Assholes at the Front of the Yoga Class: Asana in America

“I am working my way—again—through X-rays and skull scans, but I have, finally, come to the conclusion that Yoga as we practice it, as we are taught it, in the West, is not what the doctor, or the mythical ‘Father of Yoga,’ Patanjali, ordered. Yoga, whether ‘branded’ Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa or ‘Hot’—and leave it to America to brand and market a spiritual practice as ‘Hot’—has degenerated into a hierarchical institution, a big business, a militaristic system of certifications and, worst of all, a congeries of ego fixes, ‘performances,’ body displays, sublimated ‘eros,’ and, and, and . . . .” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Asana was only developed 80 or 90 years ago. Patanjali (author of the ancient yoga sutras) was talking about sitting poses. Headstands weren’t done when Patanjali was alive. Asana came from Indian military exercises. Indians are small people next to the British, and they developed a series of calisthenics to make them strong. They were already flexible, and they also wanted to do sitting poses. They named it Ashtanga due to the eight limbs of yoga, and asana is one of them, but just why somebody called it that, who knows why? Those sequences have nothing to do with real Ashtanga yoga, the eight limbs of yoga.”—Glenn Black, longtime Yoga teacher, The Omega Institute

“Most people have a limited view of yoga and approach it as a physical discipline; that’s what can make it mediocre. Awareness and consciousness are no longer emphasized, and yoga somehow became relegated to physical exercise. You need to do in-depth, serious practice in pranayama and yoga nidra, and hope for higher stages of yoga to happen. Now, everybody takes what they want, but it really gets back to the yamas and the niyamas. If someone’s an asshole, it doesn’t matter how he does the pose, he’s still gonna be an asshole.”—Glenn Black

TEANECK New Jersey—4/22/2013—Alas, Gentle Readers, when I returned to America in the late 1990s, and resumed the Yoga practice I had begun in Europe in 1982, I fell into the hands of . . . assholes. Some were willfully negligent and brutal; others were innocently negligent and just plain ignorant but, to extrapolate, as Glenn Black says, “it doesn’t matter how he does the pose, he’s still gonna be an asshole.”

There is simply no other way to say it. Yoga in America is an abomination, and we—all of us in the American Yoga community—need to set about changing it, before more of us literally break our necks, hips, backs and, most important, spirits.

In 2010, performing an asana called the Drop-Down Backbend, or Urdhva Dhanurasana, I broke my lumbar spine at the L4/5 vertebrae.

Well, that’s at least one way of phrasing it. One simple, true, factual way.

Just as accurately, I might state that in 2010, my then-Yoga-teacher-trainer, a many-times-certified Iyengar Yoga adept—and an asshole of the first water—broke my lumbar spine at the L4/5 vertebrae by compelling me (the last, and by far the oldest, in a line of student-teachers in training) to perform Urdhva Dhanurasana. (For a please-do-not-ever-do-this-at-home look at precisely how my back broke, I offer this YouTube video as graphic illustration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-6g4svb0Y. Do not, please, try this at home alone.)

Now, only another Yogini with many decades “invested” in Yoga (actually, invested in her “self” in Yoga) will understand that, through the long process of my spinal fusion surgery, recovery, and return to the mat, I never once considered giving up Yoga-as-I-knew-it, as I had been rigorously taught it. In addition, I felt—at my core—that the “fault,” the responsibility for my broken back (my ganglion cysts, my bulging cervical disks, my burgeoning arthritis, the disappearance of the “arches” of both my palms), lay with the student, with this student, not with my teachers; not with the assholes at the front of my master classes.

Somehow, I had been found lacking. Somehow, my body had been found lacking by Yoga. If I just tried harder, if I just performed asana more “consciously,” I would heal; I would avoid further injury; I might even reach my always-ultimate-stated goal, samadhi, or enlightenment.

Yoga, like any addiction, bends us backward this way, away from the simple truth.

It is three long years later and, this past month, in class I (yet again) injured my cervical spine—my neck, Civilians—executing another pose, and one that in fact puts little real weight, little pressure, on either the skull or neck. In my case, however, last Tuesday night’s Prasarita Padottanasana was the straw that all but broke this camel’s neck [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJGvClXXffM].

