dan's yoga blog

notes on ny times yoga article

2009-01-04T07:52:00.000-08:00

The NY Times had one of its periodic articles on yoga yesterday. It
was called something like "Enlightenment with Rubber Ducky", and it
made the radical point that -- gasp -- many yoga teachers in the US
take a non-traditional, almost modern approach to teaching yoga.
Teachers talk about their own life experiences, they have studnets
chang bon jovi lyrics, and they'll even use props, like the titular
rubber ducky.

Seriously, this article could have been written in 1985, and maybe
1975. Yoga teachers in the west don't think of themselves as gurus
leading their students on the path to enlightenment. There might be a
few such genuine types -- Dharma Mittra ini New York being one example
-- but most of the ones who offer the path to enlightenment are for
the most part bullshit artists.

No, the vast, vast majority of people doing yoga in the US are not on
some path to enlightenment. We're doing something that's good for us,
that will better us in physical, mental, and maybe even spiritual
ways, but seriously, enlightenment? Who are they kidding?

And the fact that some yoga teachers "aren't so serious" and even
allow a little humor into their classes, that isn't much of a
revalation, is it? Every teacher has his or her own style, and I
think our culture in the US encourages people to realize their own
personalities in their work. And as any NYC yoga teacher knows, too
much seriousness and you won't have many students after a while.
People in nyc are overscheduled, overstressed, and are often looking
to their yoga class as a way to get away from all that. Too much
discipline and you're left with just a few hardcore types.

The Warrior 2 Family of Poses

2008-07-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

The poses in the Warrior 2 Family all have the torso and the hips facing the side of the mat as much as possible. As in Warrior 2, the front foot is generally facing forward, and the back foot facing the side, and the head is generally turned to face one side or another. Here are the main Warrior 2 family poses.

Virabadrasana 2 / Warrior 2

This pose is stranger and harder than post people realize. I've been doing yoga for 14 years, and I'm still working on my Warrior 2. As with Warrior 1, the reason these became essential poses is because they are so complex.

Let's be clear -- almost no one can bring their hips facing the side 100%. You have to have crazy external rotation openness in the front hip to fully square the hips to the side. Think about it this way -- stand on one leg, and bend the lifted knee deeply. Now, bring this knee out to the side. Can you bring the knee all the way to the side, fully 90 degrees from the front? Almost no one can. Now in Warrior 2, the knee is definitely to the front -- so what happens is that the back hip comes forward a little. And maybe a lot. And we're always working on getting that hip back. But remember to keep the front knee over the foot -- don't twist at the knee trying to open the hips more.

Since we internally rotate the thighs on Warrior 1 family poses, it's no surprise that we externally rotate the thighs in Warrior 2 family poses. We do it without thinking, when we open the hips moving into Warrior 2 from Warrior 1. But when you're in the pose, there's a more subtle external rotation going on, one that you can really work on.

It's really only the front leg that needs to externally rotate a lot in this pose. Because that foot is facing directly to the side, right? The back foot is facing almost the same direction as the torso and hips, so external rotation is no so important here. (But I think it doesn't hurt to externally rotate it a little.)

When you're in Warrior 2, front knee bent deeply, you might think, "dude, how on earth do I externally rotate my thigh while I have so much weight on it?" There are a couple ways to think about this. First, think of the sit bone on that side, try to think of "tucking it under". This may make sense to you, or it may not.

Another trick to find the external rotation that I really like I got from the same Shiva Rea DVD where I first heard about the "families" of poses. She talked about "Pada Bhanda", which i guess means "foot bhanda" or "foot lock". To find Pada Bhanda in Warrior 2. try to energetically rotate the front foot, bringing the heel towards the center, the pinky toe towards the outside. (If you have the right foot forward, think of "dialing" or "spinning" the foot clockwise; if the left foot is forward, think of dialing or spinning the foot counter-clockwise. Because the foot is on the sticky mat with all that weight on it, it won't move, but you will almost certainly feel a rotation of the thigh, and you'll feel that front sit bone tucking under.

There are other important things going on in Warrior 2, but I'll save those for another time. Now let's get tosome other poses in the family, and we'll see what they have in common.

Trikonasana / Triange

I always like to bring people into triangle from Warrior 2, because the feet, legs, and pelvis are then already in correct alignment. You straighten the front leg, but you maintain the orientation of legs, feet and pelvis. And the other big family trait you keep in trikonasana is strong external rotation of the front thigh. This external rotation really, really makes a difference in this pose, and it's actually easier to access in Triangle than it is in Warrior 2.

You can do Pada Banda in Triangle just as you do in Warrior 2 -- "dial" the front foot clockwise if it's the right foot, "dial" it counter-clockwise if it's the left foot. In this pose you're really feel the thigh rotate when you do this trick with the foot, and you'll feel the sitbone tuck under.

Another nice thing to do in this pose to find the external rotation once you're in the pose is to use your hand to assist the rotation. Take the top arm behind the back and reach the hand to the top of the front thigh. Then just use the hand to try to rotate the thigh externally. And at the same time, try to tuck the front sitbone under, squaring your hips more to the side. In addition to rotating your thigh, this little trick helps you open the torso to the side as well.

(Side note -- since almost no one can fully square their hips to the side in warrior 2 or trikonasana, almost everyone is doing a bit of a twist in this pose. Because the shoulders generally are squared to the side, and if the shoulders are squared and the hips are not, there's a twist there somewhere. But for some reason, no one ever seems to talk about the twist in Trikonasana.)

Parsvakonasana / Side Angle Pose

Side angle pose is pretty much what you get when you cross Trikonasana and Warrior 2, so it's no surprise they're in the same pose family. You can get get into side angle from either Trikonasana or Warrior 2, among other ways We usually go into it from Warrior 2 -- moving the front arm forward and then down to move into the pose. But you can just as easily get into side angle from Trikonasana -- all you need to do is bend the front knee, and you're right there.

Since the knee is bent in Side Angle, as in Warrior 2, it's harder to access the external rotation of the thigh than it is in trikonasana. You can do the Pada Bhanda trick in this pose, as in the others, to help you find the rotation. You can also do the trick with the top arm grabbing the thigh, as in Trikonasana, although it's a little harder to get since the body is more in the way in Side Angle.

Arda Chandrasana / Half Moon Pose

Arda Chandrasana is one of my favorite poses. A great way to think of this pose involves rotating your perspective 90 degrees. Think of your torso, pelvis, head, neck, and standing leg as all in nice simple, basic alignment, as if you were standing. Except you're standing sideways, with one leg completely out to the side. As it turns out, you're actually standing on that leg out to the side, but the rest of your body should be in alignment as if you were standing upright on an invisible wall underneath the lifted foot.

It's worth running with this mental image a little. In fact, think of yourself standing upright on the actual ground, perpendicular to a wall. You take the leg on the side facing the wall, and lift it straight out to the side pressed into the wall, with the toes pointed straight up. There's your alignment in this pose.

Unfortunately most of us can't really bring our leg out directly to the side lifted at hip level. Lord knows I can't. So in Arda Chandrasana, our top pelvis isn't really perpendicular to the floor (most of us, that is). But what we're working towards is getting it as perpendicular as we can. And once again, external rotation of the thigh is the key to this for most of us.

In Arda Chandrasana, you can also try to access Pada Bhanda, energetically rotating your foot outwards. It's possible, but difficult, to do the manual rotation of the bottom thigh with your top hand. It's hard because you're balancing, right? And if you're not balancing, you've probably got your back against a wall. But if you've got good balance, you can reach for the bottom thigh with the top hand. You can also start in side angle with the top hand on the thigh, and then move into arda chandrasana keeping the hand there. But this is pretty difficult to do, so I would just try to work with the Pada Bhanda trick.

That's all I have for now on the warrior 2 poses. There will be more to come, for sure.

Warrior 1 Family, uh, Cousins

2008-07-03T20:51:00.001-07:00

Before I get to the Warrior 2 "Family" of poses, I thought I should mention a couple additional poses that might be considered distant relatives in the Warrior 1 family.

I think what really distinguishes the Warrior 1 family is that the torso and hips are facing the front of the mat as much as possible. So, here are a couple more poses that "square the hips to the front".

