our-yoga

I just watched this recent video by David Garrigues, in which he talks about the place of pain and injury in Ashtanga yoga. He starts by talking about aligning the shoulder girder properly to prevent shoulder injuries. But he then switches gears and declares that there is a certain karmic component to injury; as he puts it, "you cannot have a long intense relationship with Ashtanga yoga without some kind of injury happening." Injury may arise in the course of your Ashtanga career due to moments of carelessness, genetic weaknesses, or the presence of certain lifestyle factors that impinge upon your practice, or other factors that are simply beyond our control. Whatever the case may be, we should not think that it is "wrong" to be hurt, or that being injured in the course of practice is somehow a yogic sin. David also brings up some funny Guruji stories about injury and pain; I won't go into the details here. I'll leave you to listen to them for yourself in the video.


I just read this very detailed report of Sharath's latest conference (Sunday January 20th). Here's something from the report that really struck a chord with me:

"One student asked Sharath what one is to do if they cannot afford to come study in India, but want to have and maintain a dedicated practice. I loved his answer to this question. We can afford cell phones and nice meals, nice clothes, etc but we cannot afford yoga? He spoke of so many of his students who make tremendous sacrifices to come study with him each year, bringing their children, sacrificing many things to ‘find’ the money to come to India and study with him b/c they want to learn the truth of what is yoga, they want to learn this practice properly under his guidance. If so many of these people can do, everyone can do. So many families coming now brining their children, uprooting their lives to come learn proper practice, to understand this yoga, to show their dedication for this practice, this lineage – if parents can make such tremendous sacrifices and bring their children, it is possible for anyone to do. He chuckled and advised someone to skip one meal per day for some time until they saved enough for the trip."  

Hmm... now I can't help but wonder what Sharath would say about not being able to come study in India because of immigration and career issues? I have a few pictures in my head as to what he might say, but I'm not going to put it out here just yet, since I don't know him personally, and it is rude (not to mention fruitless) to guess what people would say to your personal situation when you don't know them personally. But I can't help wondering, nonetheless...

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I just watched the above video by Kiki, in which she talks about some useful ways to modify the practice to work with and help to heal wrist injury.  If you are working with injuries or other issues in the wrists, you might find this useful.

Not being a very experienced practitioner, I don't have any specific anatomy or posture tips to offer for practicing with injuries. What I would like to do instead is to say a few things about the psychology of injury in yoga, specifically Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. A lot has been written about the common injuries that Ashtangis have sustained in the course of practice, and how to go about treating those injuries and/or modifying one's practice to work with those injuries. All this is valuable and useful information, of course. But I have noticed that very little has been written about what I call the psychology of injury, i.e. the mindsets and attitudes that Ashtangis with injuries tend to adopt. I'm not talking about the mindsets and attitudes that lead to injury: We are more or less familiar with this (ego, pushing too far beyond one's limits, neglecting to listen to certain signs from the body, etc, etc.). What I am interested in talking about are the mindsets and attitudes that Ashtangis tend to have when they have an injury. I have noticed that very little has been written about this area. I'm not sure why this is. But I personally think this is an important area to discuss and think about. After all, according to yogic philosophy, the mind and the body are ultimately one entity. If this is so, then what goes on in the mind inevitably manifests in the body. This being the case, it seems to me that the sort of attitude or mindset one adopts when one is working with an injury will have a direct impact on how effectively one heals from the injury.

Since I hurt my knee more than a month ago, I have had the good fortune of communicating with a few Ashtanga teachers who have worked with injuries at one time or another in their practice careers. They have offered me a lot of helpful advice and specific suggestions. Through my discussions with them, I have noticed that Ashtangis who sustain injuries in the course of their practice tend to adopt one of two attitudes towards their injury:

(A) The Badge of Glory Attitude: As the name suggests, Ashtangis who adopt such an attitude display their injuries almost proudly, as signs that they are super-dedicated or devoted to the practice; so dedicated that they quite literally sacrifice their bodies to the practice. I must admit that while I have heard lots of stories about such Ashtangis, I have never actually personally met such an Ashtangi. Maybe they don't exist anymore. I don't know. But if the stories I hear are reliable, then such Ashtangis have at least existed at one time or another.

(B) Shame/Embarrassment: Quite a few Ashtangis are either reluctant to talk to others about their injury, or keep their injuries secret altogether, because they feel shame and/or are embarrassed about their injury. Why are they ashamed or embarrassed? According to one of the teachers I communicated with, this may be because they are embarrassed about being seen as "not evolved enough" to be able to practice without sustaining injuries. Perhaps they are also embarrassed/ashamed about adding to Ashtanga's bad rep: They are embarrassed/ashamed about becoming another example of why Ashtanga is a dangerous/injury-inducing practice ("What? You busted your knee/shoulders/broke your back doing Ashtanga? See, I told you this is a dangerous style of yoga to practice, but you wouldn't listen, etc., etc."). I can personally attest to the presence of such attitudes of shame/embarrassment among Ashtangis: I struggle with these feelings myself.

As you probably figured, neither (A) nor (B) is a productive or healthy attitude to have towards injuries. (A) causes one to not listen to one's body during practice, and to do things that might well lead to more injury in the future. It may also give people the impression that Ashtangis are supposed to have a gung-ho attitude towards injury ("If you're not breaking your leg, you're not working hard enough!"), and may either lead people new to the practice to do things that are harmful to themselves, or turn people away from Ashtanga altogether.

