One thing I like about Bikram Yoga

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"

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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.