Kino’s Hip: Reflections on Extreme Practice and Injury in Asana

Kino's Hip: Reflections on Extreme Practice and Injury in Asana

Heyam dukham anagatam.

(Pain that is yet to come can be avoided.)

Yoga Sutra II:16

On June 14th, Kino MacGregor posted a photo to her 782K Instagram and 264K Facebook followers. She’s in hero pose, her hands in prayer, eyes closed, on a beach. Fans would find it an uncharacteristic shot. There’s no floating movement implied, and her body is small against the wide-angled azure sky and placid sea. Her caption gives insight into the image, and why it seems to chafe her feed like an internal tear:

Yesterday while I was helping a student in Bakasana I heard a series of pops around my right hip. Then I couldn’t bear weight, walk or straighten my leg. After a visit to the doctor I still don’t have a complete diagnosis but it’s most likely a sprain of either the hamstring or the hip or both. Now the real yoga begins. I always say that pain and injury are the true teachers of the spiritual path and now it’s time for me to walk my own talk. There is a lesson is [sic] everything, especially the hard and difficult stuff. If this is a hip sprain and not a hamstring sprain then it will change my whole paradigm on what it takes to forward bend. If it’s the hamstring I’ll gain valuable knowledge on how to heal and rehab a hamstring sprain. Today’s #YogiAssignment is Wisdom. What is the wisdom that the biggest pain or obstacle in your life has to teach you? What wisdom have you gained from going through a difficult or challenging period in your life? Remaining equanimous with faith and patience through pain, injury and suffering is hard, but it is where the real inner work of yoga begins. Being strong in yoga isn’t about how long you can hold a handstand. It’s about how much grace you can contain when facing adversity.

MacGregor’s followers on Snapchat saw more of the backstory flash across their mobile screens that Saturday, and then disappear as if it had never happened.

“I put it all on Snapchat, because Snapchat doesn’t save anything,” she tells me via phone. Her enthusiasm is infectious. “I told everyone: ‘I’m at the Emergency Room. I feel like a drama queen!’

“But I knew I had to get it checked out. I had to teach the next day. I was really concerned about potential damage to the hip joint.”

The Emergency doctor in West Hartford, Connecticut, surmised a hamstring sprain and inflammation of the hip bursa, and suggested patience before proceeding to imaging. MacGregor went for acupuncture that evening at the studio she’d been teaching in for the weekend, did only restorative postures the following morning, taught another class while keeping her knee bent in forward folds, and then flew back to Miami on Sunday night.

On Monday, MacGregor saw a sports medicine doctor who took an x-ray that ruled out any hairline fracture, and suggested physiotherapy. On a walk that afternoon on Miami’s South Beach, she paused to take a photo of herself in Scorpion pose.

MacGregor’s physio is on staff at the Miami City Ballet. “She’s excellent,” MacGregor says. “She confirmed that my hamstring was pulled, but she didn’t think it was a serious tear. She said that my glutes were pulled. She checked my obturator and as much of the deep-six as she could, and she felt that they were all a little pulled.

“But then she checked my sacroiliac joint and found that the whole right plate of the sacrum had shifted and my right hip was raised, and there was a lot of compression. I thought, ‘That’s what all the popping was.’”

MacGregor has suffered yoga-related sacroiliac pain and injury in the past. It’s a common problem in the yoga world, and is widely believed to be exacerbated by seated and standing twisting postures.

“The therapist also said that there was probably inflammation around the joint capsule, and that maybe because of the impact, the head of the femur had jammed against the socket. She gave me a list of movements I should avoid, and a whole 20-minute therapeutic routine that I did with her that day. I’ve been doing it every day, before my practice. But I didn’t practice on Monday or Tuesday.”

On Tuesday, MacGregor saw her favourite massage therapist – “an energy healer who also does chiropractic adjustments” – who manipulated her sacrum back into what felt like alignment. “There were a whole series of clicks and pops around the sacroiliac joint, and these were really loud. Twenty-four hours later, there was a dramatic improvement in my whole hip area. The inflammation was down by 50%.”

By Thursday afternoon, MacGregor was back out on South Beach, having a photo taken of herself in Vasisthasana. Neither that post nor the Scorpion post make mention of the injury.

I remarked that in the Vasisthasana photo, she’s loading her injured hip.

“Yeah, but that’s a strengthening action,” MacGregor replied. “There was no strain on the hamstring. It felt good.”

 

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I’ve interviewed more than a hundred yoga practitioners about pain and injury. The acute injuries are dramatic: a hamstring tears in the moment of a harsh adjustment, or a rotator cuff rips upon the impact of leaping into an arm-balance that uses the upper arm as a brace. But there are usually pre-existing weaknesses or stresses that forecast these events, which means that sports medicine doctors and orthopedic surgeons are typically conservative when it comes to pinpointing exact moments and causes.

Even harder to definitively source are the repetitive stress injuries that creep in below the radar. I’ve interviewed several women who have sustained labral tears, for example, which first present as niggling pinches in the groin and either slowly or quickly progress to shattering pain. Many of these subjects continued to practice as their pain increased, unaware that they may be deepening a tear. Some practiced with modification, some without, but most continued with a firm belief that whatever the pain was, practice would heal it.

Then there are injuries like MacGregor’s, which are yoga-related, but don’t literally occur on the mat. MacGregor was initially firm via email. “This isn’t a yoga injury that came from my practice. It came from the impact of a student falling into me while I was assisting her.”

But when a Facebook fan asked her during an online Q&A session: “What are your thoughts on how the intensity of the practice may have contributed to your injury?” MacGregor didn’t answer.

As we spoke, however, she opened up about borderline doubts, starting with her practice habits, and by the end, winding around to the value and impact of her YouTube channel.

I asked her about the public reaction to an Instagram she posted of herself in an “oversplits” position, with her front calf and bottom shin planted on opposing chairs, and her hips dipping into the space between them. The caption reads:

Got a new assignment today from Eugene: oversplits. He says that my hips have to eventually touch the floor. What do you think? How many month with [sic] that take? @beachyogagirl and I are snapping today–are you following our snap chat stories? Kerri caught more of the crazy things we did today. Snapchat: kinoyoga Leggings @aloyoga.

“People re-posted that picture and said, ‘That’s the reason for your hip injury.’ And I thought about it, and I thought gosh, well, I don’t know…

“I had to think about whether I was pushing myself too hard in my practice, and whether that had created instability in my hip joint.

“But when I started my practice, I was really unstable. I’m not a naturally strong person. Or naturally flexible. It’s more like ‘floppy’ is my natural state. And a little clumsy. So my main emphasis in practice is the avenue of strength. Even in a flexibility posture like oversplits, I’m approaching it from strength. So I’m training with this Russian circus guy – ”

“Is that ‘Eugene’?” I interject.

“That’s Eugene! I wanted technique for advanced stretches and arm-balances. And in the yoga world, there isn’t a lot of technique around. It’s more like, ‘Don’t do it’.

“But I know I’m gonna have to do it if I’m gonna keep practicing Ashtanga. I’m working on Kroukachasana, in the Fifth Series. So let me get some technique, the way to safely support my joints. So with that oversplits, Eugene had me engaging really intensely to support my body while I was there. He didn’t let me sit there and hang. He was focusing on how to build more strength around the joint.”

There’s no doubt MacGregor is strong. She floats between arm balances and planking variations with a post-human grace that seems aided by CGI. She seems – on film at least – to have achieved the perfect physical balance of firmness and ease described in the Yoga Sutras. But no one, including MacGregor, can know whether that alchemy is stable, and for how long.

 

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Almost exactly a year ago, I reported on the right-hip-implosion of one of Canada’s first Ashtanga teachers, Diane Bruni. In 2008, Bruni tore the deep rotators off her bone in a seemingly-harmless wide-angled pose following a five-year-long regime of hip-opening, which was paradoxically recommended by her yoga mentors to treat her ongoing knee pain.

It took Bruni several years for her to come clean to herself and others about how she felt that a programme of extreme flexibility and spiritualized pain had dominated her practice and teaching ideology – and destabilized her hips by weakening her ligaments. “My livelihood depended on it”, she told me. “My studio was based on it.