(B) is not a productive attitude to have either. If one is embarrassed and reluctant to talk about one's injuries, one might end up suffering in silence, making what is already a difficult experience more unnecessarily difficult. It is also harder for such an individual to seek help. Perhaps more importantly, injury can be a valuable learning experience both for the individual and for others who may benefit from hearing about experiences of injury healing. If one does not talk about injury out of shame or embarrassment, one deprives oneself and others of a valuable learning experience.

Please don't get me wrong: I am not saying all this to chastise or single out people who choose not to speak about their injuries. I'm not trying to start any kind of "Let's Talk about Injury Until the Cows Come Home Movement". Nor am I trying to start any kind of witch-hunt, or anything like that. Your body and mind (and mouth) are yours and yours alone, and it is totally up to the individual to decide what is the best course of action to take. I am just observing, based on my own experience, that neither (A) nor (B) are productive attitudes to have, because both of them ultimately do no good to either the practitioner or to others around him or her.

What, then, might be a more productive attitude to adopt towards injury? Here's a suggestion:

(C) Acceptance of injury as part of the process leading towards wholeness: One of the teachers that I communicated with was able to use the asana practice to heal a knee injury over a couple of years of careful and patient practice. He shared the following with me:

"It was a long process that took a lot of awareness and had many ups and downs.  The challenge for me was that as it started to feel better, I would inevitably begin to push beyond my limits and suffer a setback.  The pain can be a real indicator that wakes up awareness of an area.  So, much of my work was first and foremost in the area of awareness.  I had to learn not only how to be aware of my limits, but to discern the different muscles, tendons, and other tissues that were at play in a certain movement.  For me it was anything involving a half lotus.
In my case, I had to specifically learn how to stretch and lengthen the adductor group and the quadricep group in these poses while engaging the hip flexors.  It was just a gradual process of learning to discern what to engage and what to stretch and doing my best not to confuse the two.  Over the course of a couple of years, it was like going from blind to sighted with regards to that particular part of my body...  It was a real lesson in listening to my body.  What I didn't do was to skip poses.  I would instead allow as long as I needed to get into poses, and modify if necessary or not go as deep as I was used to going...

This, in my opinion was key to my recovery since it allowed me to address the underlying imbalance (short adductors and quadriceps) that I believe caused the injury in the first place.  This approach is not for everyone, and it took a lot of time and patience.  I often times doubted my process and had fear and anxiety around it, but it was faith in guruji's advice that kept me going.  I don't believe there should be any shame in injury or getting surgery.  These pains and injuries that come up are part of a much larger process leading towards wholeness.  I believe that these imbalances live in our body and cause tremendous suffering either consciously or unconsciously by the ways in which they limit our life experience.  It would be nice if we were tuned in enough to move towards harmony and balance without the injuries and pain, but at least in my case, I have had to learn the hard way periodically.  However,  I am always grateful for the chance to grow and learn and I believe that I am better off having addressed these imbalances."

Before I go on, I should issue a little disclaimer here: I included a lot of details that are specific to this particular teacher's injury-healing process, because I feel that these details are needed in order to convey the depth of his process. However, I must emphasize that none of the above is intended to be any kind of medical advice and/or specific advice on how to practice. As the teacher himself stated above, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to practice issues: This is especially true when one is working with injury. Please be advised accordingly.     

Having said this, I think the gist of this teacher's account lies in the insight that injury and pain are necessary parts of the journey of practice for many people (including yours truly). If one happens to be one of the fortunate practitioners who never have to work with pain and injury through the course of the practice journey, that's great (such a person would probably have to be somebody who has practiced yoga for many lifetimes before this one). But if you are, ahem, a mere mortal like me, take heart: Injury is not the end of the world, or the end of your practice. It is, in many ways, a new beginning.

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[Spoken with Yoda voice] Ah, a very funny thing this blogging is. For most of this month, I have just been averaging about one post a week. But then suddenly, this is the second post for today. The blogging muse is indeed a fickle creature...

Just a few minutes ago, I stumbled upon this article by Anne Finstad, in which she describes Ashtanga yoga as a "House of Pain." As you probably remember, about a month ago, David Garrigues published his by-now-famous blog post on the inevitability of pain in the Ashtanga practice (it's so famous that I'm not even going to link to it here; I bet you have probably read it, like, a thousand times by now). In response to this post, the entire Ashtanga blogosphere was aflame (or should I say "inflamed" :-)) with passionate discussions about whether pain is good/necessary in a "real" Ashtanga practice, how many kinds of pain there are, whether the pain that comes from practice is similar to the pain that comes from poetic creation, and whether some senior Ashtanga teachers might be Cylons (this last one is, of course, entirely my own contribution to the conversation :-)).

Anyway, this article by Finstad is definitely worth a read. She talks about her own experience of pain in the practice in a very honest, heartfelt, no-hyperbole kind of way:

"There was a long time for me, the practice just hurt. I spend my first trip to Mysore having torn a hamstring insert before going. It meant a lot of adjustments from Guruji and made me wonder what was wrong with all of us — especially me. It was not an ideal spiritual journey. It was pure raw pain and it was not only painful it was exhausting. I really was suspicious that Pattabhi Jois was a crazy man and we were all crazy for going to India to go through this. And as many will tell you, he didn’t really explain much to you, he just did it. So there was a great deal or room to wonder.

