Extreme Yoga?

These days it seems like if you take enough yoga classes, you're going to get injured. What shocks the heck-fire out of me, is that most of us come to yoga to heal some aspect of ourselves. In Ayurveda, that which heals, can also poison if used in the wrong way, wrong amount. This is not to say that cardamom pods or cumin seeds are poisonous, but how they are used will either heal or hurt. 

Same with yoga.


Yoga and injury. I don’t believe that the two go together. When yoga is treated like an extreme sport, yes, it’s part of the package. But in the true yoga, the union of self with Self, there is no injury except to parts of ourselves that hide us from our light. This is not to say that there aren’t yoga practices that consciously break every part of their body so they can repair it, and in the repairing, eliminate the positve/negative charges of the cellular structure. That’s’ a different story. Why are there 70 year old yoga masters that can do the most twisted and crazy poses without blinking an eye? I think it’s because they took the slow road, the road of being true to the moment, being true to where the body/mind was in each moment, honoring the Divinity in that moment, thus, the practice was all about honoring the Divinity of the physical and non-physical. 


I was never injured from yoga until I started doing power flow. At first,  it felt great. I was doing really cool and extreme poses. After a few months I started to get injured – back problems, pulled hamstring, blah blah blah.  Why the injury? Part of it I attribute to group classes. When doing extreme poses in a group dynamic with a teacher ranting at the top of their lungs to go harder faster, there’s a tendency towards the competitive. We start competeing with the teacher, the others, ourselves. If I had been working one on one with a guru, I seriously doubt I would have started this pattern of injury because there would be no one but me to compare myself to, other than my guru, who would have been in an egoless state, giving me nothing to push against. The only thing that I would have injured was my ego. 


Now, the idea that you’re going to get injured in yoga is out there. It’s become a given. I have a problem with that. If yoga is supposed to make your life better, is it better with a pulled hamstring or strained wrists or tight shoulders? I guess if it’s really working, you could be physically beat up and still be smiling, but wouldn’t it be more fun to have both physical well-being as well as mental and emotional well-being?