Hanuman Asana / Split Pose

I was doing this today, and it occurred to me that I was internally rotating my thighs to try to get my hips to face the front as much as possible. A-ha, this must be a Warrior 1 Family Pose too! And sure enough, you're trying to bring the hip of the leg extended forward back, and the hip of the leg extended backwards to the front. Just like in Warrior 1. And I do think that the internal rotation of the hips, even here, helps to square the hips to the front.

Virabadrasana 3 / Warrior 3

In this pose, you're trying to level your pelvis parallel with the floor, not with the front of the mat. But, since your torso is facing the floor, the floor can be considered the "front" in this pose. What's really of note here is that internal rotation of the standing thigh is absolutely essential to bringing the other side of the pelvis to face the floor. If you externally rotate the standing leg, the hip of the lifted leg lifts, eventually bringing you into Arda Chandrasana/Half Moon. (Which, of course, is a Warrior 2 pose -- hips and torso facing the side of the mat.)

Parivritta Arda Chandrasana / Rotated Half Moon

Rotated Half Moon Pose is actually more like rotated Warrior 3. Your pelvis is facing the floor, and the lifted leg is straight back. But in this pose you rotate the spine to make the shoulders as perpendicular to the floor as you can, facing the side of the standing leg. This pose should be considered Warrior 1 family, if distant, because the pelvis is squaring to the "front" (the floor, actually). And sure enough, internal rotation of the thighs, especially the standing leg, is essential to this pose.

Of course there must be more, there are so many poses, but these are some of the basic ones. Remember, when the hips/torso are facing the front, the hip of the front leg moves backward, and the hip of the back leg moves forward. And internally rotating the thighs is a good way to move in that direction.

The Warrior 1 Family of Poses

2008-06-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

As I noted in the last post, you can speak of the Warrior 1 and Warrior 2 "Families" of poses. I do this a lot when I teach class, I think it's really useful. You can extend your knowledge and insight and intuition from one pose to a related pose. For instance, if I'm in parsvatanasana, I can think of the things I do in Warrior 1 to improve my experience in that pose, and I can try to apply them to parsvatanasana, a pose in the Warrior 1 family.

Without further ado, here are the main poses in the Warrior 1 Family:

Virabadrasana 1 / Warrior 1
Parsvatanasana / Intense Side Stretch a.k.a. Pyramid Pose
Parivritta Trikonasana / Rotated Triangle
Parivritta Parsvakonasana / Rotated Side Angle

There are of course variations of all these, and other more advanced or obscure poses that might be considered part of the Warrior 1 Family. But these will do for now, since most of us do these poses all the time.

The most basic thing these poses share is that the pelvis is squared to the front as much as possible. All of them, except Rotated Side Angle, are generally done with the back heel down as well. You can do Rotated Side Angle with that heel down as well, which probably makes it a bit more like the others.

Here are the things I like to think about in the Warrior 1 Family of poses.

1) The biggest thing, that every teacher says every time -- square your pelvis to the front, bringing the hip of the front leg back, and the hip of the back leg forward as much as you can. For most of these poses it's even more helpful to think of bringing the front sitbone back, and the back sitbone forward. This is especially true in the forward bending variations -- Parsvatanasana and Rotated Triangle.

2) You actually want to push away from your front foot, almost like you were trying to slide it forward on your sticky mat. This will bring the hip/sitbone on that side back.

3) At the same time, you want to push away from your back foot, as if trying to slide it back on the mat. This will help bring the hip/sitbone on that side forward. Part of this action of pushing back on the back foot is pushing the outside of the foot into the ground. This also involves internal rotation of the thigh, which is number (5) below.

4) Combining (2) and (3), it's like your trying to slide your feet apart from each other. (Don't try too hard, because surely it's possible, and then you'll fall down. It's an energetic thing -- you put as much energy into the action as is reasonable to get the action you're trying to get in the alignment of your pelvis.)

5) Internally rotate both thighs. This is a subtle thing, and it's effect is subtle, but it's important, especially as you get more advanced in your practice. By internally rotating your thighs, you almost inevitably square your pelvis more to the front.

Getting to Know Internal Rotation of the Thighs

I highly recommend experimenting with this internal rotation of the thighs. Use your hands even. Just stand with your feet in Warrior 1 position, both legs straight. Take one hand to each thigh. Start by externally rotating each thigh. What happens? Your pelvis moves to face the side more. Then internally rotate each thigh? What happens? Your pelvis moves to face the front more. When you do it like this, standing with straight legs, it's really, really obvious the effect. It's a little more subtle when you've got the bent knee in front and a lot of weight on it, but it's really important nonetheless.

That's probably enough for now. I will also discuss each of these poses in more detail separately at some later point. Stay tuned!

The Warrior 1 and Warrior 2 "Families" of Poses

2008-06-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a concept that I like a lot, that I use all the time in my classes. I have never heard a teacher in class mention this -- I got it from a Shiva Rea DVD. I did take one class from Shiva Rea in Santa Monica, but it didn't come up.

So she mentions certain poses belonging to either the Warrior 1 or Warrior 2 "Families" of poses. I'm pretty sure this refers to just standing poses.

I really like thinking of the poses this way, because it helps you see what the poses have in common. And you can transfer things you know or do or think or whatever from one pose to the other. For instance, in Warrior 1 I push the sitbone of the front leg back. I do the same in Parsvatanasana, a member of that family.

The split is incredibly obvious. Warrior 1 Family poses all have your hips facing the front of the mat, as much as possible. The Warrior 2 Family poses all have your hips facing the side of the mat, again, as much as possible.

I'm going to do separate posts on each of the families, talking about the things the members of the families have in common. But quickly, I'll mention the basic poses that fall in each family. Of course there are variations and obscure poses that I won't mention, but these are the ones that we do over and over.

Warrior 1 Family
-- Virabadrasana 1 / Warrior 1
-- Parsvatanasana / Pyramid Pose
-- Parivritta Trikonasana / Rotated Triangle
-- Parivritta Parsvakonasana / Rotated Side Angle

Warrior 2 Family
-- Virabadrasana 2 / Warrior 2
-- Trikonasana / Triangle
-- Parsvakonasana / Side Angle
-- Arda Chandrasana / Half Moon

How I was reminded of two key yoga principles in spinning class

2008-04-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't been taking my yoga very seriously while here in Buenos Aires the last four months. I've been leading a small class two or three times a week, practicing at the same time, but that's been pretty much it. Nothing wrong with that, after 14 years you're allowed to take a break now and then.

But I was nicely reminded of two of the most important components of the yoga practice recently in spinning class, of all places. And I was reminded of these principles because I was using them, with great seriousness, during the hardest parts of the class.

For those who don't know, spinning class is a led class of station bicycle riding. At first it sounds crazy, like why would you need someone to lead you in riding a stationary bicycle, right? Well, what they do for the most part is run you through interval training -- you tend to do sets of a few minutes, each set reaching a pretty high level of cardio-vascular intensity, and you rest briefly between sets. And as a lifelong cyclist, I can say that I never, ever, ever do this kind of training on my own. It's just so not fun. But it turns out it feels great, and it's no doubt really, really good for your cardio-vascular health. I have come to really love spinning class, and I think it will help my "real" cycling dramatically when I get back to New York.

Now, how was I using these yoga principles in spinning class? And which principles were they anyway?

At the end of some of the intervals, the teacher has you sprint for 15, 20, or 30 seconds. (I love how they say "esprint" in spanish!) In this context, sprinting means maximum possible output, pedaling as fast and as hard as you can. And trust me, this is hard. So I found myself during these sprints staring with great focus at a single spot on the floor ahead of me for the entire sprint, and focusing all my attention on inhaling as deeply and exhaling as thoroughly as I could. And also, to keep my rational mind quiet, I usually count my breaths during these "esprints".

So, the two yoga principles I have been using are the drishti, and focus on the breath.

Drishti is the gaze, and when performing yoga poses, you are supposed to maintain a fixed, though soft gaze. The fixed gaze is said to help calm and focus the mind. And without thinking about it, this is what I've been doing in the esprint.

Focus on the breath, well, that's yoga principle number one for many people. Somehow, it seems, by focusing on the breath, the body is more free to do its thing, whether that's release more completely into a stretch, or pump out its maximum output during an esprint. I think Kundalini yoga in particular uses a focused, forceful breath to allow you to push your body very hard through the repetitive exercises in that practice.