The thing was, and thank God, that part of the practice wasn’t forever. This magic thing happened where after five years of practice my hips opened. After seven years of practice, my knees stopped hurting. And as people will tell you or you can see if someone sticks with the practice over time and through these things, the body is made new.

It’s not a perfect transformation in all cases and the limits of it are dictated by how we take the practice. But as much as we let it the practice will change us for the better."

One of the first things that hit me when I read this was: "Damn, seven years of knee pain!" Most ordinary human beings I know would probably bail after like, five seconds of knee pain. Seven years? Gosh... But Anne has more to say. Here's the upshot of pain in the practice, according to Anne:

"I am writing this to say that everyone at some point has an experience of pain. We each have an attitude towards our own pain. To me the practice is a good way to start looking at how we approach pain. This discussion isn’t always comfortable, but it is one that a lot of us need to have. To work out how to not seek it, avoid it, or fear it. It’s going to happen, this pain. Just like life is going to happen. Sometimes it calls on us to do something, and sometimes we just need to let it be what it is and not try to fix it.

What the practice teaches me is how to let go of fighting the pain — to move on and through it without hanging on or becoming identified with it. To let pain become another sensation that educates me, to change my behavior, or to accept what is.

This, rather than just putting my foot behind the head, is yoga."

I hope you find Anne's article as edifying as I do... but--and I'm pretty sure you are already suspecting this, but I have to say it anyway--this also means that Anne Finstad is probably also a Cylon. How else could anybody live with knee pain for seven frakking years? 


But here's a different way of looking at this whole pain-and-Ashtanga-yoga business. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously proclaimed that "Language is the house of Being." I'm no Heidegger scholar, and am therefore unable to tell you what Being is (maybe Grimmly can, but he's on the beautiful island of Crete, soaking in the sunshine and taking in wonderful yoga instruction from Manju... and who wants to read and talk about Heidegger while on vacation?). But as a very convenient (albeit somewhat bastardized) shorthand, you can think of Being as being akin to the Tao or the Force of Star Wars.

So language, according to Heidegger, is the place where Being/Tao/the Force is most at home, and reveals itself most readily to us. But this revealing cannot take place by trying to wrench meaning out of words by linguistic analysis. Being can only reveal itself to us when we are open enough in our being for language to unfold itself through us. Heidegger's favorite example is that of the poet. The poet does not work with language by analyzing it or trying in some way to force meaning out of it. Rather, he allows the muse to speak to him and, in so doing, becomes an open conduit through which language and Being unfolds itself through him.

If none of this makes much sense to you, it's not you: It's probably a combination of the fact that I am both not a Heidegger scholar and also a very bad poet. But where's the connection to Ashtanga here? Well, consider this: What if Pain is the house of Ashtanga? In other words, what if it is through the language of pain that the truth or Tao or whatever of Ashtanga reveals itself to us? In other words, could it be that Pain is the House of the Being of Ashtanga? Yeah, I know, all this is very awkwardly put (I told you I was a bad poet...), but hopefully, you get my drift here.

But if all this is true, wouldn't this mean that practicing Ashtanga is a form of poetic creation, so that in practicing Ashtanga, we are doing poetry with our minds and bodies? Ha! So the pain of Ashtanga is really akin to the pain of poetic creation, after all. Well, shows what I know, right? ;-)     

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by Nina

Needle and Ice by Melina Meza

When a man has mastered himself,
he is perfectly at ease in cold,
in heat, in pleasure or pain,
in honor or disgrace

—Bhagavad Gita, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

We get many comments on our blog, but every once in a while there is one that makes me feel sad, like this one, which one of our readers left on a post about menopause:

This will certainly be relevant for me (65). Besides ongoing extreme irritability, yoga is not the joy it has always been for me because of joint stiffness and pain. What little stability I felt in life came from yoga, and feel that slipping away when I need it most.

My first reaction to this was to write to Shari and suggest that she write about menopause and joint pain because I knew that she, too, was currently suffering from joint problems (see Yoga for Menopause: Joint Problems). But even after ensuring that this topic was going to be addressed, I was concerned about the underlying issue:

yoga is not the joy it has always been 

what stability in life that came from yoga is slipping away

The thing is, I don't believe that physical pain means that yoga practice needs to be less joyful, or that the stability that practice brings will slip away if your asanas hurt more than they used to. And I speak from experience. Now that I'm over two bouts of frozen shoulder (which, trust me, were very painful), I'm still living with an arthritic hip that's not going to go away. So for many years, I've experienced pain when I practice asana at home or during a class. And, of course, I definitely cannot practice many of the poses I used to do on a regular basis. However, practicing yoga is still a positive, life-affirming experience for me, and as joyful as it ever was.

Because, after all, what is yoga? Definitions of yoga in the scriptures vary from "yoga is equanimity" to "yoga is cessation of the fluctuations of the mind" but nowhere is there anything about practicing pain-free asana. Indeed, as the quote at the beginning of the post tells us, being a yogi means being equally at ease in pain as in pleasure.

