<\/p>\n
A shorter version<\/a> of this article appeared in Guardian.<\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n Is yoga a sport? A therapy? A religion?<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not a yoga insider and you listened to British Wheel of Yoga Director Paul Fox and British Hindu monastic Swami Ambikananda joust over these questions on BBC this Monday<\/a>\u00a0(time cue 2:50),\u00a0you\u2019d be none the wiser. Their prickly duet sang of a subculture-turned-industry that not only can\u2019t decide which of the three it is, but for decades has based its mystique on the tensions between them.<\/p>\n The question at hand is whether or not British yoga is ripe for regulatory intervention through alignment with a National Occupational Standard. Instigator Fox says yes, because he claims yoga is causing physical injury — but he can’t say how much — and that some teacher trainings are too short \u2013 but he won\u2019t say which ones. Defender Swami says no, because she claims yoga is a religion, and regulation would constitute a neo-colonial intervention into an ancient tradition.<\/p>\n Obscured from most observers would be the fact that these are two power brokers wrestling within yoga’s confederacy of cults, in which charisma and zeal consistently outperform evidence.<\/p>\n When Fox asserts in science-y terms that yoga practice can deliver medical benefit through the guidance of expert instruction, but it can also injure people if the instruction is poor, he sounds reasonable. However, hard data on both the good and bad of yoga postures is very thin. Fox seems to be upselling and crying wolf at the same time, and as the director of an organization leveraging membership dues to lobby for regulations that would surely validate its own \u201cexpert\u201d trainings, his motives cry out for a grain of salt. Especially when he\u00a0punches down at less-moneyed guilds like the Independent Yoga Network, which recently gutted Fox\u2019s proposal with a few curt bullets<\/a>.<\/p>\n About the upselling. Research into yoga\u2019s benefits is surging, but it faces definitional, methodological and conflict-of-interest obstacles<\/a>. Whose yoga is being tested is the first question, followed by what that yoga consists of. (These are the same questions that Fox\u2019s regulation project would have to dictate answers for.) Then there\u2019s the fog of self-reporting, and the fact that yoga tests are impossible to control or double-blind. And from the beginnings of the modern yoga in 1930s India, researchers have been over-invested in positive outcomes. They\u2019ve either been self-promoting teachers, propagandists, unwitting pseudoscientists, or a blend of the lot.<\/p>\n Research conflicts continue. An example: Fox\u2019s own teacher, yoga anatomist David Keil, is currently undertaking a broad survey of yoga injuries<\/a>. It looks like a noble effort, well-supported and designed. But will Keil really be able to objectively assess whether his and Fox\u2019s particular slice of the yoga pie \u2013 the Ashtanga method, famous for its joint-punishing acrobatics \u2013 is more or less safe than any other?<\/p>\n But I can understand Fox’s alarmism\u00a0about injuries. When I started publishing on yoga\u2019s shadows<\/a> two years ago, I too was outraged that people should be getting hurt when they were looking for healing and succour. I quickly realized, however, that my crusade was about something deeper than the torn hamstrings and shoulder dislocations that could more easily happen in Crossfit or tennis. I learned that what little hard data we have<\/a> shows that injury rates in yoga are quite low. And in more than two hundred interviews with subjects injured doing yoga, I\u2019ve found that \u201cexpert\u201d teaching is as much a predictor of injury as a preventer.<\/p>\n Why? Because key experts at the forefront of yoga\u2019s globalization in the 1970s had some ideas about the human body that mingled the medieval with the naive. In his bestseller\u00a0Light on Yoga<\/em>, Iyengar suggested that placing one’s\u00a0full weight of the body onto the head in headstand was a great idea. Pattabhi Jois \u2013 Fox\u2019s own root-guru \u2013 said that his repetitive Primary Series was \u201cTherapy for the Body.\u201d Along with the echoes of their abusive childhoods<\/a>, they passed these axioms down through training programmes where elaborateness projected legitimacy, and students matched cash with devotion to make their tuition.