Happily, utilizing these two principles, or components of the practice, or whatever we want to call them, does seem to help me perform -- even in spinning class. So of course I've been thinking of how these two principles can be more generally applied in life.

I think just about anytime at all during your day you can try to fix your gaze, to limit the quick eye movements that we all do naturally, and this may help you focus, and may help you calm the mind.

Similarly with breathing, I think anytime at all you can focus on the breath and this will help steady your body and mind. But I think perhaps a focus on the breathing is especially useful whenever you're in a situation where the body, or the mind, is under some stress. You may be in a 30 second "esprint", or you may be preparing to go into your boss' office to tell him you didn't finish your project on time, or you may be waiting at the door for your blind date to show up. In situations like these, focusing your attention on the breath can have a steadying effect, I'd suspect.

I love how you can apply things from your yoga practice to improve your day-to-day life. As I often say in my classes, yoga is sometimes like a little laboratory for life. You take what you learn in yoga class and apply it in life. And two of the biggest ones for me are fixing the gaze, and focusing on the breath, especially in those situations where focus and determination are important.

Like the "esprint" in spinning class!

Now, as a final aside, I might note that these two principles -- drishti and focus on the breath -- are every bit as much part of meditation as they are part of yoga, perhaps more so. But, ah, the relationship between yoga and meditation, I think I'll leave that for another day.

Trikonasana/Triangle Pose

2008-02-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

Triangle pose is one of the more interesting and complex of the common poses. It's thought of as a beginner pose, because pretty much everyone can do it to some extent. But even after years and years of doing trikonasana, I'm still figuring things out about it.

When they first start doing Trikonasana, most people think of it as a side bend, because they feel the side stretch on the top side the most. And sure, it is a side stretch. But then, teachers will tell you to extend the bottom side of the torso as much as the top side. This can be pretty confusing the first time you hear it -- obviously you're compressing the bottom side of the torso, and lengthening the top side. But the instruction should be this -- you TRY to extend the bottom side as much as the top side. In other words, you're trying to make your whole torso as parallel to the floor on both sides as possible. And at the same time, you're trying to make your pelvis as perpendicular to the floor as possible -- as if you were lying on your side. This is pretty much never going to happen for just about everyone, but that's OK -- what's important is your intention, the effort you make towards the goal.

So my revelation after a dozen years or so of doing Trikonasana is that what's really important in the pose is what's happening at the hip joint of the forward leg. I think the way to really take your Trikonasana places is to think only of what's happening at this joint, and pretty much ignore the rest.

Here's an image to consider. Imagine that instead of your torso heading towards parallel to the floor, you are maintaining it upright. If you replicate the torso/leg relationship (i.e. the action at the hip joint) with your torso in the upright position, where would your front leg be? Why, straight out to the side, lifted way up, with your foot up somewhere near shoulder or head level. Think of a ballet dancer standing on one leg, with the other leg straight and held up by the ankle out to the side. Note that her spine is totally straight, pelvis totally perpendicular to the spine. It's all flexion at the hip joint.

So the real action of trikonasana is a leg flexion of the front leg, completely to the side. It's like a hamstring stretch straight out to the side with your leg externally rotated as much as possible.

OK, I know this is all pretty abstract -- that's just how I am. I have to abstract things first, then come back to the real, practical world. So to get practical, here are some steps to follow for trikonasana.

1. First of all, there is no correct distance to spread your legs. And there's no reason to always have your legs the same distance apart. Try three feet apart one day, five feet apart the next day. The two poses will be very different. Neither is "right", they are just different.

2. Really, really externally rotate your front thigh as much as possible. You can even bring your top hand behind your back, grab the front of your thigh, and rotate it outwards. While you are rotating your thigh outwards, think of tucking your bottom/front sit-bone underneath you as much as possible.

3. Here's the most important thing -- push the bottom sit-bone back in space, towards the back of your mat, as much as possible. Here is where you think of making your whole spine as parallel to the floor to the floor as possible, and your pelvis as perpendicular to the floor as possible. Remember -- lying on your side.

Note -- by pushing the sit bone towards the back, you should feel the stretch in the hamstring increase. This is what you want. Your hamstring flexibility (unless you are a Gumby) should be the limiting factor in how far you can tilt your pelvis onto its side. If you can't get a hamstring stretch in this pose, you should experiment with lengthening the distance between the feet. If you still can't get a hamstring stretch, count your blessings.

4. Don't worry about where your hand is. Everyone is so goal-oriented in yoga, which is fine, except they choose the wrong goals. Bringing your hand to the floor is not the goal in trikonasana. Getting your spine parallel to the floor, and your pelvis perpendicular to the floor is your goal. Getting the hand to the floor may just mean that your're curving your spine to the side a lot.

Mind you, it's not the worst thing to curve the spine -- we all do it to some extend. And you do get the side stretch on the top side. But there are better ways to get a side stretch, and besides, what's really powerful and unique in the triangle pose is the sideways leg flexion in the front leg.

So, give it a try. Just focus on the hip joint of the front leg, trying to get as much of a stretch of all the muscles there as you can. Don't worry about the hands, the side stretch. It's all in the hips, baby.

My favorite standing forward bend

2008-02-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

I like doing standing forward bends. For the whole time I have been doing yoga -- 14 years, I think -- I have much, much preferred uttanasana (standing forward bend) to pachimottanasana (seated forward bend). You are essentially doing the same stretch, but for me it is much more comfortable. The two main advantages that come to mind are (a) in uttanasana, you've got gravity pulling your torso towards the floor, which helps elongate the spine, and (b) because the weight of your torso is not pushing your pelvis into the floor, it's easier to rotate the top of the pelvis forward, thereby lengthening the backs of the legs, which is what you're trying to do in both of these poses.

And in fact, I think (a), the weight of the body also pulls at the pelvis encouraging the rotation that you're trying to do. Of course it's possible to do the same rotation in pachimottanasana, but it's just not as natural, not as easy.

Now, to my favorite version of the standing forward bend. Anyone who's taken my class a few times has probably done this with me. In this version, you stand in tadasana (mountain pose) with your heels 8-16 inches away from a wall, with good alignment in feed and legs. Then you lean your butt back onto the wall. Then, you come to a flat back, tryiing to get as much stretch as possible in the legs, before you round and stretch the back. And then, in this position, you bring hands to the wall, and push off just a half-inch or so and try to move your sit bones up the wall as far as you can. This tilts your pelvis forward even more, bringing as much stretch as possible into the legs. Then you go ahead and round the back, and relax into this pose.

One thing that's interesting about this variation, is that with your legs out like this you're effectively doing the standing forward bend with your feet somewhat pointed. (How pointed depends on how far away from the wall your feet are. This is a choice you have to make when you're doing the pose.) By pointing the feet, your relaxing the calf muscles, which in a leg flexion position like pachimottansana pull on the hamstrings, making the stretch harder.

This is one of the ways in which I'm somewhat of a yoga heretic -- I totally believe in doing hamstring stretch with toes pointed as well as with feet flexed. I don't just think that one's "easier", I think they're different, I think they stretch the hamstrings differently. I always encourage people to experiment with this.

I was doing this variation of pachimottanasana today, thinking about what makes it so great. One of the best things, i realized, is that since you're leaning your weight into the wall, you don't have to work to keep your balance. You're just kind of falling into the wall. So in this position you can relax all the muscles of your legs and torso much more than you can if you need to maintain your balance. It's a nice, gentle, slow forward bend, and I often hold this for quite a while, maybe two or three minutes.

Give it a try, let me know if you like it.

Nice article in Salon -- "Why I Hate Partner Yoga"

2008-01-24T19:31:00.000-08:00

Salon published a nice article called "Why I Hate Partner Yoga" which sums up a lot of the quandries a lot of us have about yoga and what it is, why we do it, and what we hope to get out of it. Here's the link.

First of all, I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, I think it's kind of hilarious that everyone is always talking about what yoga is and isn't. I try to stay above the fray, and rather disdain many of the upper-middle-class americans who've been doing yoga a few years who are certain that they kinow what real yoga is. But in the end, if you're going to do yoga, and especially if you're going to teach it, you have to have a pretty good inkling of just what 'it' is that you're doing.

