee did not get better instantly. But what I have discovered is that acupuncture works on your body the way the tides slowly rise on the ocean. You may not notice anything in any particular body part immediately. But by increasing the level of chi or life energy in your body, acupuncture treatment raises the overall "ocean level" of your body chi over time, so that over time, inflammation is reduced, and your body can undertake the natural process of healing itself without any obstructions. I suppose you can say that acupuncture helps your body to get out of its own way, so that healing can proceed more smoothly.  At least that's how I feel it has worked for my body. Again, remember: I am neither a medical doctor nor a bodyworker nor an acupuncturist. All this is just me reporting my own experience.

These days, I go to acupuncture ostensibly to continue treating my knee. But I'm starting to think that the real reason is a bit bigger than that: I have come to see acupuncture as savasana with needles: You basically lie there for half an hour with needles in you, and just "be with the universe", as my acupuncturist would say. In many ways, I see it as the restorative yoga practice I never had :-) So yeah, acupuncture rocks!   

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