After the class—taught by a teacher I’ve known since my arrival in New Jersey—and pumped up on endorphins, I felt no immediate pain but, in the night, I woke with a crushing headache that persisted for three days and which has now abated to a certain extent, but not left me. In addition, the disks in my neck crackle now like glass ground under foot, and my thoracic and lumbar spinal vertebrae are distorted; their supporting muscles in spasm.

I am working my way—yet again—through X-rays and skull scans, but I have, finally, come to the conclusion that Yoga as we practice it, as we are taught it, in the West, is not what the doctor, or the mythical “Father of Yoga,” Patanjali, ordered. Yoga, whether “branded” Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa or “Hot”—and leave it to America to brand and market a spiritual practice as “hot”—has degenerated into a hierarchical institution, a big business, a militaristic system of certifications and, worst of all, a congeries of ego fixes, “performances,” body displays, sublimated “eros” and, and, and . . .

American Yoga is the province now, very largely, of assholes. At the front of the class, certainly, but also back here with the corps, where we’ve been avidly drinking the Kool-Aid and breaking our own necks.

I am only beginning to tease apart this nexus of addiction and narcissism, but I am in no wise alone. It has taken me a recurring ganglion cyst, two reversals of the natural curve of my cervical spine, and a $250,000. lumbar fusion—I am a slow, stubborn learner and a three-decades-long practitioner of “heroically performed” asana—but even I can learn.

Still, it is a testament to the stubbornness and resilience and basic humility of the tribe who practice and teach Yoga on the middle-management level here that it has taken about 40-50 years for us to smell a rat; and to begin lobbying for another Yoga entirely, for a return to something lost in the mists of time.

And, if the people I’ve spoken with here in New York City (all devoted and acclaimed former Yoga teachers who are now all badly injured former Yoga teachers) are anything to go by, we really don’t yet know what should or will come next. We only know what should not, which is just about everything now being “sold,” packaged and marketed by the big, internationally trademarked Yoga juggernauts.

So, no more “gurus” for me. No more “received wisdom.” If it doesn’t feel right to my particular body at any particular point in time, I’m not doing it. I don’t care if everyone else in the room is doing Revolved Triangle, my neck no longer revolves for anyone. And if most Yogis are trying to hold a pose for three minutes, I’m coming out of it the moment my body whispers, “Uncle,” even if I’ve barely got into the asana.

Amazingly, I have found that I can just say, “No,” at the very moment my body says, “No.”

I got where I am today—fused vertebrae, excruciating pain, and bones bleeding fluid (well, that’s what a ganglion cyst is, after all) by following the teachings of assholes.

The only way out—while still continuing to do body work—is by following my instincts, pretty well trained by this point in time to separate baby from bath water. If it hurts me, it ain’t happening on my mat.

You’d think that would have been an easy thing to call, but then you don’t know runners in America, weight lifters in America, dancers in America, etc., etc. Give us a church, give us a pure art form, and we will somehow find a way to make it competitive.

I was once much, much wiser.

My mother, who loved me, but who also loved ballet and saw, early, that I would be tall and flexible, lobbied me into taking class in the 1950s. I hated it from Day One, but I did it for my mother.

Until toe shoes came into the picture, and I literally put both feet down. I would not go up on pointe. Ever. End of story. The pain, I can still remember.

But, somehow, in the decades ensuing, I was seduced by something not so very unlike “the red shoes,” and I have allowed Yoga, and the certified assholes who teach it across this land, to break me on their cruel little dhanurasanas. I participated wholeheartedly in my own injury, as well. But no more.

I do not have too much else to relate at this point (ahead, I have so much to unlearn, re-learn and learn for the first time), but I would direct any of my readers who practice Yoga, anywhere in the world, but especially in big-name American Yoga mills and studios, to read the two articles I append here below, and read them carefully. Your life may depend on it.

PS Also, you Yoga teachers, certified, half-trained and untrained—out there teaching big classes coast to coast across my birth country—do me and your students a favor, please. Take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’ve ever injured a student. You know the answer. If you have, you’re one of those assholes Glenn Black speaks of, and you need to make amends, big time, starting now. Stop. First, do no harm. Today. If you’re teaching shoulderstand and headstand, just for example, stop it. Today. About 99.9% of your students will never be able to do these asana, and who the hell cares if they don’t? Heroic inversions? Not at all what Yoga is about. And none of us—not even his children—will ever be BKS Iyengar. Not even close. Nor can we take him—mortals that we are—as a model. He and Kofi Busia? Not like us. So, back off, and push not at all. Neither yourself, nor your students, push. That “edge” you speak of, as in “Take it to your edge”? Well, many of us, self included, have gone way over that edge already.

