There’s a big furore in Yoga-Land, over that NY Times article about how yoga can wreck your body. Well, sure it can. Anything done badly can. I am, as you know, walking proof that yoga injuries can happen. When I was young and inexperienced, and did the initial damage to my SI joints, I can say my teacher was partly to blame: she, too, was young and inexperienced and couldn’t ‘see’ what was going on in my body. Ditto that teacher in Bali. But I allowed that situation, and I take responsibility there!
I really enjoyed Bernadette Birney’s response to the NYT article. In it she talks a bit about yogis & advanced asana:
I also like to do advanced asana sometimes. It’s joyful. It’s challenging. It’s fun. I don’t do it to stay strong and limber. I do it simply because I want to, for the love of it. Advanced asana practicioners are–among other things–elite athletes. Elite athletes sometimes get injured.
She reminded me of a quandary I faced a while back, when a student told me she wanted to learn to do Wheel Pose.
‘OK,’ I’d replied, ‘I will teach you how to get there. But you know yoga’s not just about that, right?’
‘Yes it is.’
I didn’t even know how to respond.
Noooooooooo! I wanted to say. It’s an EXPRESSION of the joy of a healthy, happy, strong body. Expression, not goal.
But how do you differentiate, when you are swamped by images of yogis doing the flashy sh*t? Yogis like me!
Here’s the thing: the practice of yoga is a very effective way to bring on the ‘flow-state’.
According to Wikipedia (bless their awesome):
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.
To get into flow, there needs to be an element of challenge, and learning to do poses you can’t yet do can provides that challenge.
(So can learning to breathe properly, but that’s subtler and less exciting.)
It’s got me to thinking.
Well, if I’m honest, it’s got me to worrying. Does doing flashy shit give the wrong impression? Does it lead people to believe that that’s what we are all about? Despite having the ‘wrong’ body for yoga – just ask my friend Ananda – I can do some circus monkey stuff, and sometimes I do. It’s fun, it can be creative, and it looks cool in photos.
I will teach fancy poses too, if the class warrants it.
I always tell my students that although the circus monkey poses are fun, they are not necessarily going to get you into an experience of YOGA. Often, that happens in the quiet times when it’s just you and your breath, and you are in Child Pose.
So how about that student who has a long way to go before doing Wheel safely, but who thinks that the gymnastic part of yoga is the whole point?
I asked her to write an essay about what yoga meant to her. I figured that would clarify for us both what she wanted out of her yoga practice, and I would then know whether I could be of any use to her.
She wrote a beautiful piece about intention, and realised that Wheel is representative for her, of a place she was once, but isn’t anymore. A place she wants to return to. Ahhhhh. Magnificent.
So it wasn’t about actually doing the pose, for the sake of the pose, but rather about what it represents, and the discipline, challenge and practice it takes to get there. Flow, basically.
This message,I think, gets a bit lost when you are looking at the photos of the flashy poses.
I love looking at pictures of other people in fancy yoga poses. But to me, they are just pictures of people with unusually bendy, strong bodies, doing cool stuff. It’s not necessarily something I aspire to or that impacts my world. I often practice very gentle yoga, because that’s what I need.
It’s the same with fashion magazines: I do read them, I enjoy their vacuity sometimes, but those models? May as well be giraffes for all the similarity they bear to me. Therefore, I find them neither aspirational nor threatening.
What do you guys think?
Do the pictures of fancy yoga (possibly in hotpants) make you feel inspired? Alienated? Something in between?
Do you wish yoga was portrayed differently?
Moving from Stability: Understanding the Pelvis in Posture (Online workshop)
Light Up Your Life
hopefully the teacher keeps informing their students that they need to honour their body and work with them over time to develop a deeper practice (not that it should even be about that). Then over time the student can awaken to the understanding that it’s not all about how far you go in physical practice but how integrated their practice becomes to the individual’s body – mind – soul and the 8 limbs of yoga.
Ms J!
I think you’ve reiterated an essential point in the conversation. We teachers have the responsibility to show our students that yoga is more.