I'm not going to go into in too much detail here. I think I'm saving it. So let's start with where the author of this article comes down. Which, by the way, is pretty close to my thinking.

She starts off right away noting her immediate aversion to partnering exercises. Why do you want to be touching a sweaty stranger? She asks one of her teachers, who says: "It's almost a foolproof way of getting people to lighten up, because it gets people out of their minds. It makes them interact."

But, she says, this is exactly what she hates about partner yoga -- the interaction. "Was having my face in dangerous proximity to a stranger's crotch helpful for my meditative state?"

She talks to the guru of one of her teachers, a genuine indian yogi named Dharmanidhi Sarasvati Tantracarya, who founded Mandala yoga, a yoga center that is also a functioning hindu temple. To him, yoga is a part of Hinduism, and most american yoga is a "bastardization of a spiritual practice", as the author puts it.

But the money quote comes from the guru:

"Imagine you go into a Catholic Church and there's something called genuflection, where you go down on one knee," he said. "What if a person comes out of the ceremony -- which is supposed to be about their relationship with God -- and they say, wow, my legs feel a little sore! And they go home and open up a shop and have people do genuflection for an hour to disco music. And partner genuflection, at that! It's completely taking it out of context."

Whoa, this makes you think.

First of all, for years, people have been telling me that yoga is related to hinduism, but independent of it. You can be a hindu without doing yoga, you can do yoga without being a hindu, or perhaps you are a hindu who does yoga.

And I have also heard from many sources that yoga just isn't all that popular in India, the home of hinduism. It may be apocryphal, but I have heard said and seen written several times that more people do yoga in the state of California than in the whole country of India.

But is what people are doing in California (and in New York, and right here in my friend Piper's apartment in Buenos Aires) really yoga?

Fuck, I don't know.

Seems to me, when you have this many reasonable, dedicated, experienced, and generally well-intentioned people who can't agree on something, well, there just isn't really an answer to the question being asked.

It's funny, because I lean more towards the guru's point-of-view than the point of view of most people practicing and teaching yoga in the US these days. I think the emphasis on movement, the flowing vinyasa style that everyone likes so much (and that I've been practicing myself for over a decade, three or four times a week), is mostly a to what you're really trying to do in yoga. It's just something to make yoga palatable.

Likewise, I think partner yoga is a major, major distraction. But, it's also sometimes kind of nice in its own way. The real work of yoga is kind of hard, and not necessarily much fun. So the flowing vinyasa classes (which I previously compared to dancing in a group, not at all a bad thing), and the partnering, and some of the wacky stuff that teachers throw in, they do it just to make yoga palatable. And that's fine. But as you get more experienced and more serious, then you have to start spending more and more of your yoga time of the Serious Business of yoga. Whatever it is you think the Serious Business of yoga is.

I will pretty soon start talking about what I think the serious business of yoga is. Let me just say here that I think you can get more out of spending five minutes in downward facing dog than you can get out of ninety minutes of complicated flowing vinyasa practice. Vinyasa practice is great, it's interesting and requires a lot of focus, but I don't think it allows time for mental subtleties of the practice to take place. On the other hand, if all you're after is some great physical work and the type of mental focus that vinyasa practice requires, than, bingo, that's the perfect yoga for you.

If in fact it's yoga. More later, of course. Meanwhile, read that article in Salon if you have the time.

Limits to Flexibility -- The "Hard Stop"

2008-01-07T06:08:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting things you see in yoga class is that some very experienced and flexible practitioners have particular poses in which they cannot seem to make any progress. The most startling example for me is when very flexible people just can't get any further down in Upavista Konasana, or a seated straddle forward bend.

In this pose, you sitting down with straight legs open wide, and bending forward between thems. For most people, this is much easier than bending forward with the legs together. Almost everyone can flex at the hips more with the legs open. How do you know you're flexing at the hips and not in the back? Think of folding forward with a perfectly flat back and straight legs -- that's a 'pure' flexion in the joint.

I think the joint flexion with legs open is greater mostly because the hip socket is typically more open when the leg is out to the side a bit. Though surely soft tissue (muscles, tendons, and ligaments) are involved as well.

As I said before, most people feel much more open at the hips, much more able to move forward in Upavista Konasana than in Paschimotanasana. But then certain people, including some very flexible people, can hardly move forward at all. And some of these people have been trying for years. I ask them about it, and it doesn't seem to them like it's a question of muscle flexibility -- i.e. it doesn't feel like something they just need to stretch. Instead, it feels more like what I call a "hard stop" -- hitting some kind of firm boundary where there's just no going any further.

By the way, 'hard stop' is a term I came up with, so you probably won't hear it anywhere else.

For me, a hard stop is when your range of flexibility is limited by either joint mobility or ligament. Think of the hip joint. It's a ball-and-socket joint, and very, very snug. This joint is amazing, it supports all our weight all day every day. The thigh bone has the ball inside the joint, and then a long straight bone coming out from there (simplifying quite a bit -- there's also a little branch coming off to the side, I think the lesser trocanter.) The ball sits in the socket, which is like a cup. What's important for "hard" flexibility is the shape of the cup. If the thigh bone hits the edge of the cup, that's it, it's not going any further. Period. Any further movement of the thigh just moves the cup, or the pelvis. (And chances are it's not going to move too far.) This is the best example of a "hard stop".

I used to think that the problem that some people have in upavista konasana was in the shape of the hip socket, that for these people bone was hitting bone, and that was that. But then I noticed that some of these people can do baddha konasana just fine. It seems to me that the relation of thigh bone to pelvis is pretty much exactly the same in the two poses, so it seems that the bone-on-bone 'stop' is not happening for people with very different flexibility in these two poses. Instead, it's probably some ligament in the thigh. This is something I need to research more. (Sorry! Tthis isn't meant to be authoritative. It's a blog, after all, not a textbook.) If anyone has any ideas on this, please post a comment.

There aren't that many examples of hard stops that I can think of. For me, I get a pretty dramatic hard stop when lying on my back and bringing one or both knees into the chest. I bring the knee up to a point, flexing entirely in the hip joint, and then there is a point at which it won't go any further without bringing the pelvis along. You know when this happens because the tailbone lifts and the low back starts to come along for the ride. We all experience a hard stop when doing a supine twist, lying on our back. You bring one knee up, and start to pull it across the body. For a while the lifted thigh moves entirely in the hip socket. But then at some point the hip socket comes along, you lift that whole side of the pelvis, and you come into the twist. (Note -- there is great variation in the range of motion in the hip socket in this direction. Most men can barely make the center line of the body before the hip lifts up, whereas some women and the occasional man can bring the knee six or eight inches across the body with the pelvis still totally level on the ground.)

There are other obvious hard stops having to do with bones. You can only bend you knees or elbows back so far before bone hits bone. Some people have a total hard stop in the ankle joint, in the front -- the bones at the top front of the ankle hit each other (I don't really remember the configuration, but I remember there are a number of bones there!). And when bone hits bone, you're just not going any further without doing some damage.

Most of the other 'stops' in flexibility are 'soft stops'. For instance the arm. The arm socket is very very loose, as you might guess. And there's tons of ligaments and tendons holding things together there. But the ligaments in the shoulder are pretty weak, apparently, and really there are only a few (if I'm not mistaken). So mostly it's tendons and muscles limiting your range of motion. And tendons and muscles stretch. So when you're in down dog, and you're trying to drop your chest forward through your arms (in effect bringing your arms back further behind you), it doesn't feel like a hard stop. It feels like this is something you could probably stretch. And chances are, it is. Though of course take care -- it's very easy to strain a tendon in the shoulder. In fact, this is I think the most common musculo-skeletal injury that medical types face, shoulder injuries, most of which are strained tendons. (I know -- I have a long-lingering mild tendonitis in my right shoulder.)

But ligaments just don't stretch like muscles or tendons, and the bigger and more powerful the ligament, the less it stretches. Ligaments (at least for people over 20 or 25 years old) are very tough, like hard plastic, whereas tendons are a bit softer, like soft plastic. It's not a perfect analogy, but think of ligaments as stretchable as the plastic in a bottle, and tendons as stretchable as the plastic in a six-pack holder. And muscles stretch even more, like big thick rubber bands. (Very thick! It's not that easy to stretch muscles, as we all know.) The ligaments of the hips are really, really strong, as they need to be. As adults we really can't stretch these at all. When we're younger it is possible. Some dancers will stretch their hip ligaments when they're young, to increase their range of motion. And some of these dancers will have some serious back or other physical problems when they get older.