Note: Those who want the definitive word on how Yoga-as-now-practiced-in-The-West can destroy bodies should begin with the following articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eden-g-fromberg-do/yoga_b_1202465.html.

I include here below the entire text of William J. Broad’s New York Times article and its long interview with Yogi adept, and survivor of spinal fusion very much like my own, body-work teacher Glenn Black of New York City. I could go on and on quoting Black, whom I spoke to by phone after my own most recent injury (“Stop all asana,” was his exhortation), but William J. Broad, also an injured-during-Yoga Yogi, says it all here best:

January 5, 2012, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.

At Sankalpah Yoga, the room was packed; roughly half the students were said to be teachers themselves. Black walked around the room, joking and talking. “Is this yoga?” he asked as we sweated through a pose that seemed to demand superhuman endurance. “It is if you’re paying attention.” His approach was almost free-form: he made us hold poses for a long time but taught no inversions and few classical postures. Throughout the class, he urged us to pay attention to the thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way—pop, pop, pop.

After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga—the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

Black seemingly reconciles the dangers of yoga with his own teaching of it by working hard at knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something—the shoulder stand, the headstand or putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.” Though he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a legendary Manhattan-based physical therapist who devised a method of massage and alignment for actors and dancers, he acknowledges that he has no formal training for determining which poses are good for a student and which may be problematic. What he does have, he says, is “a ton of experience.”

“To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘OK, we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’—it just doesn’t work.”

According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity—the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011—means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on—teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”

“They look at me like I’m crazy,” he goes on to say. “And I know if they continue, they won’t be able to take it.” I asked him about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips.” “One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints,” Black told me. “The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements.” I asked if she still taught. “Oh, yeah,” Black replied. “There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”

Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. Jagannath G. Gune, who helped revive yoga for the modern era, made no allusion to injuries in his journal Yoga Mimansa or his 1931 book Asanas. Indra Devi avoided the issue in her 1953 best seller Forever Young, Forever Healthy, as did B. K. S. Iyengar in his seminal Light on Yoga, published in 1965. Reassurances about yoga’s safety also make regular appearances in the how-to books of such yogis as Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois and Bikram Choudhury. “Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda, a guru who made ten world tours and founded ashrams on several continents.

But a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people, a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals—among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities. In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.

Doctors traced the problem to an unresponsive nerve, a peripheral branch of the sciatic, which runs from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the legs. Sitting in vajrasana deprived the branch that runs below the knee of oxygen, deadening the nerve. Once the student gave up the pose, he improved rapidly. Clinicians recorded a number of similar cases and the condition even got its own name: “yoga foot drop.”

More troubling reports followed. In 1972 a prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell, published an article in The British Medical Journal arguing that, while rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in relatively young, healthy people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but also from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in whiplash—or certain yoga poses. Normally, the neck can stretch backward 75 degrees, forward 40 degrees and sideways 45 degrees, and it can rotate on its axis about 50 degrees. Yoga practitioners typically move the vertebrae much farther. An intermediate student can easily turn his or her neck 90 degrees—nearly twice the normal rotation.

Hyperflexion of the neck was encouraged by experienced practitioners. Iyengar emphasized that in cobra pose, the head should arch “as far back as possible” and insisted that in the shoulder stand, in which the chin is tucked deep in the chest, the trunk and head forming a right angle, “the body should be in one straight line, perpendicular to the floor.” He called the pose, said to stimulate the thyroid, “one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our ancient sages.”

