The Trouble with Yoga

What trouble with yoga? (1)  Yoga is everywhere these days—on every corner, in schools, in prisons.   Professional athletes and Hollywood celebrities do yoga.  Yoga, it would seem, is a resounding success.

Despite the inarguable and astounding momentum of the “yoga boom,” I observe a subtle but profound problem with yoga in America.   My ability to diagnose this problem is rooted in my training as a chiropractor and Feldenkrais teacher as well as my experience as a long-term, devoted yoga student.  From my vantage point, it is clear that many who are riding the wave of the yoga’s immense popularity are practicing asanas without connecting with the heart of yoga—practicing diligently for years without ever experiencing the “union” for which “yoga” is named.   At its root, yoga is about radical transformation or unveiling of the self; it challenges us to dissolve or transmute habitual ways of perceiving and thinking, feeling and moving.   But too often yoga instruction fails to meet modern Western students where they are; it fails to begin from the point where such profound somatic learning must begin.  As a result, yoga classes often leave intact, or even reinforce, students’ unconscious embodied habits of trying, performing and straining.  They inadvertently perpetuate, rather than defuse, students’ habits of violence toward the body.

One symptom of the dis-ease afflicting yoga instruction and practice is the frequency with which people are injuring themselves in yoga classes—initiating or exacerbating chronic lower back and sacroiliac pain, straining their necks, pulling hamstrings and adductor muscles or tendons.   The number of people I see each year—in my small office, located in a small community—who have injured themselves in yoga classes suggests that this is a widespread problem.  And if what I observe in my practice resembles the dynamics in the U.S. as a whole, for every person who sustains outright injury doing yoga, there are scores who try it but end up quitting due to lower level but persistent pain, discomfort and/or frustration.  

Another, more serious but more subtle, symptom of our current trouble with yoga is that a large number of people are attending classes for years without developing an authentic, personal relationship to the practice.  When I work with such students in my office and ask them to do a foundational asana like Downward Facing Dog or Triangle, there is a pervasive sense of strain, rather than ease and enjoyment.  My eyes and hands—my whole embodied sense—tells me that these supposedly intermediate students are arranging their bodies as they think they “should,” rather than experiencing the internal dynamics of the asana for themselves.  They imitate rather than inhabit the pose.  While such students undoubtedly experience myriad benefits from their asana practices—improved fitness and strength, greater flexibility, improved concentration and self-esteem—they are not only risking injury but also missing out on the deeper opportunity and the challenge that can make yoga something more than the hippest form of exercise, relaxation, or psuedo-spiritual consumerism.

This trouble with yoga is rooted in fundamental habits and biases of Western culture.  If the yoga community in the West wants to heal the dis-ease—as opposed to ignoring, denying, or superficially ministering to the symptoms—it will need to grapple more seriously with these issues.  As the great yoga teacher Vanda Scaravelli wrote,we need to “create a much more serious approach towards our bodies, which have been neglected for so many years.” (2)  The yoga community needs to deepen its own practice—to change its own habits of thinking and perceiving, feeling and doing—in order to more truly and effectively meet the needs of modern Western students.  

Most yoga instructors are aware of our cultural tendency to work too hard—the “no pain, no gain” mentality—and of the potential for injury or frustration that results from it.  Most yoga classes are filled with instructions to “stay within your limits,” “work where you are comfortable,” “go to your edge, but not over it,” etc., etc.  Should we conclude that the people who get injured in yoga classes, or who obstinately go on working too hard despite years of instruction, are simply failing to listen to the teachers’ advice?  Most people I encounter who got hurt while doing yoga say things like, “Gee, I thought I was staying within my limits!  It felt good at the time!” And most of the long-term yoga students I see have no felt sense of how they could do things differently.  If we are to honor these students’ experience, we must conclude that the problem is neither the quantity nor the quality of verbal instruction by yoga teacher nor the unwillingness of students to heed such instruction, but rather something more elusive and more obvious.   (3)

The problem is that most yoga students and a considerable number of yoga instructors—like most American adults in general—have little experience of what genuine ease and comfort feel like.  We think we are at ease when in fact we are merely unconscious of our habitual muscular over-work, tension, and awkwardness.  We confuse the familiar with the genuinely comfortable.  Unlike other mammals, for whom most movement patterns are neurologically hard-wired—fully developed at birth and relatively immune to change—we humans must learn almost everything from scratch.  This is why puppies and foals can walk within hours of birth—and why you almost never see a really clumsy, awkward dog or horse—while humans require at least a year’s apprenticeship to learn to walk, and many of us do it relatively badly.   We learn to move by feeling and observing those around us; if they are uncomfortable and inefficient, odds are that we will be, too.   

Modern Western culture allows, even rewards, uncomfortable and inefficient movement to a degree never seen before in history.  More than any culture before ours, we find it appropriate to order our lives according to the clock, to ignore or override the cycles of nature and the inevitable interplay between those cycles and our earthly bodies’ ebbs and flows of energy and mood.  In an industrial/post-industrial society, our “success” in social life from infancy onward depends upon our ability to ignore or deny our bodily sensations, experiences and needs. What healthy, vital body would choose to sit as much or in the ways that we are forced to do from at least our first day of school onward?  What lively, intelligent body would choose to sit at a computer, breathe stale air, or look at fluorescent lighting for 8 or more hours per day?   In our world, even athletes and dancers must generally learn to treat their bodies like objects, like machines, to succeed.  They must compel their bodies to meet externally defined ideals and routinely force them to work through pain and injury.  