Both Ram and I have written about cultivating santosha as an important part of yoga practice (see Santosha: Happiness and Longevity  and Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness ). Santosha means "contentment" and TKV Desikachar defines contentment as "the ability to be comfortable with what we have and what we do not have." And I believe that being comfortable with what we have and what we do not have must include practicing asana while in physical pain and being comfortable with that. And as for the joy, the Yoga Sutras tells us in sutra 2.42 "Perfect happiness is attained through contentment."

So the path back to joy is not through the elimination of pain, but rather through cultivating contentment. In his post Achieving Stillness in Turbulent Situations Ram told us how his grandfather taught him to meditate in a train station in India because achieving stillness in a noisy, chaotic environment was what the practice of meditation was all about. Likewise, I feel that learning how to find contentment in our asana practice, even while in physical pain, is also the essence of yoga. (Of course, you should continue to use pain as a guide to practicing safely as Shari describes in her post Yoga for Menopause: Joint Problems.)

So dear commenter and all our other readers, while I hope you may find some helpful hints on this blog that will help reduce your physical pain, we cannot remove all pain from your life  But we can offer you something more valuable. For practicing yoga by cultivating santosha inside and outside the yoga room will help see you through life's challenges in whatever form they take. As I wrote in my post Yoga and the Pursuit of Happiness, the Yoga Sutras make it clear which steps to take on that journey:

1.12 Practice and detachment are the means to still the movements of consciousness.

1.33 Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.

1.34 Or, by maintaining the pensive state felt at the time of soft and steady exhalation and during passive retention after exhalation.

1.35 Or, by contemplating an object that helps to maintain steadiness of mind and consciousness.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Kino MacGregor's new book, The Power of Ashtanga Yoga, on the blog. As a follow-up, Kino agreed to answer a few questions for the blog! I am super honoured and appreciative that she took time out of her busy schedule to answer my random philosophical musings... So please read, digest, enjoy, and comment!

Oh, and have you entered the giveaway yet for the chance to win a fabulous lavender silk eye pillow from Barefoot Yoga? No? What are you waiting for?

Interview with Kino MacGregor


Kino MacGregor is an international yoga teacher, author of two books, producer of six Ashtanga Yoga DVDs, writer, vlogger, world traveler, and co-founder of Miami Life Center (www.miamilifecenter.com). You can find details of her current book tour, her books, DVDs, videos and other goodies at www.kinoyoga.com.


Wow. Some amazing and inspirational words there! I suddenly have a massive craving for chocolate cake... What about you, readers?

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Last week there was some lively discussion in the yoga blogosphere about pain in yoga practice. As you can imagine, commentators had a wide range of opinions, ranging from: "if there's no pain you're not practicing hard enough" and "injury is inevitable in yoga, just get on with it", to, on the other side of the spectrum "if your practice injures you, you are letting your ego dominate" and "if it hurts, you're doing it wrong," and of course everything in between.

I remember my early yoga teachers talking on occasion about "good pain" versus "bad pain", which is pretty vague and therefore not very helpful. In addition, pain is highly subjective and each individual has a very different tolerance to pain depending on their individual physiology and their past experience (just imagine if a full-grown woman began screaming and wailing in public over a skinned knee; yet it's perfectly understandable that a 4-year old would).

From my perspective, it's not very useful to make generalisations about pain except to say that we will all experience it at some point or another. You really cannot know what another person's individual experience is, or judge whether their pain is "transformative" or just really, really annoying.

I do think it's useful to reflect on a few different types of physical pain and how these might affect our yoga practice. Here are four main types that I can think of:

1) Muscular pain: It is perfectly normal when you are working the body in new ways and pushing your limits to experience some soreness afterwards. This kind of muscular pain is usually isolated in areas of the body that you've been working hard, and might feel like tightness, stiffness, achiness or soreness, and is a sign of a normal, healthy body that is getting stronger and more flexible. Especially if you are practicing on a day-to-day basis, you are going to feel the residue of yesterday's practice when you first step on the mat. Generally with muscular pain of this kind, you can take a few deep breaths, observe the sensations, and keep going through your practice.

There is a big difference between observing pain and ignoring pain. In yoga, we never ignore any sensations. Observation is critical: if you have muscular pain that gets steadily worse, or the area where you feel pain starts to become inflamed, you may have an injury.

2) Joint pain: Joint pain is probably the most important type of pain to recognise in yoga. Joint pain can be dull or acute, but generally it's pain that you feel deep within your body around your critical joints: ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, or anywhere along your spine. It might feel like pressure building up against something solid. Other symptoms of unhappy joints include swelling, unusual stiffness or soreness in these critical joints, and continued discomfort when you use the joint throughout your day.

Joint pain is a serious sign telling you that you are doing something that is wrong for your body. If you try to "push through" joint pain you may end up with a very severe injury - the kind that will be with you for the rest of your life. In my experience, joint pain in yoga often occurs when people try to force their way into a pose that their body is not fully ready for: for instance, injuring your knees while trying to force your body into full lotus position. Joint pain is the type of pain that you work around in your yoga practice, never through. Often this might mean refining your technique or changing your alignment to reduce stress on joint, or modifying a pose.

3) Acute pain / injury: Acute pain is a sharp, intense pain that can't - and shouldn't - be ignored. Pain from an injury is not necessarily acute - it may vary in intensity, but it will usually be accompanied by other symptoms include feelings of heat, swelling, or redness over the affected area.