“Before my injury, I used to say many of the things Kino says in the injury post and on YouTube,” Bruni writes. To illustrate, she sends me a link to “Yoga for Open Hips: Full Practice with Kino”. It’s on the Kinoyoga channel, which has 271K followers and almost 70 million views.

“I would say: ‘Notice the sensations. Notice if it hurts, it’s burning, or of it’s tight. Tell yourself it’s okay, practice surrender. Accept the pain, breathe into it. This will help you accept who you are.’

Now I wonder – what does that even mean?”

At time cue 9:25 of the video, MacGregor sinks forward over her thighs in a deep butterfly posture, and pauses in a passive stretch. “Feel that burning sensation in the hip joints,” she intones. “Nice deep inhale. Nice deep exhale.”

Bruni sighs over email. “I said all the same things.” She’s since left Ashtanga behind to learn and teach what she feels to be more functional and sustainable movement.

“I practiced and taught all these poses, which are totally inaccessible to most people. I learned the hard way. I hope I can help save at least one person the agony of my injury.”

 

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It’s unclear whether this setback will shift MacGregor’s practice in a permanent way, or be absorbed into her brand narrative, or both. Early indications suggest that the media juggernaut that projects her yoga may make it difficult for anything but business-as-usual.

Since the injury announcement, Kinoyoga instagram has been updated with over 50 photos and videos of MacGregor in advanced postures. The hip-opening clip that Bruni sent me was published on June 29th. Some critics have speculated that all of these visuals must have been shot before the injury, and have continued auto-uploading without disclaimer or warning – perhaps to fulfill endorsement contracts – as if from a virtual studio where injury is impossible.

But MacGregor says that only some photos date from prior to the injury, while most were shot on the day of posting. For instance, on July 1st, several Kinoyoga platforms unrolled a “Back to Backbends” public challenge as part of a beta-stage collaboration with @beachyogagirl Kerri Verna. Fans are encouraged to post yoga-selfies that mimic a pre-set sequence, and to click into sponsorship sites.

MacGregor tells me that all of the challenge’s backbending photos and films were shot prior to the campaign’s start – within the two-week window following the injury. “As long as I stayed away from hip rotations, I was fine,” MacGregor says. “Backbending felt really good. Arm balances were fine. Straight-line handstands – good.”

MacGregor says that she didn’t want her media platform to reflect upon her injury while she was unsure about its status. Therefore, the regular posts continued.

“I really just wanted to figure it out, to go through it, and wait until I was on the other side of it,” she says. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying ‘This is the physical therapy I’m using to heal’, because I wouldn’t be sure of it. Maybe after it heals I could talk about my experience and the step-by-step postures and be able to say ‘This worked’. I’d want empirical evidence that it worked, rather than just sharing it and having a whole bunch of people mimic my process.

“So I couldn’t share the physical part of the journey, but the #YogiAssignments I gave with every post that week took the flavour of exactly where I was emotionally, spiritually, and mentally.”

 

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Iain Grysak is an advanced Ashtanga practitioner and teacher stationed in Bali who I interviewed about a year ago for my project, because he emphasizes safety and moderation in practice. He seems to be one of those exceedingly rare advanced practitioners who reports no significant injuries.

“I have respect for Kino and what she does,” Grysak writes. “She gets a bad rap from part of the Ashtanga community because of her massive marketing and commercialization process. I have always respected the fact that she does it with integrity, by attempting to live the truth of what the practice means to her, as well as remaining in line with the current ‘tradition’.”

But as to the physical toll of MacGregor’s stated job of providing “a link between the pop culture of yoga and the more traditional lineage based spiritual practice,” Grysak expresses concern.

His basic contention is that this fiery method can be healthy and even therapeutic when practiced with supervision in conservative amounts. But he warns that even the most robust practitioners will hurt themselves if practice turns into a full-time profession demanding endless jet-setting, teaching, and demonstration – whether for digital consumption or “weekend intensive” formats.

“It’s not what the practice is designed for. It’s not sustainable. The striving – for deeper opening in Bruni’s case, or to give “inspiration” in MacGregor’s case – might lead people to take the practice to a place that it is just not meant to be taken if it is to remain a healthy technique.”

Grysak also says that the same teacher to whom MacGregor dedicated her recent book – Sharath Jois, grandson of Ashtanga founder Pattabhi Jois – actively discourages both the professional zeal and the mega-posture workshop-culture now par-for-the-course in the yoga world.

“Sharath is very opposed to overworking and speaks out against it regularly in Mysore. He admonishes people who go home after practice and continue to work on tough postures. He says asana practice should be done once a day, in the morning. I agree with him: get on with your life and wait until the next morning to do more asana!”

I asked MacGregor for a response.

“I would definitely agree. When I’m in Mysore, I do my practice, and then I go home and go back to bed. My body has been through a spiritual, emotional, and physical battle on levels I’m not even aware of. I’m like a soldier, no joke. I try to avoid talking to other people afterwards, because I’m in this sensitive, other world.

“But in Mysore there’s really nothing else to do. So after I sleep, the rest of the day is like ‘Do you wanna drink coconuts, or do you wanna go get lunch?’”

“I have to admit” – I can hear a sly grin over the phone – “when I leave Mysore, I’m a bad Ashtangi. It’s not possible for me to keep up that kind of intense discipline. I practice six days a week, but I do not kill myself. I practice in a calm manner that gives space to my body and how I’m feeling that day. I’ll do the practice my teacher has given me, but I will not force. I’ll give myself little outs. That’s taken me a long time to get to that chilled-out place.

“So I totally agree. I wouldn’t be able to sustain traveling and teaching and making a few videos in the afternoon if I was practicing like in Mysore.”

 

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MacGregor has periodically faced doctrinal and pragmatic critique from within her subculture head-on. But she also faces scientific pushback from the wider movement-studies field. Opposition to the assumed benefits of flexibility-focused and repetitive-motion exercise is growing – most loudly against the passive stretching that might not be part of the Ashtanga method per se, but which MacGregor and others promote as preparatory for the deeply contortionistic postures of its advanced series.

Most of the biomechanics specialists, kinesiologists, neurologists and orthopedic surgeons I’ve consulted in my research are deeply skeptical of the borderline-mystical theories of stretching handed down through pre-modern yoga therapeutics. This new consensus is overturning popular notions of bodily alchemy that echo through sources ranging from medieval to New-Age to high-end-spa-speak.

Pattabhi Jois was fond of the adage, “With enough heat, even iron will bend”. But this new rationalist yoga discourse imposes clearer limits upon the aspirational body, insisting that muscles do not get “longer”, and pain is not an “opening” – except in a pathological sense. The primal dream of bodily transformation through “being worked into a noodle”, as Jois student Annie Pace described it, is being eclipsed by the simpler goal of enhancing a natural range of motion for functional movement.

Jules Mitchell, who works to incorporate the most recent data on the science of stretching into yoga studies, is unequivocal: “The yoga community has been dangerously obsessed with tissue distention,” she writes via email.

Interviewed for her blog by Ashtangi Tracey Mansell, Londoner Osteopath Jamie Andrews adds: “Prolonged exposure to progressive stretching can eventually lead to ligamentous laxity and joint hypermobility, increasing the risk of muscular injuries, ligamentous injuries, joint dislocation and reduced proprioception.”

But Pattabhi Jois wasn’t just referring to muscles and ligaments when he used the word “iron”, even though the body was his teaching instrument. For Jois, physical possibility on a gross level provided access to a subtler spiritual possibility. As almost all of his senior students recall, he was constantly speaking to the deeply conditioned wounds of the human psyche, clad in the iron of defensive self-concepts.

“Pain is good,” MacGregor quotes Jois as saying of the process that “releases” spiritual rigidity. If Jois’ terrifying postural adjustments are nauseating to the movement specialists of today, it’s in part because they don’t understand the premise that he was wrestling through stubborn tissues to get at his students’ souls.