Survival—at least middle class survival—in our contemporary context calls upon an extremely limited range of physical skills and sensitivities—certainly more limited than those required by most people alive when the yoga sutras were penned.   In order to survive a couple thousand years ago, most people needed to be relatively fit, agile, and coordinated.  Consider the array and sophistication of sensory/motor skills needed to carry water long distances, hunt, grow or gather food, build shelters and make and repair clothing, tools, baskets, and musical instruments.  Now consider the physical skills necessary to run a computer, take food out of the freezer, or put in a DVD.  It is evident that the people who began asana practice thousands of years were beginning from a different place with regard to the body than the average person who takes up asana practice in the United States today.    (4)

Yoga instructors’ well-meaning injunctions to stay where we are comfortable are of limited utility in this developmental and social context.  Verbal direction to “take it easy” or “stay within your limits” is virtually meaningless in the face of what F.M. Alexander called our “debauched kinesthetics”—our overwhelming confusion and ignorance about our embodied experience.  Our ways of moving and feeling were in place long before we were proficient with language; even the most elegant verbal instructions are frail oars indeed with which to row against such powerful currents.  

Asking your average 40-something—who probably hasn’t had a rich sensory experience of his feet since he was an infant—to “ground the four corners of the foot” is the somatic equivalent of asking a sixth grader to give you a lucid précis of the themes of Anna Karenina.  Asking that yoga student to ground the four corners of the foot while simultaneously making distinctions between movement at the hip joint and movement at the lumbar spine, lengthening the spine, and allowing the head and neck to be free is like asking a kindergardener to read a text about the theory of relativity.  It’s no wonder lots of yoga students become discouraged and injured when they are sincerely doing their best to follow instructors’ cues.

Healing the dis-ease affecting yoga practice in the U.S. would require at least two changes in yoga instructor training and classroom teaching.  First, the yoga community would need to recognize that asana practice involves somatic learning, and that somatic learning involves learning by example more than learning by verbal instruction (none of us learns to roll over, crawl, walk, run or climb by following verbal instructions).  In other words, a yoga teacher must embody somatic wisdom in order to transmit it.  No matter how often or in what variety of ways a teacher cautions students to work from their place of ease, if her own ways of moving and speaking convey strain, if her hands on students’ bodies transmit tension and unnecessary effort, she inadvertently reinforces her students’ habits of “efforting.”   When it comes to teaching yoga, there is no meaningful alternative to “walking your talk.”  

If the yoga community wants teachers who can walk their talk, it needs to be uncompromising about the fact that the development of such embodied wisdom takes time.  It takes a long time to learn to attend to the myriad small, subtle details that go into even our simplest action; it takes even longer to be able to extend such presence to the dynamics involved in a single yoga asana.  If the yoga community wants yoga teachers who can transmit embodied wisdom to students, it needs to alter its habit of turning out yoga instructors in a weekend or a month.  If the yoga community wants to be true to yoga’s premise that the body is and should be a vehicle for liberation, for enlightenment, it needs to stand firm against our tendency to treat the body as less than the mind.  No one would imagine that a university could produce a competent astrophysicist in a month; it is equally ludicrous to imagine that one can produce a good yoga instructor in that time. (5)

In the effort to develop yoga teachers’ embodied wisdom and convey it to yoga students, the yoga community would benefit from incorporating the wisdom of somatic education.  (6)   Unlike yoga, somatic education springs from a modern Western context and thus is attuned to the conditions required for modern Western people to rediscover or rebuild body awareness.  Somatic education disciplines provide a wealth of clever, fun and interesting methods for discovering and subverting ingrained habits of moving, feeling and acting while recovering an embodied experience of joy, spontaneity, and clarity.  We recognize that a person coming to college with weak basic language skills requires remedial coursework.  The yoga community needs to recognize that virtually every student coming to yoga from a culture where fundamental respect for and intimacy with the body is lacking needs remedial body education. Somatic education is a most elegant vehicle for that foundational work.  (7)

Developing embodied intelligence is inevitably a lengthy process, but in my experience, engaging with somatic education along with asana practice can ease the way considerably.  I believe that admission to a yoga teacher training should require experience with some form of somatic education as well as evidence of sustained personal yoga practice.  Somatic education should be incorporated into the curriculum of yoga teacher trainings, and should be on the menu at yoga conferences and retreats.  And yoga instructors and somatic educators should be collaborating routinely.   (8)

I practice yoga because it brings joy and refreshment, inspiration and peace, to my being.  I practice yoga, month after month and year after year, because my body asks for it as unequivocally as it asks for food.  I practice yoga because it feels good—in the moment and over time.  Because we naturally wish to share the things that give us pleasure, I feel distressed to observe that so many people who are diligently practicing asanas are missing out on the simple and profound happiness that yoga can provide.  I sincerely hope that the yoga community will demonstrate the integrity to acknowledge the limitations of the current “yoga boom.” I hope that the community will find the courage and creativity to bring greater depth and breadth to its own practices in the service of peace, joy and enlightenment in these bodies, on this earth.