So I think the hard stop is this -- when bone hits bone in the range of motion of a joint, or when you're testing the limits of a ligament, especially one of the powerful ligaments of the big joints.

It seems to me that the idea of the hard stop is anathema to most yoga people. And I understand why. You don't want to approach your yoga practice saying "oh, I can't ever go any further in this pose because that's just the way my body is built." You want to be able to work towards improvement, and you want to believe you can improve.

But I don't agree that everyone should believe that everything is possible. For some people, fine, they can keep striving and not be disappointed when progress is slow or non-existent in certain areas. But for other people, lack of progress can be very discouraging, and can lead to just giving up on yoga (or whatever pursuit.) It's really a matter of mental disposition, and you need to know your own mental disposition. If you're susceptible to discouragement, keeping the concept of the 'hard stop' in mind can be helpful.

Another reason to keep the hard stop in mind is that in yoga there's also the risk of believing a little too strongly in willing your way through everything. The body only will open (or strengthen) so fast (if at all), and if you don't respect the limits of that opening or strengthening, you risk hurting yourself by forcing yourself too far into a pose. Here you risk tearing tendons, tearing muscles, or straining ligaments. (You could tear a ligament I suppose, but muscles and tendons usually go first.)

There's this condition that yoga people in New York refer to as "Yoga Butt". You have a long, lingering pain at the bottom of your butt. And guess what, it's hamstring tendonitis, almost certainly, caused by trying too hard to stretch the hamstrings. I had it about six or eight years ago, it lasted about a year. Lots of others I knew had it. Because we were New Yorkers, strivers, we were going to improve. So we pushed ourselves hard in our stretches, and tore our hamstring tendons.

So I like the idea of the hard stop, even if it really doesn't come up that often, because it tells us that, hey, not everything is a matter of will and effort. There are some things that we're not going to improve, because that's just how our bodies are formed. And, as with just about everything in yoga, this is a little microcosm of life. Sometimes will and effort will get us places, and sometimes they won't. This is the oldest of old ideas, and one of the biggest "big issues" in life, but it's something that we americans, and especially we new yorkers need to remind ourselves.

Five Minutes in Downward Facing Dog

2008-01-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

One of the things I'm going to experiment with here in Buenos Aires is holding poses for a very long time. I did this a little bit last year, and found it very intense and interesting.

As my first experiment, I thought I'd hold downward dog for five minutes or so. Turns out five minutes was a good amount of time. Definitely a challenge, but not too great a challenge. I definitely could have held it longer, but didn't feel a need to at this time. Here's how it went.

Holding the pose for this long was much more of a physical challenge than a mental challenge. Mentally, it was great, I had no trouble staying focused. Physically, a few things started to happen. After about two or three minutes, my hands started to tingle. There must have been some nerve impingement in either the shoulders or the wrists. This happens to me bicycling sometimes too, one or both hands will start to tingle a little. After three or four minutes, I started feeling my latissimus dorsi muscles, or lats, the muscles at the outside of the upper back. No surprise here, those muscles are obviously doing a lot of work holding the body up. This was my biggest limitation in the pose, probably the only thing that would keep me from doing it for 12 or 15 minutes.

In addition to challenges, holding the pose for a long time produces some interesting benefits. There are some yoga people who say that the muscles only really let go after being stretched for three minutes. And indeed, I felt the backs of my legs, in particular the calves and maybe even the achilles tendon, relax and let go as I held the pose longer. I didn't push at all, no pedaling the feet or anything, but after three minutes or so I definitely felt more of an ease in the stretch of the back of the leg, especially the lower leg.

I'll be trying this experiment with a bunch of poses, and will report here any interesting results.

One thing I like about Bikram Yoga

2007-12-28T20:05:00.000-08:00

One of the things I most wonder about in yoga as we practice it here in the US is all the emphasis that teachers place on keeping the shoulders down in all poses. I've written about this before.
It doesn't make sense to me. When reaching overhead, the shoulders naturally come up. Reach for something on a high shelf, the shoulder comes up. It seems to me this is the way the shoulder is meant to work when reaching overhead. This is our natural range of motion. Everywhere else in yoga we try to maximize our range of motion, but by keeping the shoulders down when we reach overhead, we're limiting the range of motion in the shoulders and arms.

Anyway, in Bikram yoga, there are a few poses where you keep the arms raised overhead, fingers interlaced. And they say shoulders up, arms straight, squeeze your ears with your arms. Mind you, I think they do lots and lots of things wrong in Bikram, but this is one thing that I really they do right.

My Favorite Twist -- The "Fire Hydrant Twist"

2007-12-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

Twisting is one of the more complicated things we do in yoga. There's always a lot going on, especially in complicated twists like arda matsyendrasana or twisted marichi asana.

I look at people doing arda matsyendrasana (seated spinal twist) and just cringe sometimes. Teachers will always say 'make sure both seatbones are on the floor', and, really, almost no one's sitbones are both on the floor. It's just very hard to do this when tucking one leg under and crossing the other in front over the top. So pretty much no one's pelvis is level, and worse, most people aren't sitting up straight, they're rounding the back quite a bit.

I think the best way to find a deep twist while keeping the pelvis level and the spine straight is what I call the "Fire Hydrant Twist". I adopted this name because I frequently do this twist on the street using a fire hydrant. It's actually a twist that they do in Iyengar yoga all the time, only there they tend to use a chair or a stool next to a wall. But a fire hydrant works great, as does a chair, table, or anything about 12-24 inches high. (You should definitely experiment with the heights, to find a height that's comfortable for you.)

Here's what you do. You stand facing the fire hydrant or chair or whatever firm surface you're using. You step one foot onto the firm surface. The knee should be bent substantially, more or less at 90 degrees. All your weight is on the standing leg, and you should feel very stable on that leg. (When you first start to do the pose you often need to adjust where you're standing by an inch or two in one direction or another.) Stand up super-tall, feeling the spine really long and straight.

Place the hand opposite the lifted leg on the outside of the thigh, and rotate the torso. That's it. Use the front hand pushing against the leg to push yourself into the twist. Make sure you don't move the front leg when you're pushing against it. The back arm can be extended straight back (not recommended if you're using a fire hydrant), or wrapped around the back grabbing the front thigh, or just hanging.

Because you're standing, your legs and pelvis are really stable, and so all the twist takes place in the spine and torso. And it's also easy to keep the spine nice and straight as you push yourself into the twist. I think this twist is by far the most controlled twist.

I don't think that all twists need to be this controlled. The body's really complicated, and sometimes we twist it while raising one hip or curving the spine or whatever. But for a controlled twist, it's hard to beat the 'fire hydrant.'

Inner and Outer Rotation of the Thighs and Arms

2007-12-26T18:39:00.000-08:00

Everyone who does yoga with any kind of seriousness has some things that they constantly remind themselves to do or think about as they do yoga. It might be ujaya breathing, it might be tilting the pelvis forward in forward bends, any number of things. My favorite subtle self-adjustments are inner and outer rotations of the arms and legs.

In particular, I think it's really, really helpful to think about inner and outer rotation of the arms and legs in standing poses.

I have a general guideline for this. In the warrior 1 family poses, you rotate both thighs inward. In warrior 2 family poses, you rotate both thighs outwards.

In warrior 1, you're always working to bring the pelvis as square to the front as you can, as parallel to the front of the mat as you can. Internally rotating the legs helps you do this. For me, the back leg rotation has more of an effect, but I think for others the front leg rotation may be as important.

The other warrior 1 family poses, where you're also squaring your hips to the front, are parsvatanasana (sometimes called pyramid pose) and parivritta trikonasana, rotated triangle. Here the thigh inner rotation is revelatory, it can totally change your experience of the pose. I've had several people thank me profusely for this tip in rotated triangle.

Try this yourself in these three poses. Really rotate the thighs inward as you try to bring the back hip forward and the front hip back. Try emphasizing one thigh first, then the other, then try to combine the rotation of both legs.