 

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With regard to the general meaning of the human body, Kino MacGregor is faithful to Jois’ path. In video and print, she speaks of using postures to “access” the hips, the interior space of the pelvis, the inner body, and the heart (not the cardiac muscle, but the emotional centre). For Jois and MacGregor, the body is a container to be opened and purified, and pain is a necessary sign of progress. “Practicing six days a week,” MacGregor writes, “accelerates the rate at which you experience the pains that purify weakness and stiffness, as well as the rate at which you experience the purified result of more strength and flexibility in the body and mind.”

I asked MacGregor how she and her students distinguish from the spiritually necessary pain that she seems to be describing in her book, and the pain that indicates injury. She affirmed the difference between acceptable delayed-onset muscular soreness and pain that is to avoided: joint pain, or pain within practice that makes the yogi wince.

But the longer part of her answer detoured back to the ideal spiritual attitude the yogi should have towards the injury that’s already happened.

“When you’re injured, you have to ask ‘Am I really going to do Marichyasana C, or am I going to let my hip joint heal?’ In my case, I’m going to let my hip joint heal. Does that annoy me? Sure. But it’s my ego that’s hurting. So then that is the tapas. That is the real teacher. That’s more yoga than just going in and hammering out the asanas.”

The circular argument that MacGregor transparently makes is so hard to understand, it seems to validate the adage that yoga cannot be conceptualized. Pain is described as a necessary spiritual tool in a practice that claims to heal the body and ego and free the person from all limitation. But if you have too much pain, or the wrong kind, you’re courting injury. No-one wants that.

Or do they? If too much pain does injure the yogi, the bright side is that renewed focus upon bodily healing may hurt the ego as it contemplates its new limitations. This is ultimately good news, because, as MacGregor says, “the real yoga is the burning up of the ego”.

The more rationalist approach, larded with biomedical jargon and devoid of MacGregor’s poetic paradox, may never capture the hearts of truly devotional practitioners. Kinesiology doesn’t turn the body into a vehicle for spiritual lessons best learned through fire. Jois may have called his Primary Series “Yoga Cikitsa” or “Healing for the Body”, but his esoteric paradigm for health, quite distinct from contemporary biomedical goals, includes the capacity to commune with pain and to embrace the inevitability of injury as proof of the omnipresent Divine.

Senior students I’ve interviewed have insisted that the late Jois didn’t invite them into his shala to help them avoid the fear of pain and death, but to encounter it fully, and face it down with the same steady gaze and even breath with which he performed his ritual fire offerings every morning.

 

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Neither the Kinoyoga YouTube channel nor The Power of Ashtanga Yoga carry disclaimers, warnings, or contraindications for the postures MacGregor teaches. I asked her whether if in the shadow of this injury she might consider changing this, or altering her instructions to offer more protection against the growing trend of joint destabilization. She’s tiptoed around the question before.

“Well I’m not feeling that great about my YouTube channel, to be honest,” she replied. “It seems to have become a place where men come to talk about about my feet or my butt.

“So I’m currently renovating it. I’m changing the focus to shorter, more friendly practice routines, and then a weekly video blog about what I think it means to be a yogi in the world.

“I have to admit I’m not a perfect teacher. I’ve probably made numerous mistakes, and left out key information numerous times. I don’t have any plans for adding disclaimers or contraindications, but I’d definitely consider that in the future.”

I pivoted to the issue of a different kind of safety.

“Do you think the trolling on your channel makes it an unsafe space for your intended audience?”

(There have been 12 million viewers for her video of Supta Hasta Padangusthasana, most of whom seem drawn over by the thumbnail from fitsploitation channels that produce soft porn faux-yoga for ad revenue. The clip has earned over 1500 comments, most of which are sexually harassing.)

“Gosh, I hope not. When some guy says I have sexy feet, I think ‘Whatever.’ But the mean-spirited stuff – the misogynistic and racist stuff – that’s part of why I’m renovating the channel. In the new videos I’m wearing leggings, speaking slower, and the angles are PG-13, 100%. The intention is to keep it mild-mannered. My hope is that one of these videos will become my most popular. That will mean that people are coming back to the practice.

“Would you consider deleting abusive comments and banning users?” I asked. “It might be another full-time job, but….”

“I would consider it, but I’m also concerned about the boundaries of free speech in a public forum like YouTube. But anything racist and misogynistic – I’ll keep an eye out for it with these new videos, and I’ll definitely consider blocking users who cross a line.”

Amongst MacGregor’s non-troll fan base, a few commenters on the injury photo have offered her friendly but imaginative healing advice. They tell her she should take raw garlic to battle the parasite infection that will now invade her hip. They tell her to be mindful of the effects of Saturn, or to determine which chakra is causing her acute pain. One dreamy supporter suggested that MacGregor discover which past memories were tightening her hamstrings.

But by and large, MacGregor’s following has flooded her channels with less intrusive wishes for a full recovery.

So have her esteemed colleagues in the Ashtanga community. Eddie Stern, founder of the iconic Ashtanga Yoga New York, commented by email, “I think it was very brave of Kino to post about her injury, and share it with her following.

“I hope that she didn’t do anything too serious,” Stern continues. “And I hope that her recovery is quick. She will probably gain some insights that she can pass along to her students and social media fans that they will perhaps benefit from.”

 

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Elsewhere, lesser-known yogis riding the media wave that MacGregor has churned are also coming clean about the painful faultline between practice and performance.

Twenty-three year-old Instagram yogi Irene Pappas (@fitqueenirene, 476K followers), is now practicing with one arm only to protect her arm-balance-aggravated necrotic wrist bones, which may never be able to bear weight again. Another Instagram yogi, @blue_yagoo (21.5K followers), reports on being removed from her home via stretcher after tearing her trapezius muscle, following a period of intense practice.

She posts: “I was ‘listening to my body’ intently the same way I had a thousand times before, and I STILL assessed the situation incorrectly.

“The paramedic asked me how I got into my predicament as I was lying on the stretcher. I tried explaining the asana verbally, which only rendered confusion. So I showed him the photo.

“His eyebrows shot up. ‘Yep. That’ll do it.’”

 

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photo of Kino MacGregor by Tom Rosenthal

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Five Easy Ways to Derail a Conversation About Yoga Safety (King and Queen Followup #1)

Five Easy Ways to Derail a Conversation About Yoga Safety (King and Queen Followup #1)

First published in Yoga International. Several ideas in this article first appeared here.

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So what happens when you publish a nuanced analysis of the safety of headstand and shoulderstand in global studio-based yoga culture, featuring the voices of five qualified commentators?

  1. You get a lot of views.
  2. You provoke a lot of emotions.
  3. Several classic ways of derailing an uncomfortable topic are instantly revealed.
  4. Emotions + derailments = repeat number one.

The response to “King and Queen No More?” was voluminous, spread over a thousand threads, and expressed in at least a dozen languages. It’s difficult to analyze, but in my own unscientific survey, the sentiments seemed equally divided.

 

On the positive side, many readers appreciated the biomechanical deconstruction of two iconic poses. They wrote of their reticence around their own qualifications to practice or teach them safely in group settings. They felt that the ambivalence of skilled anatomists on the issue of cervical load-bearing activity—whether it’s appropriate at all, as well as how much is appropriate, for how long, and for whom—meant that the poses are better left on the shelf, especially if alternatives are available. Finally: Many expressed relief that the very poses they correlate with their pain or injury are now drawing closer scrutiny.

On the other side, many commenters re-pledged their allegiance to the King and Queen, and wrote of their gratitude for the many blessings they bestow. Some decried the micromanagement of the discourse by posture-crats who are losing sight of yoga’s larger purpose. Some lambasted the specter of yoga-teacher-as-helicopter-parent. Some argued for personal responsibility over bubble-wrapping each student against the precious chance of transcending fear and limitation. In the end, many detractors settled on the permissive side of the risk/benefit question, unconvinced that the cautions of Miller, Mitchell and Theoret carried sufficient weight to justify Leena Cressman’s decision to remove the postures from her studio’s classes.

Continue reading “Five Easy Ways to Derail a Conversation About Yoga Safety (King and Queen Followup #1)”

WAWADIA Update #21: You Are Not the Problem… Your Yoga Culture Is

 

(A post in support of the #WAWADIA IGG campaign, which finishes up on December 1. Please support if you are so moved.)

