Traveling the Safer Road | Avoiding Injury in Yoga & Life

 

(this article originally appeared on the Yoganonymous website and is reproduced her by their kind permission)

 

Let me begin with a little urban legend...

When I was a kid growing up in Connecticut, I woke one morning to hear on the news about a bridge collapse in nearby Greenwich.  From Wikipedia:

 

The Mianus River Bridge carries Interstate 95 over the Mianus River in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, Connecticut. The bridge suffered a 1983 collapse, killing several motorists.  The bridge had a 100-foot (30.5 m) section of its deck of its northbound span collapse on June 28, 1983. Three people were killed when their vehicles fell with the bridge into the Mianus River 70 feet (21.3 m) below, and three were seriously injured.

 

Now the urban legend I always heard growing up is this: when people realized what had happened they stopped and did their best to wave down other oncoming cars to make them to stop before they plummeted off to their deaths.  Most stopped but supposedly one car ignored these warnings and the driver and passengers were said to be seen flipping the bird at stunned bystanders as they sailed off into the darkness on that humid June morning.

 

Now that I’ve probably bummed you out, you may well be asking what does this grim tale have to do with yoga?  I’ll tell you.

 

I’ve often said to students in my classes that I see a yoga class – specifically the Power Vinyasa Flow classes I teach – as being similar to driving on a highway.  There is the highway itself that is the class and sequence the teacher has laid out or will lay out over the course of the class.  Along the way there are instructions for the best and safest travel along this route;  this would be the alignment of the postures.

 

Some will go at the pace of what is being instructed, others may move slightly faster and others slower while some may even come to a complete stop in rest; these are the travel, fast lane and slow lanes of the highway respectively.  And then there are those who will ignore the speed limits, warning signs and go at an unsafe pace and sail off the edge into oblivion due to their choice of not listening to the instructions given or heed the warnings.

 

The alignment of yoga poses is critical to the safety, health and prolonged life of the student and all in the class.  Without it we can become uncomfortable or worse: we can become injured permanently or in such a way that will take a long period to recover and therefore dissuade us from ever traveling down this road again.

 

The crux of this is the teacher.

 

A good teacher can not only inspire strength, confidence and miracles from a student but also see and instruct where improper alignment can bring pain and injury.  I have a good friend who suffers from back pain that I have repeatedly pleaded with to try out yoga in order to heal this pain and prevent further injury or worse – unnecessary surgery.  “No way!” he says for he is a fiery, emphatic individual with very set ideas about things, “Yoga messed up my mom’s back.  I’m not doing yoga.”

 

To which I reply with three points:

1)  You are not you mom and your mom’s back is not yours.

2)  Your mom’s back wasn’t injured by yoga but by an inexperienced instructor who gave poor alignment instruction that led to injury.

3)  3,500 years of yoga and millions of practitioners worldwide are free from the pain you suffer because of the proper treatment and instruction they received from a qualified yoga instructor.

 

Sadly, I have been in classes where the teacher so inexperienced that not only was the class uninspired, boring and left me more agitated than relaxed, but the teacher missed several instances of improper alignment that led to injuries to their students.  Personally as a teacher, I find this horrifying because of how crucial proper alignment is to a yoga practice. Otherwise it is simply dangerous exercise.  In several classes I’ve attended at local studios, the teacher practices up front while giving instructions in the poses.  How can they help the students in need when they themselves are practicing at the same time?  To go back to the car analogy, it’s like trying to teach someone to drive by saying, “I’m getting in this Porsche, you get in that ’88 Chevy Celebrity and I’ll teach you to drive.  Just follow what I do and listen to me over the roar of your own motor.”

 

In that style of teaching, the risk of laissez-faire practice among inexperienced teachers and students runs the risk of all yoga becoming a free-for-all where the discipline of the practice is lost to the misguided concept of “just do what feels right for your body.”  Some could take this edict to extremes:

“What feels right for my body is to eat a bag of double-stuff Oreo’s.”

“What feels right to my body is to have sex with many unsuitable partners.”

“What feels right for my body is to drink myself to sleep every night.”

“What feels right for my body?  Heroin!”

 

Now, you could take my comparing bad alignment to irresponsible drivers, sex and drug addiction to mean that I’m some sort of alignment fascist interested only in seeing people doing yoga exactly as it looks in a book.

 

You could not be more wrong.

 

Rigidity in regards to alignment is just as bad as rigidity in religious or political views.  Without some flexibility there comes a massive danger of losing the mental relaxation of the practice and turning the pursuit of proper alignment into the desire for perfect alignment which in turn becomes yet another obsessive compulsion in our lives.  The relentless pursuit of orthodox, “perfect” alignment becomes another instance where we burden ourselves with yet another place to overanalyze ourselves and lose the joyful experience of a yoga practice.

In the style of yoga that we practice at the studio is co-own with my wife, Portland Power Yoga, we pursue safe alignment with regards to the individual student.  For instance, a newer student needs to be guided into the practice slowly and carefully, be shown the basics and know that there’s a way to do a pose which brings strength and freedom (proper alignment) or a way to do it that doesn’t build strength or flexibility, brings pain and eventual injury (improper alignment).  I like to use something my brother used to say to his kids when they didn’t want to do something he asked them to:

“There’s my way and then there’s the way with tears.”

 

I’ve never brought a student to tears with my corrections.  But I have brought them tears of joy from showing them the beauty of this practice.

 

At our studio, teachers and class assistants are trained to see alignment issues as they arise and correct them to the degree they need it.  This may be as simple as a gentle hand at someone’s shoulder showing them where they are striving and straining or it may be a lift in bow pose to allow them into a deeper back bend they are capable of.

 

Some see our large classes and shudder, thinking that one teacher and one assistant cannot possibly be aware of every student in the room and keep them free from injury.  Come take a class with me and I will show you that’s not the case.  Ask the students who I gently call to from across the room to make a hairline adjustment that works wonders for their practice.  Ask the people who feel an assistants hand on them from out of nowhere, gently, lovingly and carefully moving them into grace and ease within a pose.  I think you’ll find the reality is quite different from your concept of what a class can be like.

 

In closing, there’s a saying to the effect that “Yoga is a journey with no destination.”  Along this way there are many short stops, bad roads, rough spots and unforeseen obstacles.  We can choose to ignore them at our own peril.  Or we can choose to travel the safer roads where the signs are clear and the guidance is safe, leading us on a powerful transformative journey.

 

Namaste!

 

- Charles Terhune