by Md Ikhram
Last week I was introduced to a very interesting article in the New York Times (thank you Wei Ming) titled “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.” If you’ve not read it, you should. It addresses a very relevant issue that does not get much limelight – injury from yoga. Enough people are getting injured from yoga to warrant some inquiry and the article by the New York Times is timely indeed.
Just a few months ago, Shahrean, one of our vice-principals, was introduced to 2 young ladies who stopped yoga due to injuries and don’t intend to do it anymore. They complained of very bad neck pains that took quite some time to heal. I personally suffered a minor sprain in my neck while doing Halasana or the Plough Pose a few years ago. It healed very fast though. 4 days to be exact and here’s the clincher – I did yoga to recover.
I attribute my injury to the fact that I tried to “throw” myself into the posture instead of gently going into it. Fortunately, I was learning under the tutelage of my mother, Sue, who is an excellent guru. She was very quick to prescribe remedial yoga techniques and a lot of the pain was gone by the second day. The point I’m trying to make here is 3 fold:
- Injury in yoga can occur with bad practice or improper guidance
- Yoga has remedial procedures
- A good instructor is of utmost importance
While I am admitting that injuries can (and do) occur while performing yoga postures, I disagree with Glenn Black that yoga can do more harm than good to “the vast majority of people”. Not only is this counter-intuitive to yogic science, it is also a gross generalization that has no factual basis. In fact, the New York Times article I refer to is peppered with many instances of assumed causality.
For instance, the author tells the story of a male college student who decided to intensify his practice by performing Vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. This student soon experienced difficulties walking and doctors found that a peripheral branch of his sciatic nerve had become dead. The author makes no inquiry as to whether the student learned from a qualified instructor or was self-taught. Was he guided when he decided to intensify his practice? Did he do the Vajrasana correctly? These questions are left unanswered.
In another example, the author writes about a 25-year old man who had difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. There were signs of neck trauma and doctors found blockages in his left vertebral artery which prevented blood from going to the brain. This was attributed to his practice of the shoulder stand for over a year. Whether this was the real cause is left glaringly unanswered. Was bad practice ruled out? Improper guidance?
Learn from a good guru and you’ll find that most yoga postures have counter-postures to balance and negate any untoward stress that the posture may cause on your body. The counter-posture to the shoulder stand is Mastyendrasana or the Fish Pose. Not everyone is taught this.
If you put anything under the spotlight and look hard enough for reasons to vilify it, you will find those reasons. Misinterpret cause and effect and you can easily come to wrong conclusions. Often even experts makes these mistakes. One can even conclude that walking is extremely dangerous in this way. After all, people have literally walked to their deaths in the past.
The health benefits of yoga is too great to be cast away by wrong conclusions. I have seen many, many people recover from illness through diligent practice of yoga. I’ve seen people cure themselves of asthma, sinus, and migraines. I’ve seen people suffering from arthritis live better lives through yoga. I know people who have rid themselves of back problems by practicing yoga regularly. Yoga has the potential to help people live better lives, free from pain and disease. A blanket statement that yoga will wreck your body is an oversimplification of a problem.
The proliferation of yoga has brought about much good as well as problems. It is important to remember though, that historically yoga was always taught in this context: A qualified guru would teach a group of disciples.
Yoga gurus would spend years learning under the tutelage of other gurus as disciples. A guru would decide when a disciple was ready to teach based on individual abilities and aptitudes. It was a process that could take years. It was not a 200-hour or 500-hour training program that was concluded in a few months. It was also never designed to be self-learned or taught in a jam-packed class of 100 people.
Yoga injury is a problem that must be addressed but this must be done objectively. Would you dispose all the knives in your kitchen because knives have caused tremendous amount of injury and deaths in the last 100 years? Reason and common sense must prevail when studying causality. I believe that we need to look into the actual causes of yoga related injuries and address them appropriately if we are to arrive at any real solution.