I had a phone conversation today with one of our mutual friends, and she was saying she thinks teachers often forget that we ought to give back to our communities, because we are lucky enough to have this thing, this yoga thing, that makes it easier to get through the day.
It’s a trust, teaching yoga. It’s a responsibility. A big one
I’m loving your daily two words, but the way. Off to post a link to them on the FB page.
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Charlotte – the urge to do fancy poses in a classroom is one I STILL have to fight sometimes. The only group class I still teach is at a local college’s rec center. I have a wide variety of students – 50+ year old faculty that have been with me for years, 30-something alum that are somewhat regular, and college students that just drop in occasionally. I try to make sure that they all “get something” from class.
Some come with injuries, some come with lots of life experiences, some come from ballet class or gymnastics. It’s a challenge every week to keep them all engaged. I want those who are uber-flexible to understand that poses require just the right amount of strength from just the right muscles, AND that some poses are more about surrendering.
Sometimes when I’m leading the class I feel strong and flexible, and I need to keep my ego in check! I never want to injure someone, so while I say again and again in a class, “You can always REST!!” the message may not get through if in the next breath I say, “Or you can put both your feet behind your head in the ‘yogic sleep pose.’” I mean, they ARE in a yoga class, so why WOULDN’T they want to do a pose that has “Yogic” right in the name?!
As Pattabhi Jois used to say, “Oh! Yoga. Is not easy!”
Oh, I’m spiritually sorted too! It’s not like I’ve tried compensating with clothes, food, brains, sex…. Or have I? Yes I have. Even qigong has served as a kind of compensation and a crutch for denial. I’m currently working through a whole lotta stuff to do with self-worth that I never really processed before, and it’s hard work, but I feel like I’m developing a depth of self-knowledge, awareness and acceptance I never had before as I realise my worth isn’t based on these extrinsic things… I’m through the process enough now that I’m on the happier side, rather than the gloomy side, and I’m able to talk about it a bit.
And training plays a very interesting role in this. I enjoy much simpler things than I used to, and I’m doing a lot of weightlifting at the moment. Simple lifts, heavy (mostly squats, chin-ups, bench-press, deadlifts), lots of rest, and it’s an exceptionally zenful (is that a word? It is now) experience, which is interesting in and of itself, because training with weights is not regarded as a soulful pursuit. It’s surrounded by too much machismo, body-shaming, cultural blah, but when you peel it back – there’s really those four main lifts I’m working on, and joint stability/mobility stuff, and simple, honest training gives me so much more satisfaction in the moment than flashy fancy stuff ever did. You really become aware of the process, and there’s nowhere to hide the truth – it’s you in your body, and you’re okay… if that makes sense. We know training teaches you things about yourself, but it always seems to teach you something you didn’t expect to learn. When I’ve spent more time working on fancier things, the focus moves from the internal to the external, the focus is nailing that trick, or doing that thing that’s outside myself (even though I’m the one doing it), rather than the focus being me and my internal life. Which leads me to think about failure vs success in entirely different terms too…..
But I don’t know if I’d have ever really started training in the first place, if I hadn’t been drawn to flashy martial-arty stuff, and felt the need to compensate. I guess what I’m saying in my rambling way is that it’s been a heluva 15-year journey, and I’m happy with where I’m at.
Having said that, I do imagine myself getting into handbalancing in the future, but for different reasons than I used to train flashy stuff in the past – more for my enjoyment, rather than approval.
Thank you.
Damn, I am REALLY enjoying this conversation! You lot have some really incisive ideas. I suspect that we yogis take the analysis/fixing thing a little too far, a lot of the time. And that can lead to…overextension.
But we are just human, and it makes us feel safe to have things categorised into boxes. THIS is achievement. THIS is yoga. THAT is not. The world feels less tenuous that way.
Chris, really great observation about the compensation thing. I’ve done much the same, but with food. Oh, and flashy yoga. Oh, and clothes shopping.