<\/p>\n My research has led me to believe that if there are injuries to worry about, they\u2019re not primarily from particular postures or inadequate training hours. They come from dysfunctional learning relationships in which the abusive attitudes and behaviours of top teachers are internalized by students. If I were Fox, I\u2019d be less interested in micromanaging the\u00a0resum\u00e9s of workaday British teachers \u00a0than in sussing out the lingering effects of Iyengar\u00a0battering his students<\/a>, or Jois\u00a0sexually harassing his<\/a>.<\/p>\n For her part, Swami Ambikananda seems keen on a different kind of micromanagement: that of the image of yoga itself, to protect it from business-oriented interlopers like Fox. But when she\u00a0claims that she stewards a 5000 year-old tradition that\u2019s religious in nature, and Hindu in essence, and that regulating it would continue the barbarity of the Raj, she stretches the ligaments of credulity in a posture that many right-wing\u00a0Indian politicians\u00a0would applaud. Her argument should make atheist, agnostic, and Buddhist yogis nervous, even as it dodges\u00a0the possibility\u00a0that public\u00a0oversight might prevent yoga lineages from falling into the psychopathy that religions are so good at covering up.<\/p>\n In fact, certain yoga regulations could even protect Ambikananda\u2019s own school from negative aspersions<\/span>. Her \u201cTraditional Yoga Association\u201d claims its spiritual heritage through relationship to Swami Sivananda. Unfortunately, so does the Satyananda School of Yoga, whose worldwide organisation has been rocked by allegations in Australia of fraud and child rape<\/a>. With both schools claiming the same spiritual lineage, wouldn’t the Swami\u2019s students be comforted by knowing her school was independently approved as a psychologically safe space? Because traditionalism, devotion, and positive orientalism give no insurance of kindness, safety, or sanity, maybe some regulation really is in order. Not of postures, but of power and projection.<\/p>\n I think the British Wheel can stop spinning on this one. The invisible hand is never\u00a0a satisfying\u00a0answer, but simple market pressures are positively impacting physical safety standards in classes worldwide.\u00a0Trainings that want to be competitive\u00a0now hire bonafide physiotherapists or osteopaths to teach the anatomy and physiology segments of their programmes. \u201cBiomechanics\u201d and \u201cfunctional movement\u201d are the new buzzwords of Yogaland, and the language of trauma sensitivity<\/a>\u00a0is starting to make trainers aware of both therapeutic possibility and overreach.<\/p>\n If the shouting dies down, consensus may\u00a0gradually develop around touchy issues like the safety of headstand, passive stretching, and whether yoga’s flexibility fetish is dangerous to the hypermobile, or needs to be supplemented with resistance training. If we’re really lucky, an organic discussion will also emerge about a yoga teacher’s scope of practice. This is sorely needed\u00a0when the commodified\u00a0vision of teaching is limited to physical skills, and the traditionalist vision is bloated by promises of salvation.<\/p>\n While it all shakes out, people who just want to feel the loveliness of yoga can remember a few simple pointers. If you move with the simplicity and curiosity of a small child, you\u2019re unlikely to hurt yourself. If a teacher seems to have an agenda for your body you don\u2019t understand or didn\u2019t consent to, they need to go to therapy.<\/p>\n New practitioners\u00a0should also know that yoga bureaucrats cannot guarantee yoga safety. Nor can yoga priests. And that yoga bureaucrats who want to regulate often stand to capitalize\u00a0on controlling the conversation, while yoga priests who want to resist regulation often stand to benefit from an absence of scrutiny and critical thinking. But if you seek out independent, low-key teachers who don\u2019t put on airs and don\u2019t lay their trips on your body, you might find\u00a0their expertise offers something neither regulations nor religions can guarantee: humble service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A shorter version of this article appeared in Guardian. _____ Is yoga a sport? A therapy? A religion? 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