Illness or injury or depression are often framed as personal ethical failures — not signs that a system needs rebalancing. When yoga culture has a redirect-and-blame response to a personal injury story rooted in that very culture, it is mimicking the general decay of the notion of collective responsibility, offering nothing but “buyer beware” logic in consolation.
How do I report to the yoga world I’m so invested in, to which I owe my livelihood, and that I spent over a decade teaching in, that several basic staples of asana practice might be definitively unsafe?
I have developed a wariness around yoga that has kept me from the mat. I remember reading about Krishnamacharya, the great modernist yoga collage artist/teacher, who offered everyone their own practice. This series of poses would evolve (and continue to evolve) after watching the individual student, and working with them, and adjusting them. In other words, the practice of yoga was relational. Doesn’t this make sense? But perhaps there’s no time for that in studio culture. Perhaps everyone would go broke if it all came down to one on one.
For more than a century, yoga has straddled the paradigmatic threshold between an intuition-based knowledge fostered internally and nurtured by anecdote for generations, and the evidence-based knowledge that has evolved through the intersubjective process of shared, repeatable research. When I was briefly hospitalized last week, I was lucid enough, and not too discomforted by pain, that I could sit for while on that threshold and meditate.