Unfortunately, injuries can occur suddenly and there may not be any warning signs. In yoga, especially if we are pushing our physical limits, injuries can occur in any number of ways. They can happen to you in your very first class or your thousandth, while trying a new pose or doing a pose you've done a dozen times. Often injuries occur when we push ourselves too hard or try things we are not quite ready for, trying to run before our muscles have really got the hang of walking. Sometimes we don't fully realise that we've injured ourselves until after our practice is over. The first few hours after an injury are critical, so it's important if you do injure yourself to immediately stop and look after yourself, whether that means applying an icepack or seeing a doctor. This can make the difference between a speedy recovery and a long, slow one.

When you're dealing with an injury (whether it happened in yoga or off the mat), the only yogic thing to do is to practice ahimsa (non-harming) and to let the injured area rest, so it can heal.

4) Chronic pain / recovering injury pain: Many people come to yoga because of pain. This is a totally different type of pain than the previous three, which we are assuming occurred during your practice, because this is pain that you are living with everyday, and bringing to your yoga mat.

Chronic pain or the pain of a recovering injury is different for everyone, so there's not a lot of use generalising here. The best advice I can give is to work with an experienced teacher or a yoga therapist to find the right mix of practicing with, through and around your pain, and devising practices that will help you feel better, and not make your pain worse.


So to sum up:

Type of Pain	Feels like	Practice recommendations?
Muscular	Soreness, tightness	Breathe through it and observe how it changes.
Joint	Pressure, swelling, stiffness, inflammation	Practice around it, never push through!
Injury	Acute pain, swelling, redness, heat	Rest and heal! Practice around it.
Chronic	Constant, of varying intensity	Practice with, through or around, depending on the individual case.

Readers, what are your thoughts and experience? Would you group things differently or could you add to this summary from your experience?

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A lively exchange on pain and the Ashtanga practice has sprung up recently at the Confluence Countdown. As with most such lively exchanges, commenters come from all points on the pain/practice/sadhana spectrum. Some people agree and resonate wholeheartedly with Bobbie's view that pain is part of the growing process and sadhana associated with the journey of the practice. Others feel that Bobbie is setting up a false dichotomy between pain/long-term sadhana on the one hand, and no-pain/no-sadhana, on the other. These people feel that Ashtanga is not, and should not be an all-or-nothing proposition, that it is possible to practice Ashtanga and still lead a relatively "happy" and pain-free existence.

As for me, I'm not sure how I should even start talking about this, or if I should even talk about this at all. One problem I've noticed with exchanges like this in the blogosphere is that people tend to talk past each other. One person would say that pain is good and necessary; another might say that pain is bad and should be avoided. But are both people talking about the same thing when they talk about pain? It seems to me that in these exchanges, there is a lot of jumping around between different concepts while using the same word. For instance, at times, Bobbie is referring to the physical pain from her degenerating disks; at other times, when she says "pain", she seems to be referring to sometime more emotional, maybe even existential, like when she compares the pain that arises from the practice with the pain of poetic creation. I'm not sure what to make of this myself. I'm no poet (even though I sometimes try to write bad poetry), but I would be cautious about linking the experience of one process (Ashtanga practice) with another (writing poetry) so liberally; the two are, after all, distinct from each other. And even if there are similarities between the two processes, why tag on more baggage onto our practice than is already there? But well, what do I know about all this? As I said, I'm not a poet...

But in any case, what I'm trying to say is this: In this exchange, there clearly seems to be an equivocation between different senses of the word "pain". Bobbie, as we have seen, switches quite liberally between two different senses of that word. And God only knows how many other definitions of pain the various commenters are working with. Which, as we can imagine, is not too helpful for useful conversation.

But enough of complaining. Let me try to see if I can say something useful for once. Well, I'll just state the obvious. If you have pain of any sort (whether it's the physical kind, emotional/existential kind, or any other kinds that are out there), you have a few options:       

(1) Ignore it;
(2) Push through it; 
(3) Find ways to practice and live with/around it;
(4) Seek professional help, either from a teacher, medical practitioner, psychotherapist or.... poet (?) or.... philosopher (?)

I should also add that these options are not mutually exclusive. For instance, it is possible to find a way to live with/around the pain while seeking professional help at the same time. In any case, we are all adults (whatever definition of "adult" you choose to go by), and are free to choose and live with the consequences of whatever option we choose.

But of course, I should also add that things will probably be a lot easier if you are a Cylon. If you are a Cylon who suffers from unbearable pain (of whatever kind) arising from your practice, you can just kill yourself and then download into a new body; if you don't know what I'm talking about, watch Battlestar Galactica. But would Cylons need to practice yoga in the first place? Well, I don't know; but Cylons have been known to practice taichi on their basestars. Here's a model 8 doing taichi in the nude:

If some Cylons practice taichi, it stands to reason that there must be other Cylons out there who practice yoga. Maybe even Ashtanga? Hmm... might Kino be a Cylon?


Maybe that's why she is so strong and flexible... Heck, maybe all long-time Ashtanga practitioners are Cylon sleeper agents; they think they are human, but are in fact Cylons who have been placed on earth to assume the cover identities of yoga practitioners and teachers. But why would whoever's in charge of the Cylons want to place Cylons here as Ashtangis? Well, how would I know? I'm not a Cylon. Or am I? Yikes... 