 

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he injury stories alone have provided all the motivation I need for taking on this stupidly ambitious job.

Like:

Somebody is encouraged to “lengthen” their hamstrings through passive stretching. They are told that this will cure their lower back pain.

Somebody is taught tripod handstand without the disclaimer that any weight placed on the cervical spine is discouraged by many medical professionals.

On the general advice of their practice culture and colleagues, somebody holds plow pose for yin-lengths of time to soothe their neck pain.

Somebody’s told that their shoulder pain is karmic, related to some past misdeed, and that it’s good that it’s “coming out now” rather than causing a crappier birth next time around.

Somebody’s told that practicing the same 90-minute sequence six days per week can’t lead to repetitive stress injuries, because the sequence itself is “therapeutic” – and you can’t overdo therapy, right?

Somebody latches onto a studio’s “unlimited” introductory month and isn’t discouraged from coming to three elite-level classes per day, or from signing up for the studio’s popular green juice cleanse, even though she looks very slender and somewhat wan.

Somebody is shown how to do a posture that demands torsional stress on the knee. They injure their knee attempting it, and then are told they can avoid injury in the future by working on their “ego”.

A teacher asks whether there are any students in the class who’d rather not be adjusted. Somebody with PTSD puts up their hand. In front of everyone, the teacher asks them what their problem is.

Somebody’s encouraged to keep practicing while injured, to “keep the prana moving”, but isn’t given any corrective or therapeutic movements, because the instructors are certified in yogacheering, but not physiotherapy.

Somebody is told to stop crosstraining because it will stiffen them up and because “asanas are all you need to be healthy.”

Somebody has their hamstring attachment torn by an instructor who decides it’s a good idea to lay their full body weight across the student’s back while they are in Supta Kurmasana, because, you know, ‘openness’.

Oh, and then somebody gets slapped in the head by an abusive instructor. It goes on and on.

In each of the above, you might as well replace the word “somebody” with “many people.” Because I’m pretty sure the stories I’m collecting aren’t isolated. So yeah: I have a lot of motivation. But every once in a while I come across a piece of yoga culture that gives me that little extra kick.

 

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]onsider this anonymous, borderline-abusive post from the Ashtanga Picture Project on Friday, entitled “The Yoga Is Not The Problem… You Are.” On one hand, it chapped my ass hard on behalf of those who tell the stories above, plus myself, plus countless others who injure themselves or are injured by teachers in the strange shadow of yoga’s therapeutic marketing. On the other hand, seeing the megalomaniac victim-blaming hubris of modern postural yoga parade in full monty makes my job a lot easier, if a lot less pleasant.

I’ve laid into the Ashtanga Picture Project before, back when its Admin suggested that attaining “impossible” postures is a simple matter of believing in yourself and working hard, and ergo has nothing to do with particular physical traits, dubious functional movement goals, and lots of leisure time. I really don’t mean to hound this blog, because its heart is probably in the right place and all that, but when this particular post gets over two thousand Faceblot hits… come on. It’s a drum corps march of every tone-deaf, dangerous, pious, evading-serious-issues, “you’re on your own” platitude you’ll ever hear in Yogaland. I won’t quote much of it, because this is how it starts:

Whatever pain you are feeling from yoga, it is caused by you. It is caused by your attitude. It is caused by your actions. It is caused by your interpretation of the shape. It is caused by your thoughts.

In other words: yoga practice happens in a psychic bubble of me-ness that attempts physical shapes and gets injured in the process because of … character flaws? Also – practice has no interpersonal context. In this slice of Admin’s world, there are no teachers, techniques or instructions, and no communal goals. No people advising other people on what to do or how. No differing levels of training in biomechanics. There is no learning from each other, or from groups, or from temple friezes in Karnataka, or from Lilias on PBS, or Richard Hittleman’s 70s classic, or Kino’s YouTube channel. In short, Admin seems to claim that yoga operates pristinely, outside of culture.

It’s not true. People learn asanas from other people, just like babies learn any type of movement at all: through imitation, instruction, hands-on manipulation. The most antisocial yogi in the loneliest cabin in the most remote forest is practicing under the influence of a culture. Today, in a fractal-explosion of the photoplates of Light on Yoga, some people even learn about asana through the yoga-selfies of people they’ve never met. That’s what APP is all about, no? APP is fostering a culture of yoga, while saying, in this post at least: there is no culture. The Yoga and Body Image Coalition is also fostering culture. If you click through you’ll see that it’s just a little bit different.

 

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]here could this “you are the problem” argument be coming from? I reached out to the APP Admin to try to understand this better, but they didn’t respond, so I’ll take a crack at a few possible answers.

Superficially, APP’s post tops off a messy layer-cake of recent Ashtanga aversion-and-attachment manifestoes. In layer one, Annina Luzie Schmid baked up a searing defection notice, which was quickly smeared with enough commentary-custard to be reposted by Yogadork. Layer two popped out of the springform pan of Jessie Horness, whose unfazed devotion to practice seems to mean that she doesn’t care enough about any of the cultural issues that Annina raised to actually address them. Next, APP drizzled a coulis of refutations, and then added the post in question as icing. So in a way, it’s all just an old-fashioned yogasphere confection: bitter, tart and sweet.

(Of course then – I have to mention – Zoë Ward took that cake and smooshed it in the internet’s face with this eerie mashup of hate and love, reframing the rejection-allegiance tension down to the moment of the vritti – the no-and-yes of practice. I appreciate that this piece actually describes the deep ambivalence at the heart of the matter, rather than staking out territory.)

In a broader scope, this post is a reminder of the pervasive effects of neoliberal brain damage. It’s been twenty-five years since Dame Thatcher proclaimed to her Conservative party Conference that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.” How many of us have internalized this, surrendered to it, and perhaps think we can recast the hostility of our political zeitgeist as the backdrop of some heroic vision quest? How many of us have yogawashed the hyperindividualism of the age into the wish that transformative narcissism is a viable path? The entire culture is saying: Things are good. You’re on your own. You’ve been given the endless-growth truth about human life: don’t be ungrateful. The playing field is as level as a yoga mat. Whatever happens on it is between you and God. Whatever pain you are feeling from your culture, it is caused by you. Go on, manifest!

 

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut the APP post reminds me of something else. It communicates something developmental, which unfortunately doesn’t read well in print. Admin’s thesis might be useful in a moment of one-on-one confrontational psychotherapy. But putting it into print is a kind of violence.

I grew up, as I imagine almost everybody does, in an objectivist, essentialist mood. Susan Gelman describes it well in The Essential Child. The world was filled with objects and populated by people, and it was my job to go out and learn about them and decide what they were – not to me, but in themselves. In developmental psychology, it’s a mood that pervades ages four to seven, a period of almost continual extroversion that seeks to name and hopefully control the world. It opens the door a few years later to the Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew, who are never paralyzed by the question “Who am I?” The adult version of this mood is nourished by Sherlock Holmes. We love Cumberbatch in that role because it feels like he’s about six years old, without a shred of self-consciousness. (How he becomes a sex symbol through that is a whole other story.)

While I was trying to become an adult, I had two insane gurus. They smashed whatever was left of this objectivist mood with their one-trick pony wrath. “Reality is subjective!” yelled one. “It’s all in your mind!” bellowed the other. For a while, I cruised through an almost unbearably lighter world. It was indeed freeing to flip the cognitive error of childhood: to consider my own interiority as the common denominator of all experience, perhaps even the source of it. What couldn’t I change? The world wasn’t the problem. I was. I could start with the man in the mirror, to quote Michael Jackson’s impossible pledge — he who looked into so many mirrors and probably couldn’t see a stable self to start with at all.

I get the sense that “It’s all in your mind” is the vinyasa that the APP Admin is flowing through right now. In fact, in one of their answers to complaints about the post, they write:

How is saying that you are responsible for your life shaming? To me, it is freeing.

To which I say: yes, it can be freeing. For a while. Until you see that neither position is really true, let alone sustainable. Reality isn’t objective, and it isn’t subjective. If we can find reality at all, it’ll be somewhere in the middle, where we realize with a shock first sickening and then poignant that we actually have no idea where we end and where our culture begins.