I am SO spiritually sorted…
David – I hear you – “fancy shit is taken as proof of worth” – I used to buy into that waaaaay too much, and in so many ways it did more harm than good. I’ve had diabetes since I was 11, and I only realised relatively recently (21 years after diagnosis) that a lot of my athletic accomplishments were an attempt to compensate for feeling like my body was somehow wrong and I needed ‘achievement’ to make up for it. But personal development is grand, and I’ve come a long way lately and my sense of self-worth isn’t caught up in achievements and qualifications any more. Not so much, anyway!
This is such an important, core topic, Nadine. And you do such a good job with it – and all the commenters, as well.
Do I wish yoga was portrayed differently? I do. But given our societal values,the portrayal isn’t going to change anytime soon. Unless we teachers bring the change. The flash is fine. I love watching Ana Forest do her demo thing. It’s fun. It’s celebratory. We just have to not let our heads get turned. We have to embrace our hatha yoga students while making sure that they hear from us that asana is but one of the eight limbs.
We need our bodies in this life. And yoga journal is filled with beautiful ones – I love Tori’s “beauty normed” term. (Will we ever see a wizened, toothless old yogi in a loincloth on the cover of YJ?) We have to help our students to let go of the beauty normed cover of Yoga Journal as the epitome of yoga and see it for what it is – good merchandising.
I say “sing the body electric.” We just have to make sure that our students know how much more there is to the practice. And we have to show them how much of it can be practiced right on their mats in yoga class. If we can wake our students up to the depth of the practice, it will be much easier to keep them safe. And it will help build their immune systems against the sometimes shallow portrayal of a very deep practice. And in time that may bring about change in the portrayal.
And your essay assignment? Brilliant! I think you must be a very fine teacher.
I was just reminded (thanks to David’s comment) of being in a yoga class earlier last year and I was in what I call a ‘yoga-snob’ frame of mind. The class was at the gym and there were middle aged women; I would look around and get frustrated with their misalignments in various postures, and their lack of attention to their bodies with hunching backs and shoulders. But after a few rounds of salute to the sun, I gazed across the room and saw the expression on a face, a lady gazing ahead with her hands in prayer….she looked so serene and so centred. It didn’t matter about her body shape, or the clothes she was wearing. Her expression gave me a glimpse of how she was feeling INSIDE. That was the real yoga.
Yeah, this is an interesting discussion. I agree with those who said their reaction to a picture of fancy pants yoga poses depends on what type of picture it is. Some times, such a picture can inspire me and make me want to try that pose out, just to see how it feels and whether I can do it. Some times, a yoga pose picture makes me shake my head.
The strongest reaction I ever had was when I was looking through an instruction book with all these pictures of BKS Iyengar doing yoga poses. Some of them were so RIDICULOUS that I actually found myself feeling angry. It didn’t seem like yoga to me – more like contortionism.
I do have goals or aspirations in my personal asana practice, but they’re nothing to do with looking fancy [which is just as well because I'll never look fancy doing yoga!]. They’re more about overcoming my own barriers. I want to be able to do camel pose with feeling sick, for example, or handstand with out feeling terrified, or standing forward bend with straight legs cos then I’ll know my hamstrings are at last loosening. I think there’s nothing wrong with having aims in yoga practice – it’s the motivation for those goals that counts.
PS. I love that picture of you doing wheel, Nadine.
Hi Nadine ~ Thanks for another important post. Even though I have some quibbles with the NYT article—sloppy research, a lot of anecdotal stuff, a generally snarky presentation—I’m really glad this discussion is taking place.
Mary Elizabeth, I was just thinking this morning about what you say in your second paragraph. From the beginning I’ve told my students that yoga is not a competition. When I first heard this it made total sense and I’ve always talked about it. However for years in my early teaching days, while I was telling my students that yoga’s not about accomplishing fancy poses—and truly believing it—I would proceed to demonstrate the fancy variations of the poses I was teaching. Eka Pada Rajakapotasana comes to mind. There was absolutely no reason for me to do this except to show off. I knew that very few to none of the people in the class would ever be able to do it because their bodies simply wouldn’t bend that way. All I was accomplishing by demonstrating crazy poses was making my students feel inadequate. I’m so over this now, but it took me a long time to see the incongruency between my talk and my walk.
