How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
By WILLIAM J. BROAD Published: January 5, 2012
On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm. ....for more please go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magaz ... ted=1&_r=1
Here are some of my thoughts on this article, I would love to hear yours:
"awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them" - YES
“the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm" - NO, they need the right teacher/instruction (a non competitive class so to speak) and of course approval of their doctor
"means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury" - I have said that all along, AND they need a responsible teacher who has many years of experience and is LIVING their yoga on a daily basis.
Yoga needs to be very gentle for us Westerners and if a student does not feel comfortable doing certain poses they should never be pushed. Trusting their instincts and their bodies wisdom.