I think we soften that shock in the yoga shala, by realizing that we really don’t know where the teacher’s body ends, where the body of the fellow student ends, and where our flesh becomes ours alone, if it ever does. By realizing that while asana can feel solitary, it’s never alone, because movement connects identities by breaking them down.

This all means that it really matters how we treat each other. Because the body is culture.

 

____

 

 

WAWADIA Update #18: One Hundred Years of Yoga in One Big Apple Day

Please consider supporting the fundraising campaign to support the book that is emerging from this research.

_____

I spent October 13th in Manhattan, doing two interviews for the #WAWADIA project. I’ll tell the story of that day here, and then publish excerpts from some of the source interviews soon.

My first meeting was in the morning with Lindsey Clennell, a 40-year practitioner of yoga from Britain, and an award-winning film maker to boot. I wanted to ask him about the documentary that he’s making with his son Jake, called “Sadhaka”. The film is an homage to the legacy of his teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar. I was especially interested in asking about the visual metaphor that opens the gorgeous trailer they’ve released to help promote their project. (The trailer is linked below.) In the metaphor, Lindsey and Jake compare the work of Mr. Iyengar on the human body to the work of a local stonecutter carving an icon of Hanuman.

The first words of the trailer belong to the grizzled artist:

One cannot begin work on a sculpture without courage. The nature of a stone is that it is strong. To transform it into a sculpture, and see God within it, requires immense strength. If one gives up or is daunted by the strength of the stone or injuries, the sculpture will never come to life.

Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #18: One Hundred Years of Yoga in One Big Apple Day”

WAWADIA Update #14: Practicing Yoga in the “False Body”

 

On November 1st I’ll be releasing a prospectus for the book slowly emerging from this project, in conjunction with a crowdfunding campaign. I’d like to preview a bit of that document here, and ask for responses to a strange question:

Do you sometimes have the feeling that there are two bodies on the mat: the body you have, and the body you fantasize about? Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #14: Practicing Yoga in the “False Body””

Practice And All is Coming | Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond

Practice and All Is Coming
Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond
Authored by Matthew Remski

Through dogged investigative work, careful listening to survivor stories of assault and abuse, and close analysis of the cultic mechanisms at play in the sphere of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga community, Matthew Remski’s Practice and All is Coming offers a sober view into a collective and intergenerational trauma.

It also offers a clear pathway forward into enhanced critical thinking, student empowerment, self-and-other care, and community resilience. Concluding with practical tools for a world rocked by abuse revelations, Practice and All Is Coming opens a window on the possibility of healing—and even re-enchantment.

Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond

Now Available

Order »

Advance Praise

Update: January 22. Practice And All Is Coming has a cover!

Here it is. Click here to preorder! First copies ship out 3.14.

Update: October 31st, 2018. Practice And All Is Coming Launches in March, 2019

Happy Hallowee’n, friends —

Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond is steaming towards a March 14th 2019 release date.

I’ll be launching the book at the Sedona Yoga Festival (March 14-17), and then at events in Copenhagen (March 29-31), Cambridge, UK (April 2), London (April 4), Berlin (April  6), at the First Annual Conference on Trauma and Embodiment (April 12), Boston (April 13), Calgary-Edmonton (May 10-12), Victoria-Vancouver (May 16-19), California venues in June, and Ottawa in July. As I look over this schedule, I’m both excited to meet old and new friends, and also already missing my family, plus overwhelmed with gratitude for my partner Alix who will be holding down the homefront with our boys, even as her psychotherapy practice scales up towards full time.

The big news from my current edit is that with the help of my publishing team, I’ve been able to pivot towards an unforeseen conclusion. PAAIC still goes into granular detail of the what and how of the Jois event as a case study for similar tragedies in yoga and dharma communities. It still rigorously employs several analytical frameworks I believe will be broadly useful. But the ending now arcs upward, offering a proactive study manual to help students, teachers, trainers, and administrators use the lessons of the book to evaluate the vulnerability of their communities to toxic group dynamics. Part 6, the concluding section, is titled “Better Practices and Safer Spaces: Conclusion and Workbook”. Here’s a screencap of its Table of Contents.

I’ve been crucially aided in this process by my editor at Embodied Wisdom Publications, Maitripushpa Bois. She’s a Buddhist scholar with a long history in many publishing sectors. She’s also a practicing Buddhist with a long-term connection to a community that has grappled with its own abuse history. Her familiarity with the territory, combined with her temperance, has helped me soften key edges, distinguish between analysis and editorializing, and find a pathway from criticism to empowerment.

Each summary section in the conclusion ends with 5-7 essay questions that can be used as points of reflection for individuals and communities. As the March release date approaches, we’ll also be building an online forum where these questions can be answered by readers anonymously, and, with consent, published in blog format to build a growing research base for how practitioners of all disciplines understand and navigate issues like consent, charisma, attachment patterns, loaded language, social contagion, and manipulation.

Once the book is released and the online forum is live, I’ll be adding a new YTT training module to my repertoire called “PRISM Training: A 30-hour yoga teacher training module in critical thinking and community health”. My hope is that this book, forum, and training become a robust and replicable resource for years to come.

— MR

Update: August 15, 2018

Happy August, everyone —

I hope this season is offering some peace and time with loved ones.

I have an important announcement to make today. Almost four years after beginning the WAWADIA project, I’ve signed a publishing contract with Embodied Wisdom Publishing of New Zealand for a first volume. The release date is set for March 2019. I’m currently discussing with the publisher whether the early and patient crowdfunders can receive their copies in a “pre-release wave”.

I’m well into the second edit of what is now a 350 page manuscript. EWP has hired a splendid editor for this project, and expects to engage an award-winning US book designer very familiar with this genre.

This volume is an expansion of my feature article in The Walrus on abuse and recovery in Ashtanga Yoga. The number of victim testimonials from women who were assaulted by Pattabhi Jois has gone from nine to nineteen, and I’ve developed the themes that the feature could only hint at: enablement, deception, the mechanisms of high-demand groups, and how really listening to victims of institutional abuse is the pathway to reform.

The working title is Practice and All is Coming: Cult Dynamics, Abuse and Healing in Yoga and Beyond. My hope is that a nuanced presentation of the Jois tragedy, combined with reporting on progressive responses to it and aiding a robust discussion of harm prevention, will help strengthen the health of yoga and dharma communities everywhere.

I’m happy to say that so far this work is already having an institutional impact. The Yoga Service Council recently invited me to participate in the writing process of their “Best Practices” manual for bringing yoga to survivors of sexual violence. I’ll be honoured to meet with that committee at the Omega Institute in October. I’ll be there not as a specialist in sexual violence or trauma, but as a researcher and activist with ideas about how yoga service providers can avoid unintentionally passing along unresolved abuse histories.

Practice and All is Coming was not in my original plan. It is the product of journalistic urgency. For the second WAWADIA volume, I’m planning to return to the core themes of the project which I lay out in this podcast with my friend J. Brown. I argue that a central story in the last half-century of global yoga culture is the movement from somatic dominance towards trauma awareness.

I’m also developing a book proposal on the recent (though historically fated) implosion of the Shambhala International group. I’ve posted several articles on the crisis so far, and have been interviewing dozens of group members. I was never a member of Shambhala, but my recruitment into a similar high-demand neo-Tibetan Buddhist group in the late 1990s gives me solid background for this work.

If you started following this project in 2014, you tuned into a slightly different content stream from a fairly different content provider (me). For the record: I’m still proud to teach yoga philosophy, history, and culture in yoga training programmes around the world. I’m honoured to be consulting with Yoga Alliance on the Scope of Practice committee. I’m still proud to offer entry-level content in Ayurvedic self-inquiry and care.

Bottom line: I’m still very much “inside” the yoga and meditation worlds, despite my critical position in relation to both, and despite the fact that I take a lot of heat for it. The clearest way of describing this insidership — this continued dedication to practice — is to say that I’ve bumped my focus outward from yoga as self-regulation to yoga as social dharma.