In the Warrior 2 family poses, the external rotation of the thighs helps you open your hips to the side of the mat. For me, in warrior 2, the internal rotation of the front leg really helps me tuck the front sitbone under. I think about both of these at the same time -- rotate thigh out and tuck sitbone under. As I rotate the back leg I think of also pulling the back hip bone back, trying to make the hips more parallel to the side.

The other Warrior 2 poses where you focus on externally rotating the thighs are trikonasana/triangle, parsvakonasana/side angle, and arda chandrasana/half moon. (Here I mean the half-moon where you're standing on 1 leg with the other parallel to the floor and the arms open wide perpendicular to the floor. There are at least 3 totally different poses called half moon.) All 3 of these poses really benefit from the external rotation. In particular, try it in arda chandrasana. Most people think of pulling the upper hip bone back to open the hips to the side, but it's hard to do this when you're supporting all that weight on 1 leg. But if you think of externally rotating the standing leg, you'll find this is easier to do, and your hips almost magically open up to the side. I don't think the rotation of the upper leg is all that important here, it's much more important what's happening in the supporting leg.

That's basically it. I could go on more, but I don't want to bore anybody.

One thing worth noting is that in Anusara yoga, they call this Inner and Outer Spiral. Anusara drives me a little crazy in its specialized vocabulary -- I think they mean a bit more by inner and outer spiral than I mean by inner and outer rotation. I'm focusing more on the joint, the alighnment of the thigh at the hip joint, of the arm at the shoulder joint. In anusara, they want you to imagine a spiral running all the way down the leg and arm (I think! It's been a while since I studied Anusara.)

The anusara people are onto something. I do think there is more to thigh and arm rotation than what's happening at the joint, but I think focusing on the joint is fine for starters. Most of the power of the rotation happens at the joint -- the rotation of the limb really affects the mobility at the joint. So a focus on the basic inner and outer rotation at the joint is really beneficial, and maybe more accessible than the more obscure anusara-style spirals.

Fixed Sequence Practices

2007-12-24T22:13:00.000-08:00

I have some experience with yoga traditions that use a fixed sequence -- i.e. every class you do, you do the same poses in the same order. I have been taking class at Atmananda, where Jhon Tamayo teaches the Atmananda Sequence. And actually i did my formal teacher training with Jhon T (as he likes to go by), though I had been doing yoga almost ten years at that point so I was very experienced already.

I have also taken a fair number of Bikram yoga classes, which is the so-called 'hot yoga', where you do a fixed sequence in a heated room. I've written about Bikram classes elsewhere in this blog, so I won't go into it too much here. And also I'm somewhat familiar with the Astanga 1st series.

These three yoga traditions -- atmananda, bikram, astanga -- are all pretty physical, and the founders and followers are pretty insisitent about doing exactly the same sequence every time. (Atmananda less than the other two, actually.)

I can see some of the benefits -- you really find your groove, you develop a deep familiarity with the poses and in particular the transitions. But mostly I think these traditions follow a fixed sequence because the founders believe that they have discovered some 'best' way to do yoga. These three guys -- Jhon Tamayo, Bikram Chowdury, and Pattabi Jois, who founded Astanga yoga -- have big egos, and want people to do what they say. So in a way I think the insistence on following a fixed sequence is a control mechanism -- you have to do things the way I think they should be done. This is something I really don't like.

First, as I say over and over, every person is different, both mentally and physically, and what's right for one person is not likely to be right for the next. And I think part of the learning process of yoga is figuring out what works for you, and what you need to work on. If you just show up and do the same poses over and over, you're losing some of that involvement in your own practice. It's too easy.

And truth be told, I'm just not a fan of following in general, of being a follower. People need to make up their own minds about things, lest we be sheep, lest we fall into line and herd the jews into the gas chambers as we're told. (oops, sorry, let that slip out!)

Here's another thing -- I think doing the same sequence over and over is just boring. It's comfortable, familiar, but too much comfort and familiarity is boring, it's lazy. I think we need to keep challenging ourselves, to find some discovery.

Now, granted, you can always work within the same ol' poses that we always do, and find some discoveries there. And that's why I can keep taking the atmananda sequence classes, because I can work with the same old poses. But I think there's a great joy in discovering something new, including a new yoga pose, or, more likely, a new variation of one of the poses you've known and loved.

There's part of me that thinks that the people who insist on doing sequences are just lazy. Because, make no mistake, it's hard to plan a full vinyasa class with new and interesting sequencing of poses. I don't do it so often myself, I usually just kind of wing it. But I know teachers who do these vinyasa classes that require a lot of planning, choreography really. And that is a lot of work, so I can see why some teachers don't want to bother. But I don't think that just concocting a standard class and doing it over and over again forever is the answer.

Maybe I'm most opposed to the ego involved. Yes, honestly, I think that's it. I think it's really, really presumptuous of thse guys to insist that everyone does their sequences of poses over and over, like they've uncovered some great secret. It's just a bunch of yoga poses in an order, with transitioning moves. But each of these guys is certain that their poses, in their order, is the 'right' version. Drives me crazy.

Thoughts on Bikram yoga, part 2

2007-12-17T18:52:00.000-08:00

It's funny, this Bikram yoga really gets under my skin. Meaning, it gets me all worked up. There are definitely aspects of it which I really appreciate, but other aspects just drive me nuts.

In a nutshell, I think the thing that bothers me the most is how so many hundreds, thousands, of yoga teachers have just adopted Bikram's 'my way or the highway' approach. I think one of the greatest attractions of yoga is its scope. There are just so many aspects to it, so much variety available, that it allows the individual teacher and practitioner to find a path that makes the most sense for them. Whereas in Bikram, not only do you do the same poses in every single class, but, good god, all the teachers say the same things. And I think it's just part of the culture, Bikram is very adamant that everything has to be done the way he says.

I think one of the best books on yoga I've read is called The Heart of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar. He's the son of Krishnamacharya, who was the teacher to Iyengar, Pattabi Jois, and others, and is probably more responsible than any other person for yoga's blossoming in recent decades. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in yoga. Now, as it turns out, what I was going to mention isn't actually in The Heart of Yoga, but rather in another book by Desikachar called Health, Healing & Beyond. This book is in no small part a biography of its father; the subtitle is Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya. Both of these books made an impression on me when I was going through my yoga teacher training about three years ago.

Anyway, the most important thing I took away from these books was how Krishnamacharya used to teach and why. Generally he did one-on-one teaching, because he believed that everyone is different, and the yoga they do should be tailored to accommodate their needs and abilities.

This is something I've felt relatively strongly about the whole time I've been teaching, which admittedly is only about three years. Not every pose is suitable for every person. I think the skillful yoga teacher adjusts their classes and their teaching for the people in the room. More importantly, I think perhaps above all else the individual practitioner should be working to understand how their body and mind respond to the different asanas and other things we do in yoga class.

The subtitle of The Heart of Yoga is "Developing a Personal Practice", and I think this is what everyone should be doing to some extent. You have to decide what works best for you, those postures and practices that you respond best to, and that challenge you in suitable ways. Even if you're never going to do yoga at home by yourself, I think you have to make every class a personal practice. You have to do what the teacher says, but I think you have to make it your own somehow, by finding your own areas of focus.

So the Bikram-style emphasis on everyone doing exactly the same thing, exactly the way Bikram says you should do it, that just sits badly with me. And I think it especially rubs me the wrong way because I dislike Bikram himself. It just kills me that all these people just swallow everything he says as gospel. But more on that later.

Thoughts on Bikram yoga, part 1

2007-12-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

I have taken a couple of Bikram yoga classes recently, and feel compelled to try to make some sense of my extremely mixed reactions.

In Bikram classes, you do a fixed sequence of poses in a room that's heated to around a hundred degrees. It's so hot that you gush sweat -- everyone puts two towels down on their mats, and for the men at least, the towels are pretty soaked in sweat by the end. Men never wear shirts, and women tend to wear job bras or some such minimal clothing. All Bikram studios seems more or less the same, they're always carpeted for some reason, and the front of the room is mirrored. The carpeting, combined with the heat and the profuse sweating, results in pretty much every bikram studio smelling totally rank. You get used to it really quickly, but when you walk in the room, oh man.