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I usually don't weigh in on the heavy yoga debates, and I'm not about to start now. I have the curse of always being able to see both sides of an issue. But this article about how a woman quit yoga after an injury has been making the rounds and caught my attention.

A few bloggers have criticised the author of the article for quitting, but personally, I don't see that as an issue. Yoga is a personal practice, not a panacea. It's not right for everyone and not everyone will like it. Some people will quit.  So what? The author of the article made her choice, learned something about herself in the process, and found a physical practice that she thought suited her better. It sounds like a happy ending to me.

The issue that I have is that this woman was medically diagnosed with high blood pressure and was not aware, or made aware, of the potential impacts, or told that she shouldn't be doing inversions, especially not intense inversions like headstand and handstand.  The resulting injury she suffered led her to quit yoga, rather than to quit inversions - which is her personal choice and it's really not my place to judge, opine, or argue with that. It's a free world, as they say.

From my perspective, reacting to tales of yoga injuries by denying them, defending yoga, or attacking the injured person or their teacher is not a constructive response. Yoga-asana is a physical discipline and the possibility of injury is always there. Find me one yoga practitioner who has never felt the twinge of over-stretching a muscle, fallen over while attempting a balancing pose, received a bad adjustment, or simply wound up feeling dizzy or nauseous while practicing. I think it's our responsibility to acknowledge that the risks are there and to do our best to become safe and knowledgeable practitioners and teachers. We need to remember that the principles of Ahimsa (non-harming), Aparigraha (non-grasping), and Satya (being truthful), among others, are more important to a yoga practice, or teaching yoga, than the asanas.

Being a pragmatist, I have tried to draw out some lessons from this story, and here are a few that I can think of.

1. If you have a medical condition, discuss it with your doctor and your yoga teacher, and do your own research, so that you can make safe choices - and then make them! (Ahimsa!) Don't make the mistake that this woman made, of keeping silent about her new medical condition and finding out the hard way what the consequences were. If neither of them know what to tell you, find a new doctor or a new teacher! And of course, do the research yourself - including drawing on your personal practice - so that you can make safe choices. Everyone is different - it's ok to explore and test your boundaries and find out where your personal limits are - but don't ignore them (Aparigraha - let go!).

2. If you are a teacher, know your contra-indications and always state them. (Satya!) In the reality of teaching large-group classes, we can't always know the medical histories of each and every one of our students. But we can take 10 seconds to make sure we talk about the contra-indications of the classes we are teaching and the poses we are instructing.  Especially with "higher-risk" poses like inversions. [I say higher risk because in a person with untreated high blood pressure, holding a long inversion could potentially lead to serious medical complications, possibly even a stroke. And that deserves to be taken seriously.]

• Because students often come in late, what I have found best is to make a short announcement after the opening meditation or when I bring the class to standing for the first time. I talk about the level of the class, and if it's a physically demanding class (as I usually teach), I warn people that it might not be appropriate if they are pregnant, or have medical conditions or injuries. 
• When I talk about contra-indications, I often say "please". As in, "were going to do shoulderstand now, but if you have high blood pressure, please don't go into this pose straight away - just relax until I can come around to you".

This also means learning about conditions that might affect your students as they age - more and more people are practicing or even starting yoga in their golden years, and it's worth the extra study to find out about osteopenia/osteoporosis, high blood pressure or Type II diabetes, for example.
 

3. If you are a teacher, create a safe space, and actively encourage people to acknowledge their bodies' limitations and explore alternatives.  This doesn't mean you can, or should, force people to stay within artificially drawn boundaries. But you should be able to set the foundation for your students to make informed choices, and create an atmosphere where nobody feels pressured to go too far. (Ahimsa again!)

I'd love your comments and thoughts... Readers, from your experience, what would you add to these suggestions?

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I have a bad feeling that this is going to be one of those posts that contribute to the popular (mis?)conception of  Ashtangis as self-torturing pain junkies who delight in inflicting pain on themselves. I hope I don't contribute too much to Ashtanga's already bad rep in this area. But everything that I'm about to describe here actually happened yesterday and during this morning's practice. So I can at least say that I am being honest, if nothing else.

Before I go on to tell the story proper, I think it would be useful for me to give you a little background story. I am going through a rather nerve-wracking and angst-provoking time in my life right now: I don't particularly feel like going into the details here (although I might when all this is over, however it turns out), so you'll have to bear with me for being a little vague about things here. Suffice to say that I am waiting for a couple of things to fall through (or not), and I'll know in a couple of days whether they do. Right now, there is nothing to do except wait. And wait some more. And in the meantime, continue to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, do the practice, blog, and try to stay sane the whole time. I have tried reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, but honestly, it hasn't been helping much. He's just too harsh and rational about this whole being in the present moment thing for my state of mind right now. For example, at one point in his book, in response to somebody who said, "Surely we need hope to keep us going, and hope is always hope that things will turn out better in the future. So doesn't having hope imply not being in the present moment?" To this, Tolle replied that if one is fully present in the moment, one doesn't need hope: When one is able to fully savor the present moment, what use is there for hope for the future? I'm paraphrasing, as I don't have the book on me right now, but I'm pretty sure I captured the essence of his reply. I don't know about you, but I think this is kind of harsh. I mean, it does make for a certain logical kind of sense: If you are fully, fully present, you won't need to hope for anything in the future. But I think it is no exaggeration to say that we humans are hardwired by centuries of cultural conditioning to hope for a better future when things get rough. And, to borrow a phrase from Marx, perhaps Tolle is saying that hope is the opium of the un-present masses, just as religion was the opium of the masses on Marx's view. And maybe it's just me, but isn't it a little bit cruel to deny a frail mortal like me even the opium of hope in a time like this? Well, I'm guessing that Tolle will disagree here; he'll probably say that I need to go "cold turkey" and use this difficult time in my life as an opportunity to rid myself once and for all of the opium of hope. Whatever. Go to hell. (Yikes! What did I just say?)