I used to practice to get a firmer grip on my mental and physical health, and my self-perception. Parts of it worked. (So did beginning to raise a family with an amazing partner.) Because it worked for me, I taught it. That’s the pattern in this industry, which, for good or ill, commodifies personal revelations.

But somehow, it also worked for me in a way that allowed me to see how it wasn’t working for others. So far, I’ve focused on the stories of harm that disrupt the common marketing of yoga and dharma aspirations. But more broadly, I’m coming to feel that any self-focus that continues beyond a baseline of therapeutic functionality in life can easily become just another form of privileged consumerism, disguised in a spiritual glow. I’ve filled out this argument in a post called “Don’t Deepen Your Practice”, if it is of further interest to you.

The punchline is that there’s a point at which the commodified medicine of personal work can become a social toxin that further isolates its patients, and lowers expectations of the common good. I’m going to keep looking for that point, to see where we can turn back from it.

And I’m going to hang out more with folks who are doing the same. Like Jivana Heyman of Accessible Yoga, who invited me to give this closing keynote speech in June at their first Canadian conference in June. I was very happy to talk about happy things.

Thank you for sticking with me on this journey.

— MR

Update: April 25, 2018

Happy Spring everyone –

I’m long past due for an update. One reason is that I’ve had to keep today’s news under wraps. The Walrus has just published my feature article on the alleged sexual assaults of Pattabhi Jois. It is centred on the voices of nine women who pushed back against trauma, confusion, shame, and silencing to go on record. I thank them for their bravery. So will the entire yoga world, I believe, in time.

I also thank my partner Alix, who has provided constant support and feedback every step of the way.

To my generous and patient WAWADIA crowdfunding supporters: this article shows what I’ve been up to, why I am late on my projected finish date, and why my thesis has shifted.

As I describe in the update below, I started this project by speaking with practitioners, mainly women, who had been injured in yoga practice. I quickly came up with some interesting data and ideas on the intersection between repetitive stress, performance expectations, and the social psychologies at play in yoga studios and communities. But I also had this feeling that I was asking too many of my subjects the wrong questions. Everybody gets injured doing physical activities. Why was there so much emotion around injuries sustained in yoga?

In time I learned that writing about physical yoga injuries can be a way of avoiding looking directly at the moral and spiritual injuries people suffer within the culture. It began to make less and less sense to be talking with practitioners about the dangers of yoga postures while ignoring the themes of domination and control that heavily influence yoga relationships.

So: this major piece of the puzzle is done. Within the next few weeks I’ll be able to update you more clearly on my publishing path and schedule going forward.

I can say this much now: while this article has gone through five months of pre-publication preparations, the data driving it has grown into something that deserves its own book. This will be the first in a WAWADIA series. I’m exploring self-publish and hybrid options for this coming fall, because it’s been clear from the last 18 months of back-and-forth with my agent that this material is too niche for the mainstream trade market.

My intention is for this first book to serve as a case study for how abuse is enabled, covered up, disclosed, dealt with, and perhaps healed in yoga culture.

On that note, I’m happy to say that all of this heavy research seams to be bending towards justice. My next travel will be to the Yoga Service Conference from May 11-13th at the Omega Institute, where I’ll be presenting a brief outline of best practices for engaging with histories of harm in yoga communities.

I am also honoured to be working on Scope of Practice issues for the Yoga Alliance’s Standards Review Project. It’s my firm belief that the idealization and mystification that intersect with authoritarianism in toxic yoga communities can be sharply limited by clearly defining the limits and responsibilities of the yoga teacher.

Thank you for your patient support.

–MR

Update: January 24, 2017

Dear WAWADIA supporters –

At the end of November, I was signed by Hilary McMahon of Westwood Creative Artists Literary Agency here in Toronto. She’s going to be representing my book in upcoming meetings with U.S. publishers. She believes it has market potential beyond the yoga niche and has provided great (general) editorial guidance so far, to get me thinking large-scale. So: as I suspected, the self-publishing route is now closed for this book. All IGG supporters will, of course, get the copies they deserve, as well as undying thanks. I’m about 150 pages into a “final first” draft, with about 500 pages standing by for selection. Almost settled on a title, too. I’ll keep you updated.

–MR

Update: May 14, 2016

Dear WAWADIA supporters –

I’m writing on the cusp of a much-needed pause in book-brewing as my partner Alix and I await the arrival of our second child within the next week or two. I’ve finished up my teaching engagements until September, and have nothing on the docket but gardening and nesting (and one on-line course). I’ll be going completely offline for a while, soon.

The break marks a threshold, as I take stock of how this patchwork of research and storytelling fits together – even whether it will occupy one volume, or several. To date, I’ve compiled over 200 interviews, absorbed a lot of the relevant popular and academic literature, and produced hundreds of pages of manuscript.

Limiting my research is proving to be one of the toughest obstacles. Hardly a week goes by without my hearing from several practitioners who want to share their injury stories. The narratives are paradoxical and poignant, telling of therapeutic needs confounded by magical thinking, and spiritual aspirations hijacked by power imbalances and outright cruelty.

Of course, it’s been like this from the start of the project more than two years ago: a relentless and heartrending stream that could easily fuel a potboiler of disillusionment and outrage. For a while, that’s the path I beat with this book, crafting the voice of a crusader.

But crusaders need solutions, and solutions need data. That’s where I ran into quicksand.

Data on yoga injuries is hard to collect. Shame and cognitive dissonance confound the self-reporting process – not to mention marketing pressures and the absence of accountability structures in the modern studio model. And while many of my senior teacher informants predict an epidemic of repetitive stress injuries cresting as enthusiasts practicing since the 1990s slam into middle age, it seems that the official incidence rate remains low. What’s a crusade without solid numbers?

Then there’s the fact that mining any given injury story for a causal link to asana can be almost impossible. Those disillusioned with practice may attribute injuries to specific movements or adjustments, but devotees rarely do. The orthopedic surgeons who actually repair rotator cuffs and labral tears refuse to assert causes. They know too much about pre-existing conditions. They’re too well-versed in the variations of tissue damage and patients’ response to it to indulge in speculation.

Even when good data linking specific practices to potentially adverse effects emerge – as in recent studies on loading the cervical spine in headstand and core temperature elevation in hot yoga – devotees are often unmoved. Scientific discourse is not their idea of kirtan. It’s understandable: so many of us have taken refuge in the mat to find the world beyond the mind. And for some, repetitive stress is a fair price to pay for a ritual that brings the stability of faith.

So: the data on yoga injuries is scant, unclear, and can be unconvincing to those who view practice more through the lens of personal transformation than that of public health. Plus, digging for data pushes the conversation into the politics of industry regulation. This can be a valuable discussion, but it carries the cost of framing injury in yoga practice as a technical problem of percentages to be completely fixed through better biomechanics training or better business practices.

It’s not. It’s something much more. Injury in asana provides a window onto the paradoxes of spiritual desire. It spotlights perpetually conflicted views of the body caught between transcendence and acceptance. It reveals the primal ways in which intimacy and violence can blend in relationships between teachers and students.

Crusading against yoga injuries feels noble and wins clicks. But it can also set the crusader up to wield a different type of power imbalance. It can fetishize the anxious stalemate of “Now what do we do?”, while deepening the divide between the disillusioned and the devoted, who often share more than they recognize.

What they share is becoming more and more of my focus, sharpened with the benefit of valuable feedback from readers and workshop participants over the past year. I’ve toned down the crusade in order to plumb the narrative richness of the dynamics of injury, not with the illusion that it can be eliminated, but to better understand the shifting meanings we give to pain. In this way my research is increasingly focused on the following concerns:

First: our practice is an enthralling mixture of tradition and innovation, vitalized and complicated by the confusion of goals from entirely different eras. Modern global yoga constitutes an attempt to reconcile, within the body, premodern transcendent drives with modern therapeutic drives. The famous “edge” that we are invited to contemplate on the mat is where these two aspirations clash. Any discussion of injury in asana practice has to acknowledge that asana invites us to both nurture ourselves and to pull ourselves apart.