I'm very non-dogmatic about yoga -- I believe that you have to find the positive aspects of all the many different approaches, the aspects that work for you, your body, and your personality. So I've taken lots of Bikram classes in my day. I used to take it in San Francisco when I would visit my friend Miles there, and I've taken a bunch of classes in LA, including one with Bikram Chowdhury himself. I'll leave my impressions of Bikram until later, but suffice to say that there are aspects of the bikram approach that I like enough to keep me returning to it periodically.

But seriously, there are aspects of the Bikram approach that are just exasperating. The teachers all prattle on and on, very much like Bikram himself. And basically what they're prattling on about is (a) how great Bikram yoga is, and (b) how you should be working harder, harder, harder, harder. They're very much like personal trainers at a gym, except way more verbose. It's all about effort, and how that effort is going to benefit you. It's kind of narcissistic in a way -- dedicate yourself to our type of yoga practice, and you'll be more attractive and healthy and successful and all that. Kind of icky.

But I can live with narcissism -- we're all a little narcissistic. What I really don't like about Bikram is its cultishness. There's a feeling of "our way or the highway," a kind of dismissiveness about pretty much everything that isn't Bikram yoga. There's a 'true believer' quality to the teachers and the regular practitioners. And there does seem to be a little idolatry of Bikram himself, a little slavish devotion. Bikram is given to making some ridiculous proclamations, and these are pretty closely echoed by most of the teachers, as if they're some kind of higher truth. It's creepy.

Now Bikram isn't unique in the yoga world in trying to position himself as a guru, someone whose word should be taken as gospel. But it is a matter of degree, and with Bikram it seems to be taken to a degree further than in, say, Iyengar or Anusara (both of which have cultish aspects) or whatever. But the combination of this kind of icky cultishness with the narcissim and 'results orientation' that they're constantly espousing is especially unappealing to me.

And I should say, it seems to be unappealing to most people with any significant background in any other sort of yoga. Bikram seems to attract newcomers, who might stick with it for quite some time. But it rarely attracts yoga practitioners from other traditions. And, make no mistake, a lot of the beginners who come to Bikram and stick with it for a while, they make some great progress, they really do transform their bodies. And to some extent their minds too -- it really does take some focus and determination to stick with the bikram practice, holding the poses with integrity in that heat. But I think the emphasis in Bikram on push/effort/strength/yang to the exclusion of yield/relaxation/flexibility/yin really turns off most yogis.

It certainly turns me off. But you have to try to find the good aspects of everything, and there are certainly good aspects to the Bikram practice. Plus, I bought a month-long pass at a fund-raiser and I still have two weeks left. So, a few more Bikram classes for me. I will write more about this.

What does it mean to be good at yoga?

2007-12-12T19:04:00.001-08:00

This is an interesting question, one that gets at the heart of what makes yoga interesting and special.

When we think about running, for instance, it's clear what it means to be good -- you run fast or far. Maybe it's a little more complex than that, you run smoothly, elegantly, but basically it's about running fast and far. What does it mean to cook well? You turn out good food, that's pretty much all there is to it. But what does it mean to be good at yoga? If you can do a perfect split, does that mean you're good at yoga? Touch your chest to your thigh in parsvatanasana? Bring your pelvis totally perpendicular to the floor in arda chandrasana?

These things don't necessarily mean you are good at yoga, skilled.

I always think of this friend of mine, she was just born with these wide-open earth mother hips. She could stack her shins perfectly in ankle-to-knee and lay her belly and chest on the ground, and she'd say "is there anything I can do to make this hard?" She could pretty much do the same in full lotus too, and she could do lots of the other flexibility-oriented poses with barely any effort. Does this make her 'good' at yoga?

Turns out she was pretty good at yoga, but she could do those things I mentioned when she first started, before she barely knew what yoga was. She was just blessed with amazing range of motion in her hips, so she could easily do these poses that many very experienced yoga practitioners (including myself) still can't come close to.

So what makes you good at yoga? Where is the skill? Of course, this isn't an easy thing to answer. But still we have to try.

My favorite answer comes from Eric Schiffman, in his book 'Moving into Stillness.' My current definition which follows, comes close to what he says in this book.

What makes the physical practice of yoga so interesting and challenging is that most of the poses involve both flexibility and strength. Or rather, as Schiffman puts it, yield and push. You have to yield to move deeper into the poses, at the same time that you have to push, exert some effort, to get into and hold them. There is a balancing act every time you go into any of the poses, between push and yield, between strength and flexibility, effort and relaxation, etc.

And there is no 'answer' as to how much of each you need in a given pose; each instance of each pose the yogi has to find the balance, the edge. And 'working the edge', as Schiffman puts it, is where most of the real skill in yoga comes from.

Pushing, effort, strength, these are never the full answer to a pose. I get very discouraged with the number of yoga teachers who act like personal trainers, emphasizing effort above all else. But neither is yielding or relaxing more always the answer. Rather, you have to do both, push and yield. And how much of both you do, there's no answer to that either. You must find your own edge, your balance between these two different energies. And that edge is always changing.

So your skill in yoga is understanding this edge, and working with it. Maybe pushing a little more today, if pushing is appropriate for you today. Maybe yielding a little more tomorrow, if tomorrow is right for yielding. Only you know the balance that you need to strike, and finding that balance is not easy, and it requires experience, practice, and focus. There lies the skill in yoga.

Latest theme -- lengthening

2007-11-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

I tried to come up with a theme for my class last week, just to make it a little more serious. So my theme was 'lengthening', finding length in all kinds of different ways in the various asanas. I thought about it quite a bit, and while I think the class was maybe a little slow and boring, I think the theme was actually quite good. I was pleased, I had a yoga teacher in my class, someone just dropping by, and she quite liked my theme and the class. We discussed the way everyone in new york just does the flow style, how hard it is to find an alternative. She said that basically, except for the iyengar institute, everywhere she's been they just do flow classes, and she agreed with me that it can be a deeper, more intense experience when you take the time to explore the poses. (the subject of my last couple poses.)

So back to lengthening. To some extent, we are always having to fight gravity, which is pulling us to the earth, so just the process of standing or sitting up requires active lengthening. And of course we want to stand or sit up straight, so we have to be more consciously lengthening. And similarly, our arms spend most of their lives hanging down at our sides, and our hands grasping at things, so these appendages get pretty used to not lengthening.

I think we all think of yoga as a an opportunity and a mechanism for opening the body. But I think that thinking of that opening as lengthening can be useful. Let me mention a few examples here before I get too tired.

My favorite examples of lengthening, because for me at least they seem to be most useful, is in various backbending poses. The classic is in Sphinx, which is really just a variation of cobra with the elbows on the floor. In this pose, because the forearms and hands are on the floor, we can actively pull the torso forward through the arms. And because our lower body is on the floor and doesn't move so easily, we lengthen the lower spine by this pulling motion in Sphinx. Of course the spine doesn't lengthen much, it doesn't have that much 'play'. But I think it definitely has a little, because I can feel this lengthening. It might be just a few millimeters, but these few millimeters allow me to move a little deeper into the pose. So Sphinx is a good way to access this kind of lengthening in backbending poses.

And we can then find the same sort of length in other backbends. Regular full cobra, with straight arms, works nicely here. although we have to find the length internally more than via the arms. Another pose that's really nicely affected by finding length in the spine is locust pose or shalabasana. In this pose, I think it's important to think of moving the low ribs forward, towards the front of the mat. I think in general this is a good way to look at lengthening in backbends -- instead of imagining a giant arch or C-shape, you imagine pulling your low ribs forward, as far away from your pelvis as you can, and then you think about finding the arch. Danurasana or bow pose is a great example here -- you really want to pull the low ribs, the bottom of the sternum forward.

Full wheel or chakrasana is another pose where lengthening the low ribs forward (towards the front of the mat) can have a nice subtle reward. When you do this kind of lengthening here I think you can really feel the backbend distribute more into the mid spine, and not exclusively in the low spine as most of our backbending tends to be. And by doing this, you get the upper spine more vertical, so that it's easier to get the arms vertical, which is just a much more comfortable position to be in in full wheel. (If your arms are far from vertical, it takes much more muscle effort to remain in the pose, and it can be more of a strain flexibility-wise on the shoulders. )

There are many more examples of lengthening in specific asanas as a way to find a deeper experience, but, d'oh! I gotta go to bed!