To add insult to possible injury, I was talking with a friend yesterday about my present situation. He listened for a while, and then suggested that I take a bigger-picture view of things as they are right now. Even though things are not going quite as I would like them to go, there are many blessings in my life: Good health, a yoga practice, etc. He then proceeded to point out that material possessions and worldly position are really quite insignificant in the light of this bigger picture. Wow... this is what happens when one reads Eckhart Tolle: Even your friends start to sound like him. 

But here's another ironic twist: As much as a certain part of me refuses to buy into any of Tolle's talk about being in the present, the Ashtanga practice seems to be the one thing that is actually fostering such presence in my life right now. This morning, I woke up with a rather funky mood. My whole body felt stiff and heavy, and I did not feel like practicing at all. Well, okay, I asked myself, what are you going to do then? Go back to sleep? But I somehow knew more sleep was probably not going to make me feel much better: If anything, I'll probably end up feeling even heavier and stiffer a couple of hours down the road. So I gingerly rolled out my Mysore rug, and started moving through the practice. As I got into primary series, an idea suddenly struck me: The last couple of days, I had been re-reading Matthew Sweeney's Astanga Yoga As It Is, and familiarizing myself with the Sanskrit vinyasa count of the postures and transitions in primary. It's pretty funny to say this, but as much of an Ashtangeek as I am, I have actually never gotten the exact Sanskrit vinyasa count in the seated postures of primary down pat. I figured that now would be the time to rectify this gap in my Ashtanga career :-) Anyway, as I got into primary this morning, I suddenly thought it would be kind of cool to recite the vinyasa count mentally to myself as I did each of the postures. So on I went: Sapta, inhale and jump into posture. Ashtau, exhale and hold for five breaths. Nawa, inhale and exhale there. Desa, inhale lift up. Ekadesa. exhale into chaturanga. And so and so forth. And since Sweeney does the traditional long count, he doesn't "reset" the count to Sapta on the second side of the posture, but continues with the count on the first side. So I get to count all the way up to Ekonavimsatihi (I really love the sound of this particular word!) and then Vimsatihi, which is when you exhale into downdog before starting from Sapta again and jumping into the next posture of the series.

It's really interesting, but before I knew it, I realized that counting the vinyasa to myself really helped to remove all extraneous thoughts from my mind. Who knew that one could pull an Eckhart Tolle simply by doing the vinyasa count? Maybe one day, when all this shit that I am presently going through is over (I know, I know, I'm not being present again, but whatever...), I'll teach a workshop titled, "Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and Eckhart Tolle: How to use the Traditional Vinyasa Count to bring greater presence into your practice". Maybe you come? :-)

Another, less pleasant thing also happened during practice this morning. My upper back muscles, especially the Trapezius, goes through periods of tightness. Such tightness tends to recur during periods of stress or anxiety. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been feeling this tightness from time to time whenever I sit in front of my computer or when I am reading. These past couple of mornings, I have been feeling the tightness during practice itself, especially when I lift my legs to put them behind my head in Supta Kurmasana. But I thought that if I moved into and out of the pose carefully, I'll probably be fine. And in a sense, I was right. Nothing major happened in Supta Kurmasana this morning. But something major did happen as I rolled over into my second Chakrasana (the one following Setu Bandhasana). As I rolled my legs over my head to go into downdog, I felt this sharp pulling sensation in my trapezius. Somehow, I still managed to land my feet in downdog. But I knew the damage had been done. Damn... no more Chakrasana (and probably also no more putting legs behind head in Supta Kurmasana) for the next few days, or maybe even for the next few weeks. We'll see. Anyway, my traps have been aching since then. In fact, they are aching right now, even as I am typing these words. I am doing a whole bunch of gentle trapezius stretches throughout the day to relieve the soreness. But the funny thing is, even this pain has its upside: It is making me more present in my body, and causing me to fixate less on the other things in my life that are causing great anxiety. I guess this says something about my state of mind, when I am actually at a point where I actually prefer physical pain to mental anxiety. I hope this doesn't mean that I need to go see a psychiatrist or something. Scary. Anyway, I guess I'll sign off here. More later.