Secondly: the easy-to-identify contributing factors to injury on the mat– postural idealization and intrusive adjustments, to name but two – are not degenerations of the globalizing era, but integral to the very roots of modern asana instruction. Most early 20th century asana evangelists were educated in high-pressure environments demanding constant demonstration policed by corporal punishment. The somatic tensions of these shalas echo still, both in studio environments that foster unhealthy power differentials, but more subtly in the laws of visual performance through which practice is marketed and practitioners’ bodies are both evaluated and objectified. I argue that we won’t even approach understanding adverse effects in asana practice until we really grapple with this difficult history.

Thirdly: recent evolutions of asana practice have occurred most dramatically through a series of responses to the performance-based patriarchal structures of the last century. Beneath the official account of heroes and their methods lies an alternative history of conscious or unconscious rejections of what has come before. This has become crystal clear for me in through many interviews, including those with Erich Schiffmann and Donna Farhi about how they left the Iyengar world.

Lastly: “What Are We Actually Doing in Asana?” needs to account for how the “we” changes through time. I can’t count the number of interview subjects who have found a practice to be medicinal at first, but poisonous over the long term. This brings up all kinds of subtleties in the field of change management, highlights the tensions between disciplined and spontaneous learning, and shows devotion and disillusionment to be two sides of the same developmental coin.

It won’t surprise you, I hope, when I say that the September release date I projected during the campaign is now overly ambitious. Stretching the timeline will help me produce the best book I can, but it will also allow me to absorb two other crucial works due out soon. Elliot Goldberg’s The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice is forthcoming in August. And the Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indian Traditions is forthcoming from Jim Mallinson and Mark Singleton in January. I’ll be reviewing them for my blog. I expect both to be culture-changers.

I hope my sporadic updates reveal a book coming together like yoga itself works: rarely in straightforward fashion.

Regards,

Matthew Remski

Reports and meditations on desire, pain, injury, and healing (the story so far…)

Here’s a little personal background for this book project.

I’ve been teaching asana since 2002. I’ve owned two studios in radically different places: rural Wisconsin, and downtown Toronto. From 2006 to 2010, I served as co-founder of Yoga Festival Toronto, which brought me into touch with hundreds of yoga teachers and dozens of yoga studio owners. I’ve been an Ayurvedic practitioner since 2005, and have worked with over a thousand clients. I’m pretty familiar with a broad range of the “yoga demographic.”

Throughout all of this time, I’d heard many colleagues and clients recount stories of injuries – both physical and emotional – sustained in asana classes. In fact, I can’t remember anyone describing an injury-free experience in asana. (In the course of the present research, I have met one. She’s exceptional, and I’ll be describing her experience in detail in the eventual book.) The obvious benefits of asana have always been well-reported throughout my social circle, as they are in yoga media. Injuries, however, have been spoken of in whispers.

For years, I was concerned, but not concerned enough. For the most part I believed that injuries were the result of poor instruction on the part of the teacher, or overwork on the part of the student. I used this half-baked rationale to simply divide the yoga world into people who “got it”, and people who didn’t. It took me a long while to realize that even well-instructed poses, executed mindfully, could also be injurious. It also took me years to give up on the default belief that the claim “yoga is for everybody” meant that the basic syllabus of Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) is essentially therapeutic. It’s actually not. It vastly overemphasizes mobility over stability, to take just one example. This has serious consequences not only for people’s bodies, but for how they relate to the world in general.

I have come to see this as having political implications. As one of my interview subjects, the filmmaker Mike Hoolboom said:

Slavoj Žižek noted recently that the New Economy requires flexible workers. He was referring of course to multiple employers, migrating job sites, the abolition of weekends. But couldn’t this also be read as a call for more yoga? I can see the boardroom heads already nodding yes. “And let’s put in a meditation room for the overachievers while we’re at it!” Žižek’s riff made me wonder if there wasn’t a fit between yoga’s newfound popularity and the rise of globalized capitalism.

So a number of realizations accumulated over the years. Firstly, I started paying much closer attention to stories students told about being injured by invasive adjustments. A few of my clients painted scenes of such negligence and even cruelty that a few times I felt compelled to suggest they consider legal action. I wasn’t happy about that suggestion, because it drove home the point that we really have no feedback mechanisms within yoga community at large. Teachers can injure students directly, not realize it, be protected from feedback by their own charisma, and believe for years that not only is everything fine, but that they’re doing good public service.

Secondly, I started getting clear on my own lack of knowledge. I’d accumulated thousands of hours of practice and training, and had been certified in Yoga Therapy (before the recent spate of IAYT upgrades), but quickly found that this didn’t come close to equipping me with the real biomechanics data that I needed to assess and help clients avoid and manage injuries. I did my best to remain clear about my scope of practice, which was definitely shrinking. Meanwhile, I saw other asana teachers continue to over-reach their training, offering advice that was medical in nature — or, in the psychological sphere, interventions that really required formal training. This, combined with reports from the Wild West of adjustments, gave me strong reservations about the whole project.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing I started to notice about the injury stories was that the vast majority of folks seemed to blame themselves for their pain. They didn’t blame their teachers, nor the instruction they’d received, nor the social environments that might have contributed to their overwork and repetitive stress. “I was acting out of ego” was and is the most standard reason a yogi gives for having been injured. Philosophically and psychologically, this is actually too vague to have much meaning at all, beyond “It’s my fault alone.” Somehow, yoga culture has either indoctrinated this default response, or capitalized upon it, to effectively avoid collective scrutiny.

By 2009, I began to withdraw from asana instruction bit by bit to concentrate on writing and teaching Ayurveda and philosophy. At the same time, it seemed that a whole new wave of biomechanics-in-yoga specialists were hitting the scene: Paul Grilley, Leslie Kaminoff, Suzi Hately, Jill Miller, and the many others that followed them. They each brought unique and novel skills into the yoga sphere. Listening to just a few lectures made me realize that the tools I’d received throughout my training weren’t enough for me anymore. Or rather: they relied on a different, older paradigm – I’ll call it the “pranic model” of wellness – which didn’t focus upon functional, pleasurable, sustainable movement that would facilitate contemplation and lowered reactivity in everyday life, but rather abstract ideals of “alignment” that were meant to purify, re-organize, or even redesign the body by allowing prana to flow freely. The pranic model was a valuable guide for me, in some ways, as it has been for others throughout the ages. But it has limitations, the primary one being its reliance on intuition.

What Are We Actually Doing in Asana? really took off through the coalescence of four events. First came the endlessly rich conversations I had with my wife Alix, also a yoga teacher, at our kitchen table while she was pregnant with our son. She’d reduced her class load in her third trimester, and was able to step back a bit and examine some of her own injury experiences from a new perspective. It was a time in which we were both somewhat divested from teaching, and it allowed us both to consider the broader picture of what asana meant to us and our immediate culture, without worrying primarily about how this would impact our livelihoods.

Secondly, I was speaking with my friend and co-author Scott Petrie. He’s completing his training to become a psychotherapist. We were talking about why people persist in asana, even when they strongly suspect or even know that it is injuring them. (Repetitive stress is a main cause of yoga injury.) He said: “Well, if you wanted to hurt yourself, yoga would be a socially acceptable way to go about it.” This opened my eyes to something I’d long suspected but never articulated: because pain has different meanings for everyone, we really don’t know how other people relate to it. Some people may have a need for it, whether it’s to punish themselves, or to allow themselves to pierce a kind of numbness, or to even recreate a trauma in what they believe is a safer environment that allows for a different resolution.

Thirdly, I was speaking to an elite asana practitioner/teacher at a festival. I said to him: “You do some pretty extreme postures. Do they ever hurt?” He said: “Sometimes I think so. But often I’m not sure if my body is telling me the truth.” This further deepened my wonderment about the subjectivity of pain, and it severely problematized that old nugget of yoga safety: “Listen to your body.” Some people are listening to their bodies through trust issues or agendas that have little to do with safe, sustainable growth.

Lastly, for about two years after my public asana teaching wound down, I realized I had been trying to heal a very painful hamstring attachment tear by actually stretching it. How is this possible? After all of my training and exposure, how did I not know how to handle this very basic injury? No teacher had ever told me to simply rest. The solution to yoga injury was always more yoga. I had so sheltered myself from the “unyogic” world of secular movement/fitness practice that I’d never even heard of the principle of cross-training. And I just wasn’t inclined to look outside of the pranic model of injury for a diagnosis or help.