Thanks for continuing this conversation in your inimitable way.
I wrote a blog about the yoga injury issue a few days ago. Here’s the link: http://www.huggermugger.com/blog/2012/yoga-injuries
Excellent post and comments! Please consider my comment to be an amen to what has already been said.
I can’t tell by looking at a picture whether the model has a strong yoga practice. I might see that she is strong and flexible and physically adept. But maybe that’s all that’s going on. (And I can’t do any fancy shit so maybe it’s just sour grapes on my part.)
I was in a regular class years ago with a woman who always showed up for class. Her warrior 1 didn’t look a whole lot different than her tadasana. It was a chatty class, but she never spoke. Just waited calmly for the next pose. After a while I noticed something. She was utterly serene. I don’t know what her eyes were looking at, but it wasn’t the performances or the lulu pants of the people around her. Years later I still think of her and how she quite possibly had the strongest practice in the class.
In this country yoga is going to get commodified like everything else in this country. And I don’t even object to that. That’s the way we are, and we have to start where we are. And we all have our edges in different places, so we want to have the extravagant asanas for those who need to go that far to find a good edge to work with. The problem of course is that in our society fancy shit is taken to be proof of worth.
Patanjali warned against getting hung up on our yogic powers. He said, Yeah you might be able to do some fancy shit, but that’s not the point. The point is to shift your consciousness away from your self-centeredness.
You’re a mighty fine blogger, Nadine. Thanks.
I think it was chosen for me automatically. It would go well with some sort of comment about world domination! RAAAAR CRASH BANG KAPOW
Oh, and Chris? I’m kinda digging your avatar!
Great thoughts, you guys! I am glad I am not the only one with the somewhat confused brain. I guess that’s just a human thing, isn’t it? There is no right way, just a right way for the individual, right now…
SO annoying. It would be much neater if everything just fitted into pretty boxes…
I finally read the article on the NY Times today. I resisted reading it because I thought it would just make me frustrated with the state of yoga being taught today. I was right. You state above, “Anything done badly can [wreck your body.]” You are absolutely correct. What seems to be lost in the discussions I’m seeing is that the TEACHING is being “done badly” as much as the practice! I think more teachers need a sense of fear that injuries can happen, that YOU, as a teacher, may cause injury to someone trusting you. The fear shouldn’t cripple teachers, but we need instructors who recognize the responsibility they have of telling others what to do with their bodies; that, let’s face it, we can’t really ever understand someone else’s body completely because students don’t tell us every single thing we need to know or they do and we just don’t know every single thing that we need to know to keep them safe.
I’ve read several of your blog posts, so I know I’m preaching to the choir. I just think that teachers who say, “it’s not about the pose” and then show lots of poses themselves (in class or otherwise) may be talking out of both sides of their mouths. I’ve never seen my favorite teachers do any advanced postures. I never saw Pattabhi Jois (in my very limited time in his presence) do any asanas at all! So I trust them when they tell me that it’s not about the asanas. The local studio scene is a different matter altogether. (And, no, this is not a slight at your lovely wheel pose posted above – just a general observation. You have seen my profile pic, so you know I have pics of myself posted, too!)
I love that you call the poses “fancy” and not advanced. There have been rare instances when I have led a few students through fancy poses, and I tell them, “These are just yoga party tricks. They don’t mean anything.” I have also led students through postures that I could not perform myself, but could walk them through.
To paraphrase Bryan Kest: “If you can’t do this pose, then know that you are more advanced than I. There will come a day when I won’t be able to do the pose either. You’ve beat me to it.”
My feelings on fancypants yoga photos are complicated and sometimes conflicting.
For one, I’m saddened by the fact that the majority of yoga posts on places like my Tumblr feed are fancy pose photos. There, it’s not the inclusion of them that bother me but rather — at least it seems like — the inclusion of them to the exclusion of a lot of other things.