Damn this day job! I hope I stay up every night into the middle of the night writing in my various blogs when I'm in buenos aires this winter!

More on flow-vs.-hold

2007-11-14T19:54:00.000-08:00

So I keep coming back to the debate in my head between the flowing and the more slow, deliberate styles of yoga. While I do think it's true that the flowing style is just more fun, especially in a big group, I do think that people who do not do a more deliberate, careful, and introspective practice at least once in a while are holding themselves back.

I take a particular flowing sequence class once or twice a week usually. In recent months I've really wanted to move more slowly, and I find myself lagging the class, just because I hold poses here and there even though the instructor has given directions to move to the next pose. I was doing this tonight, and I realized that I keep holding the poses because I think, ah, I'm finally getting somewhere in this pose, I need to keep it up a bit longer. And I think there are a bunch of different varieties of getting somewhere which can only be achieved through holding the asana for a while. First, there's a variety of strictly physical phenomena going on. For instance, sometimes the body has to relax into a pose, so you can't really even find your full expression of the pose until you've held it for a while. Second, sometimes you need to experiment with the alignment, see how it feels. Do I pull my hip back, what if I rotate my thigh under, should I be tucking the tailbone here, that sort of thing. I think this is one of the most important processes in yoga, this kind of mindfulness in the pose where you experiment with very subtle alignment adjustments, and you see how these affect how you feel in the pose.

And there's also a variety of mental processes that takes place when you're holding poses for a while, which I think you miss out on when you keep flowing from pose to pose. For one there's a kind of mental discipline that you have to employ to keep focused and mindful when you're holding a pose. And honestly, I think this is one of the nice things about the flowing classes, that you don't have to bother with this sort of discipline, because you're always moving onto the next thing. Sometimes you don't want to have to be disciplined. Nonetheless, this discipline is an important aspect of yoga I think. They often say that the asana practice is really just preparation for meditation. Well, maintaining focus and not allowing the mind to wander while holding poses seems like a sort of beginner's meditation, a step on the way to 'real' meditation.

Also, I think there's an important body awareness aspect to holding the poses. This is how we really get to know our bodies, by hanging in the poses and making subtle adjustments. I think it's too easy in the vinyasa classes to just breeze through those things that we find difficult and say, oh, that one, that's always a little hard for me. But you never really have the time to explore why it might be hard. And this kind of exploration is very powerful for helping develop an evolved body awareness.

So, sure, I love the flowing vinyasa classes, especially in a big group. It's a communal dance, and I think that's really fantastic, a great thing for our spirit. But I think everyone who's been doing yoga for a long time also owes it to themselves to regularly do a slower, more introspective practice. And if you're really experienced, this can be done at home, by yourself. A teacher can shed some great light on the process, but sometimes you only need to listen to yourself. You just have to take the time to let yourself be heard.

flow v. hold -- yoga as dance?

2007-11-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

Like most of us in the US, I started and mostly continue doing yoga following the vinyasa approach, which incorporates a lot of movement from pose to pose, and frequently doesn't hold the pose very long, sometimes hardly at all. This is far and away the most popular kind of yoga in the states. Other types of yoga, like iyengar technique, and bikram, and many others, emphasize holding the poses for quite some time, and don't really worry themselves about transitioning between one pose and the next. In general it seems that people refer to this latter kind as "hatha", although I believe hatha yoga really refers to any type of physical yoga. (As opposed to the various other types of yoga such as bhakti yoga, karma yoga, mantra yoga, etc., etc.)

For most of us americans, when learning the vigorous flowing types of yoga, we sort of assumed these were "harder" and so more serious than the slow approach of holding poses for a long time. We would get out of breath and soak our t-shirts in sweat and think, oh, yeah, I'm really doing something here. I certainly felt that way, and so did many of my friends.

So maybe this was Stage One of my thinking about yoga. Move fast, do as much as you can, push your body. Slow yoga is for old people, or people with low physical vitality.

But as i started to do more yoga on my own, I realized I wasn't that interested in doing these flowing sequences at home. Instead, I would just do a few poses, and hold them for a really long time, and sort of explore them. Or really, explore myself and my body in its reaction to the pose. And this is really interesting work, something you need time for, which you usually don't having in the flowing vinyasa classes. Sometimes these poses were strength challenges -- just try holding warrior 2 for five minutes. But most of the time they were more mental challenges.

So maybe this was Stage Two of my thinking about yoga: Find the challenge in the poses by taking the time needed to work with your own limits. Slow is intense, fast is for posers who can't be bothered really trying to understand what they are doing.

And just lately I've been thinking about yoga as dance, and maybe i'm finding a Stage Three in my thinking. I think vinyasa yoga is a lot like dancing. And, hell, dancing is fun. We humans like to dance, and we especially like to dance in a group. And lord knows, we don't do enough dancing in our lives.

So, these vinyasa classes kind of give us an opportunity to do some dancing with the others in the room. And make no mistake about it, one of the great appeals of these flowing vinyasa classes is the group dynamic. We are all doing this together, we are moving together, there is a communal energy in the room. That energy can be powerful, it can motivate us in ways that we just can't motivate ourselves. And that's the beauty and the power of these classes -- they motivate and energize. And on a purely physical level, it feels good to move.

So, no surprise, Stage Three of my thinking on yoga is that there's room for every approach. It depends where you are, and what you need, and what you're interested in. The fast-and-hard approach is not 'better', the slow-and-deep approach is not 'more serious', they're just different approaches, suitable for different people with different needs and interests.

Why the emphasis on shoulders down the back?

2007-11-06T20:21:00.000-08:00

Ever since I started taking yoga teachers have always emphasized bringing the shoulders down the back when you lift or extend your arms. This has always been a challenge, and in recent years it's occurred to me more and more that it's just unnatural. I've gotten to the point where I'm a little dubious about this dictate to keep the shoulders down when reaching up.

The most obvious and vexing example of this is warrior 1. If you press your palms together in front of you and try to lift your arms overhead while honestly keeping the shoulders all the way down, for most people you can't lift the arms any higher than 10 or 11 o'clock. But if you let the shoulders rise naturally, you can bring the hands straight overhead, arms alongside the ears, and maybe even behind the ears a bit.

Extended side angle is another pose where we extend the arm alongside the ear sometimes. And here too teachers are insistent on keeping the arm "plugged into the socket", as they frequently say.

What really got me thinking about this was swimming, and looking at pictures of swimmers. If you look at one of those classic underwater pictures of olympic swimmers reaching forward in the water, their shoulders are lifted way, way up alongside the ear. That extends the range of the stroke, and, just as important, it brings into play those big lattisumus dorsi muscles along the outside of the back, which pull the shoulder down. There's a lot of power in those muscles. But more importantly, on a totally intuitive level, the swimmer is just reaching as far as she can, and to do that, her shoulder lifts way up.

Well, I think that lifting the shoulder up towards the ear so that the arm comes alongside the ear is a part of our natural range of motion, and it's something we need to work with rather than inhibit. We go out of our way in yoga to extend our range of motion of everything else, so why not the lifting of the shoulders?

My guess is that it's an aesthetic thing more than anything else, and it comes from dance. Lots and lots of dancers end up as yoga teachers. And in dance, you want to keep the shoulders down and the arms away from the ears to frame the head and neck. So perhaps all these yoga teachers just remember years and years of "shoulders down" from dance, and come to believe that it's a biomechanical thing rather than an aesthetic thing.

I do think the situation is completely different when we're putting weight on the shoulders, pressing as in plank or chaturanga or vashistasana. This is completely different than in swimming crawl, where the shoulder is pulling, not pushing. When the shoulder is pushing as in the weight-bearing yoga poses mentioned, you want the shoulder down and back. This allows you to make more use of the much bigger muscles of the back and chest rather than the puny and delicate muscles of the rotator cuff. If you're supporting all your weight with those puny muscles, you've got a good chance of straining the muscles or more likely tendons.

So, my advice is to try lifting those shoulders, especially in Warrior 1 and parsvakonasana. You'll feel a nice stretch in your lats, and you'll find a rotation in the shoulder that you can't find otherwise. We want as much mobility as we can get in our shoulders, just as we do in our hips. But if you're putting weight on the arms, hold them down and back, and try to take that weight with the muscles of the trunk, not the shoulder.