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Happy Moon Day, Ashtangis! If you are not an Ashtangi, and are reading this, Happy Moon Day anyway! For those you who are Ashtangis, I hope you are taking a well-deserved break from your Ashtangic labors, and indulging in whatever it is that you indulge on days when you do not have to (who said you have to, anyway?) spend one and a half to two hours bending yourself into all kinds of funny shapes. Hmm, really: What do Ashtangis do with the couple of extra hours that they have on Moon Days? Here are a few options that come to mind:

(a) Sleep a couple extra hours;

(b) Play video games (Somebody should seriously come up with a Wii version of Ashtanga for hardcore Ashtanga OCD folks; that way, if you, say, can't grab your heels in Kapotasana in your regular practice on the mat, you can try to "achieve" it on Wii. True, it's not the same as nailing the posture on the mat, but hey, you got to take what you can get :-));

(c) Read books (on Ashtanga or other subjects);

(d) Spend more time blogging (or spend more time reading Ashtanga blogs like this one :-));

(e) Have coffee or tea (with oneself or with others);

(f) Have sex (with oneself or with others);

(g) Some of the above;

(h) None of the above.

Actually, this looks like good material for a poll! So let's do it. In the right hand corner of this blog, you will see a poll with these eight options. As usual, polling is anonymous; not even I will know what you choose. So feel free to choose honestly, and to your heart's content.

Recently, it seems that a certain corner of the Ashtanga/yoga blogosphere has been abuzz with intimations of Ashtanga infidelity: This blogger has courageously confessed to Ashtanga that she is "seeing other yoga". Hmm... I'm pretty sure I know what Guruji would say about this:

Interesting. Let me start by talking about the Ferrari analogy. Honestly, speaking from my own experience, I'm not entirely sure that I would describe Ashtanga as a Ferrari (or any other kind of sports car). Maybe there is a certain "turbo" element to the whole thing, at least from the outside: Those jumpbacks and jumpthroughs sure look pretty impressive and "turbo-charged" to an onlooker. But this is just an appearance; and appearances, as we know, are deceptive. Beneath the facade of speed and panache lies a long, painstaking process; a process marked by many plateaus (brought about by physical limitations, pains, or injury), punctuated by the occasional spurts of "progress" or "achievement" (i.e. you "master" a particular pose, get a new one, do an "old" one with greater ease and less effort, or get one-tenth of an inch deeper in a challenging pose).

I guess I'll say this: If Ashtanga is a sports car, it is a very high-maintenance sports car, one that breaks down quite a lot. In fact, if what I said above about plateaus in the practice is any indication of what most Ashtangis' practices are like, I would go so far as to say that breakages are the norm rather than the exception in the practice. So why bother to practice? Why not choose an "easier", "lower-maintenance" vehicle? In order to answer this question, we need to consider another, related question: What should we do when we encounter breakages (plateaus, injuries, pains) in the practice? What is the most productive attitude to take toward these breakages? Even though he doesn't practice Ashtanga (at least not that I know of), Eckhart Tolle actually has something to say about this. He writes:

"Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what the situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly... For example, you probably won't be able to enjoy changing the flat tire on your car in the middle of nowhere and in pouring rain, let alone be enthusiastic about it, but you can bring acceptance to it. Performing an action in the state of acceptance means you are at peace while you do it. That peace is a subtle energy vibration which then flows into what you do. On the surface, acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it is active and creative because it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, that subtle energy vibration, is consciousness, and one of the ways in which it enters this world is through surrendered action, one aspect of which is acceptance."

To illustrate what Tolle is saying here, let's apply his insight to a common occurrence in the practice: Injury. Sometimes, despite our best efforts at alignment/healthy movement or listening to our bodies, we still get injured in the course of the practice, because bodies are physical things, and physical things break. One could react to the injury by resisting it, asking "Why? Why me?!", and then proceed to either (a) try to deny the existence of the injury by simply pushing through the pain, or (b) give up the practice altogether. As anybody who has worked with injury in the practice knows, neither (a) nor (b) are productive responses. (a) is not productive, because it subjects one to more unnecessary pain, and can possibly aggravate the injury. (b) is also not productive, because although not practicing might mean no pain (at least temporarily), whatever it is that caused the injury in the first place is not being addressed, and the movement pattern that caused it will continue to lurk in the mind/body, setting the stage for possibly more pain and injury in the future. Here, one can't help recalling Tim Miller's famous words: "Avoidance is not the answer."

A more productive response would be one of acceptance. In this state, one tries one's best to practice with the injury, either by modifying and/or moving around the pain, even if doing so is not pleasant physically and mentally. By doing so, one not only allows healing to take place on a physical level; one also becomes able to understand the mind/body connection better with regard to this part of the body, and is able to bring the light of consciousness to bear on this part of the body. In so doing, one is able to gradually undo the deep-seated samskaric pattern that led to pain and injury in the first place, leading to healing on a deeper level.

When we understand that the most productive attitude to take towards pain and injury (and, for that matter, any kind of plateau-inducing phenomenon) in the practice is one of acceptance and surrender, the question of "Why bother to practice?" also answers itself: Although there are many obstacles and plateaus in the practice, these obstacles and plateaus are what make the practice "real" and meaningful. Working through these obstacles and plateaus presents a valuable opportunity to practice the surrender and acceptance which lie at the very heart of yoga. Indeed, I think we can even go as far as to say that these obstacles and plateaus constitute the raison d'etre of the practice: Without obstacles and plateaus and the surrenderful attitudes of acceptance that they demand, we may just as well be training to become gymnasts or acrobats. Or ninjas. Now don't get me wrong; ninjas are way cool. In fact, my childhood dream was (and probably still is) to become a ninja when I grow up. But we'll see...

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