<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Another short update, and a request:<\/p>\n
In research\u00a0for the WAWADIA project so far, a key distinction has emerged.<\/p>\n
On one hand, there are acute injuries that occur in the early days of practice, correlated with (if not caused by) a combination of inappropriate instruction, disorganized studio protocols, and lack of previous exercise\/embodiment experience on the part of the student. These injuries might be relatively easy to mitigate, if we get clearer on regulatory standards. But this is a thorny issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the other hand, I’ve collected a lot\u00a0of stories\u00a0on more chronic injuries that emerge within 3-5 years of the typical practice career. Healing from these injuries\u00a0can be complicated by the fact that the\u00a0practitioner is often strongly emotionally invested in practice at this point, and they struggle to imagine themselves changing or altering paths. Their injuries reflect their practice in a strange way: both record repetition, and stress.<\/p>\n These\u00a0practitioners attribute\u00a0their first few years of asana practice with powerful transformative benefits that are both physical and\u00a0psychological in nature. While they struggle to find that evasive\u00a0sweet spot of sustainable growth — often pursuing new teachers and training — thinking that the asana they’ve always loved\u00a0has now become physically or even psychologically maladaptive for them can evoke\u00a0painful\u00a0cognitive dissonance.<\/p>\n Sometimes\u00a0they\u00a0feel an\u00a0injury — or simply a \u00a0plateau in positive returns — as a sign they should practice\u00a0with more dedication. I’m wondering whether they\u00a0may injure themselves in part by doubling down\u00a0to pursue improvements\u00a0that may\u00a0only really be felt once, using a medium that may have been\u00a0only\u00a0partially responsible for the original benefits they reported. After all, the initiation of practice for many people usually coincides with a slew of other lifestyle, career, geographical or\u00a0relationship shifts, such that it’s hard to isolate the effects of asana alone. To what extent do we valorize\u00a0the power of asana through the fog of attribution bias<\/a>?<\/p>\n If dedicated practitioners professionalize their early love affair with asana into a teaching career, they often feel stuck — less inspired and sometimes in\u00a0even more\u00a0pain than when they started, but now compelled to continue to practice with renewed devotion, performing\u00a0the benefits of practice for others more than feeling them for themselves.<\/p>\n I wonder if\u00a0this internal dilemma shows up in yoga marketing as the endless encouragement to “deepen your practice”, or to take your practice “to the next level”. I wonder if these ads may in part express the longings of the advertisers more than actually advertising new services. The practice\u00a0plateau is to be dreaded — sometimes framed as laziness, or a kind of resurgence of a defensive ego. Yoga culture doesn’t generally record the voices of those\u00a0who interpreted the plateau as a sign to move on, because, well, they moved on, and the advertising is produced by those who stay.<\/p>\n I’m finding that many\u00a0complex injuries seem to occur\u00a0in the lag time\u00a0between a practitioner feeling that a practice might no longer\u00a0be appropriate\u00a0for them and the moment they finally decide it’s not, or that they\u00a0must change it. Another factor is the difficulty\u00a0in discovering\u00a0how far one is physically able to progress, how much progression is necessary or helpful, and how the feelings generated by that progression change over time. My guess is that most people reach their general limit for physical transformation in asana practice in about three to five years of regular discipline, depending upon intensity. (This may\u00a0mirror the usefulness curves\u00a0of many other therapeutic engagements, like psychotherapy.) Beyond that, there is an endless horizon of refinements that can be learned, but the actual<\/em> shifts in mobility, balance and strength get smaller and smaller for almost everyone. Sustaining a particular level of practice surely tones the psyche in particular ways, developing perseverance and resilience. But when people feel that bright edge of learning\u00a0begin to\u00a0dull, there’s often a reflex to dig in and try harder, to recapture an original pleasure or wonderment. It can be hard, especially for the professional, to view asana as instrumental and temporary rather than integral and permanent to their path.<\/p>\n It seems like repetitive stress arises most prominently when we’re told — or when we tell ourselves — to just keep going beyond the point of positive return, fuelled by the expectation that our lives can continue to improve at the same rates and in the same ways, piqued by\u00a0the worry that if they don’t, we’re missing out on something.<\/p>\n The effort is tinged with the teleology of the endless journey: a pressure that a capitalist marketplace will happily, if unconsciously, exploit. As practice intensifies, or even holds steady at an unsatisfying plateau, people are told or can feel that through their injuries they’re\u00a0uncovering as-yet-unknown levels of tension, conflict, trauma, or karma. It is poignant to think that the quest for deeper purification, self-improvement, and\u00a0healing may in some cases form its own injury feedback-loop. Those\u00a0with the highest investment in practice may often be\u00a0practicing in part to\u00a0recover from the effects of practice. This was part of Diane Bruni’s story<\/a>, and I’ve heard this from many others.<\/p>\n I’d like to understand this feedback loop better. I’ve interviewed enough subjects to be confident that it’s a thing. If you have a story that resonates,\u00a0I’d love to interview you about these themes directly, anonymously or on the record, as per your comfort. You can reach me through the contact page of this site. Or, if you’d just like to comment below, go for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is poignant to think that the quest for deeper purification or self-improvement may in some cases form its own injury feedback-loop. Those with the highest investment in practice may often be practicing in part to recover from the effects of practice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,24,27,19],"tags":[356,50,80],"class_list":["post-4142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-blog","category-featured","category-wawadia","category-yoga","tag-behavioural-psychology","tag-yoga","tag-yoga-injuries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}