More strangely, at a certain point I realized that I wanted to feel that pain for some reason. Part of me enjoyed it. It had become a neurotic focus. I psychologized it. It became a symbol of the “knot of me”. I felt that if I could resolve this painful material contraction, it would unpack something primal and foundational in myself. Resolving it meant working at it, working on it. Always working to improve – as in everything else in the rest of my somewhat anxious life.

So here the backstory in short form: over many years, I collected numerous contexts for yoga injury. I noted an element of poor biomechanical training. I noted magical thinking. I noted trends of socialization towards pushing and attaining that play on widespread fears of inadequacy. I noted teachers who project their needs and anxieties and rage onto the bodies of their students. And I noted the mystery of our own ambivalent relationships to pain.

In January of 2014, I posted a request to the yogis of Facebook to contact me with their stories of injuries sustained through yoga. I was instantly flooded with responses. I received so many long, very personal emails telling incredible stories of pain, injury, confusion, and long journeys of healing.

Many of my correspondents told stories about receiving injurious adjustments from teachers. I quickly realized the legal implications of collecting and reporting these accounts. I made the decision at the time to anonymize the data they gave me, redacting from it names, places, studio names, and yoga events. I’m not an investigative journalist, and I hadn’t gotten into this to establish court-ready narratives about who did what to whom. And it was not my intention to expose individual instances of poorly informed teaching, invasive adjustments, or teacherly grandiosity. In my view, these are epidemic within the culture, and there’s little use in pointing fingers and potentially ruining individual careers through hearsay. It is much better in my view to create a relatively neutral public record that today’s practitioners can simply bear witness to, and use to create a smarter culture moving forward. (Of course it can’t be entirely neutral, because I am personally invested in these stories. I can only promise to do my best to be open about where my own investments lie.)

The difficult thing about citing anonymous sources is that it puts my credibility into question. After all – I could be making all of this up. My hope is that I include such a spectrum of voices in the presentation of the data that it would feel very unlikely that it was coming from a single source or agenda. I also hope that the stories I choose are resonant enough with the general reader that their authenticity will be obvious. But to protect myself against the possible accusation of fictionalizing, I’m keeping meticulous records of every interview (video-recorded and transcribed, or via email) that will prove the authenticity of the data – while preserving its anonymity – in any potential legal action. If I am accused of fictionalizing, I will not hesitate to sue to prove I am not. My interview subjects have given too much to this project to have their stories libeled as fantasies. I’m doing this work so that we can take them seriously.

Having said all of this, there may be instances in which outright naming of specific actions committed by truly public figures might be illuminating enough – and worth the work of corroborating – that I’ll end up going in that direction. There are many difficult considerations here, the main one being how many readers would be alienated by journalism they perceive as attacking their guru. I’ll be asking the advice of many colleagues on this point, and won’t decide lightly either way.

Some of my interviewing will not be presented anonymously, or redacted, because it’s less about personal experience, and more about the expertise of the subject. In researching yoga injuries, I’ve reached out to physiotherapists, osteopaths, sports medicine doctors, clinical psychologists, yoga scholars, and other practitioners for their valuable outsider’s input. I’m happy to name these specialists, and they’re happy to be on record.

Three more things of note: I do not consider myself an asana expert, but rather an earnest student and almost-former teacher whose hubris has been sharply deflated. I don’t come at this project with any commitment to any method. At this point I value safety, transparency, sustainability, and empathy in instruction. Personally, this project is about sniffing these qualities out — and the obstructions to them. Secondly, some have accused me of unfairly targeting or bashing particular methods or lineages. While it’s axiomatic that practices focusing on physical intensity will yield a higher injury rate and create more visible examples, it is not my intention to single anyone or anything out. I’m describing a broad cultural problem, and I pledge to be an equal-opportunity critic. Lastly: it is not my direct focus, but I aim to close the eventual book with the most positive stories I can find, from those teachers and students who I believe are elevating the quality of yoga education for a new era.

I’ve created this page as a resource centre for the articles that have emerged from this project so far, and for readers to be able to quickly capture the overall scope of the project. I invite you to read, and comment, and share with whoever you think might be interested in this project.

This page is also a nod to the public evolution of this book. We live in an amazing time, in which research and stories can be shared and commented upon by a wide range of stakeholders with unprecedented speed. I began this project in the painful silence of my own body and mind, but it’s only coming to life through conversation. I thank you for participating.

Please let me know if you have questions, concerns, or stories to share through the contact page of this website.

WAWADIA Articles

WAWADIA UPDATE #11 /// Methods to Reduce Injury: An Interview Subject Speaks Out

 

 

I’ve been asking a lot of questions in the course of conducting this project. The one question I’m most frequently asked in turn is: “What should we do as a culture to reduce incidence of injury?”

This is thorny. It immediately provokes a conversation about the pros and cons of tighter regulations for studios and training standards for teachers. In the seeming absence of any concrete external pressure to regulate from governmental agencies, it’s a conversation that quickly reveals the basically libertarian bias of yoga culture. For the most part, yoga’s primary stakeholders — senior teachers and prominent studio owners — are strongly resistant to the idea that an art form for personal growth should be subject to collective oversight. Perhaps North American yoga is so rooted in 1960s countercultural ideal of self-expression that talk of self-regulation will always be distasteful. And where’s the money in it, really? Continue reading “WAWADIA UPDATE #11 /// Methods to Reduce Injury: An Interview Subject Speaks Out”

WAWADIA Update #10 /// “Lazy people can’t practice”: Thoughts On a Yoga Meme

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou’ve probably seen this quote floating around.

Anyone can practice. Young man can practice. Old man can practice. Very old man can practice. Man who is sick, he can practice. Man who doesn’t have strength can practice. Except lazy people; lazy people can’t practice Ashtanga yoga. – Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

It sounds a lot like Jois might be citing Pancham Sinh’s 1914 translation of the Haṭhapradīpikā, 1.64:

Whether young, old or too old, sick or lean, one who discards laziness, gets success if he practises Yoga.

Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #10 /// “Lazy people can’t practice”: Thoughts On a Yoga Meme”

Anything Is Possible? Um, No. /// A Yoga Selfie Blog Fail

As a rule, I try to avoid the low-hanging fruit on the ever-blooming tree of yoga idiocy. But every once in a while my news feed is smeared with dreck that so astounds me with its orgasmic smugness and contempt for critical thinking that I have two choices: punch back, or gnaw my arm off. And if I gnaw my arm off – oh no! How will I ever again do one-armed peacock and snap selfies at the same time?

On Tuesday of this week, the Ashtanga Picture Project published a (unconsciously, I hope) tone-deaf piece of body-shaming snark called “The Myth of the Unattainable Pose”, featuring a fine selection of impossibly beautiful Ashtanga selfies, some pithy hits from a Pattabhi Jois Quote Generator, and all the reasoning power of a gerbil on a wheel. If common sense is prana, this blog is doing some serious retention on the exhale. Continue reading “Anything Is Possible? Um, No. /// A Yoga Selfie Blog Fail”

WAWADIA update #7 /// Pain, Performance, and Politics in Yoga: a Conversation with Mike Hoolboom

Out of these pieces, it was left to us to put ourselves back together again in such a way that the cracks would surely show. – Mike Hoolboom

 

My general policy with the interviews for this project has been to maintain the anonymity of my subjects so that they can speak freely of yoga injury experiences that involve particular teachers and studios without fear of social, professional, or legal reprisal. But some subjects don’t need this protection, either because they are not dependent upon professional yoga culture, or because they are personally able to clear their stories with the people they reference, or because they bring a certain expertise from beyond Yogaland that we both feel would enrich the conversation. And, of course, they have to also want to be on record. My interview with Mike Hoolboom – or his interview of me – fits the bill here. Continue reading “WAWADIA update #7 /// Pain, Performance, and Politics in Yoga: a Conversation with Mike Hoolboom”

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