Two, I’m a little troubled by how heavily gendered the photos I see are (and how heavily beauty normed they are inside gender lines). What I mean is, I see a lot of relatively thin women in poses like king dancer or other backbends — positions that maybe tie into societal perceptions of what is feminine or graceful. And I see a lot of muscled men in poses like koundinyasana or other arm balances — positions that maybe tie into societal perceptions of what is masculine or strong. Again, it’s not individual photos like this that perturb me; it’s that they seem to be part of a pretty broad trend.
But third, my reactions do vary based on the “type” of the photo. That is, there are certain poses that I will never be able to do because of my body. I can look at those and go, “That’s nice.” However, there are also photos of poses where I could reasonably work toward doing them if I decided to. To those, I go, “Hey, cool!” and proceed to study them in great detail (well, as much detail as I can get to in 30 seconds or less).
But also fourth, the yoga photos I love the most are the ones where people look so spontaneously happy in them. This can be because they’ve just mastered their fanciest pose yet, of course — but it can also be because their cat surprised them during a standing balance and they realized they’re about to topple over. Very often, these are poses that aren’t fancy or “picture perfect,” but that might be part of why I love them more.
Finally, if I never again see a photo that competes for the Fancypants Yoga on the Beach/Mountaintop/Etc. at Sunset Award, that will be just fine with me.
I don’t mind a few pictures, but endless self-love shots or video annoy me. Funny you wrote on this tonight. I’m dealing with a response right now to a girl I’m in a training with.
Wow, that is so awesome! I love the essay approach. Once, when I was a kid, I wanted to keep a stray cat that showed up at our door one day. When I asked my dad if we could keep her, he told me to write an essay explaining why I wanted to keep her. I wrote it but thought for sure he’d say no. My essay must have worked some magic on him bc he let me keep the cat. I’m glad you got the chance to see what Urdhva Dhanurasana represented to your student. Nice work!
I’m in two camps because sometimes it (fancy yoga) inspires me, and sometimes I wish yoga was portrayed differently. Like you don’t have to be wearing the $200 flash yoga pants to practice. There is a youtube clip going around at the moment which is truly beautiful yoga and it is inspiring, and I almost shared it on my page…but then I hesitated….I realised what this amazing yogini performs is beyond most of us; her body beautiful but in the same way as magazine images can play havoc with our self-image. Perhaps it is best in life to embrace everything and not compare ourselves, to be able to take inspiration from others without a sense of impossibility…I’m not perfect, and the more I can say that, the more open I am to everything…including fancy poses. Because if I fall/injure myself I know i’m not perfect and it’s all ok. I can laugh.
The way I think about it is that fancy yoga poses aren’t really yoga, BUT what happens (transformation) inside you as you are doing your fancy pose is the yoga. So I suppose it’s a personal thing.
Oh! What’s with my Brain-Robot-Monster Avatar!!!
I was always drawn to gymnastics, so that aspect of yoga was always appealing to me – something that was both challenging (body and mind) and looked cool. These days I derive much more satisfaction from training simple things, which I think is a result of focusing more internally than externally – which is to say, not being as dependent on praise or adoration as I once was, and realising the satisfaction and joy that training relatively simple movement patterns can deliver… Another way to put it is that I’m not okay with defining my sense of self-worth by my abilities and skills any more.
As to how yoga is portrayed, I have often had the feeling that it’s a very serious thing, and you have to follow all directions to the letter, and that attitude – well – it interferes with my joy of movement. Guess it’s why I’m not into Bikram, it’s too strict for me. But if you’re reminded that you’re the one in control, and you’re seeking your own true expression and shape rather than being good and obedient and fitting in with the dogma – then you’re reminded that you’re free. And when you’re free, everything is more joyous. I don’t think that was quite the context you were talking about… It’s hard to know what ‘the right reasons’ for practice are, and how do you encourage those ‘right reasons’ through the way a discipline is portrayed? Because once you get into the nuts and bolts and day-to-day reality of training (pretty much anything), the glamour disappears and you realise – sooner or later – the truth of what it means to develop. How to portray that? Sometimes bendy hot-pants photos inspire me, and sometimes they make me feel very unskilled. Depends on my frame of mind at the time…