Extreme motions of the head and neck, Russell warned, could wound the vertebral arteries, producing clots, swelling and constriction, and eventually wreak havoc in the brain. The basilar artery, which arises from the union of the two vertebral arteries and forms a wide conduit at the base of the brain, was of particular concern. It feeds such structures as the pons (which plays a role in respiration), the cerebellum (which coordinates the muscles), the occipital lobe of the outer brain (which turns eye impulses into images) and the thalamus (which relays sensory messages to the outer brain). Reductions in blood flow to the basilar artery are known to produce a variety of strokes. These rarely affect language and conscious thinking (often said to be located in the frontal cortex) but can severely damage the body’s core machinery and sometimes be fatal. The majority of patients suffering such a stroke do recover most functions. But in some cases headaches, imbalance, dizziness and difficulty in making fine movements persist for years.

Russell also worried that when strokes hit yoga practitioners, doctors might fail to trace their cause. The cerebral damage, he wrote, “may be delayed, perhaps to appear during the night following, and this delay of some hours distracts attention from the earlier precipitating factor.”

In 1973, a year after Russell’s paper was published, Willibald Nagler, a renowned authority on spinal rehabilitation at Cornell University Medical College, published a paper on a strange case. A healthy woman of 28 suffered a stroke while doing a yoga position known as the wheel or upward bow, in which the practitioner lies on her back, then lifts her body into a semicircular arc, balancing on hands and feet. An intermediate stage often involves raising the trunk and resting the crown of the head on the floor. While balanced on her head, her neck bent far backward, the woman “suddenly felt a severe throbbing headache.” She had difficulty getting up, and when helped into a standing position, was unable to walk without assistance. The woman was rushed to the hospital. She had no sensation on the right side of her body; her left arm and leg responded poorly to her commands. Her eyes kept glancing involuntarily to the left. And the left side of her face showed a contracted pupil, a drooping upper eyelid and a rising lower lid—a cluster of symptoms known as Horner’s syndrome. Nagler reported that the woman also had a tendency to fall to the left.

Her doctors found that the woman’s left vertebral artery, which runs between the first two cervical vertebrae, had narrowed considerably and that the arteries feeding her cerebellum had undergone severe displacement. Given the lack of advanced imaging technologies at the time, an exploratory operation was conducted to get a clearer sense of her injuries. The surgeons who opened her skull found that the left hemisphere of her cerebellum suffered a major failure of blood supply that resulted in much dead tissue and that the site was seeped in secondary hemorrhages.

The patient began an intensive program of rehabilitation. Two years later, she was able to walk, Nagler reported, “with [a] broad-based gait.” But her left arm continued to wander and her left eye continued to show Horner’s syndrome. Nagler concluded that such injuries appeared to be rare but served as a warning about the hazards of “forceful hyperextension of the neck.” He urged caution in recommending such postures, particularly to individuals of middle age.

The experience of Nagler’s patient was not an isolated incident. A few years later, a 25-year-old man was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, complaining of blurred vision, difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. Steven H. Hanus, a medical student at the time, became interested in the case and worked with the chairman of the neurology department to determine the cause (he later published the results with several colleagues). The patient had been in excellent health, practicing yoga every morning for a year and a half. His routine included spinal twists in which he rotated his head far to the left and far to the right. Then he would do a shoulder stand with his neck “maximally flexed against the bare floor,” just as Iyengar had instructed, remaining in the inversion for about five minutes. A series of bruises ran down the man’s lower neck, which, the team wrote in The Archives of Neurology, “resulted from repeated contact with the hard floor surface on which he did yoga exercises.” These were a sign of neck trauma. Diagnostic tests revealed blockages of the left vertebral artery between the c2 and c3 vertebrae; the blood vessel there had suffered “total or nearly complete occlusion”—in other words, no blood could get through to the brain.

Two months after his attack, and after much physical therapy, the man was able to walk with a cane. But, the team reported, he “continued to have pronounced difficulty performing fine movements with his left hand.” Hanus and his colleagues concluded that the young man’s condition represented a new kind of danger. Healthy individuals could seriously damage their vertebral arteries, they warned, “by neck movements that exceed physiological tolerance.” Yoga, they stressed, “should be considered as a possible precipitating event.” In its report, the Northwestern team cited not only Nagler’s account of his female patient but also Russell’s early warning. Concern about yoga’s safety began to ripple through the medical establishment.

These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive reporting—they reveal trends rather than totals—but the spike was nonetheless statistically significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds of therapists.

Around this time, stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments—the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint—failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and dislocations.

In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors. The answers to the survey’s central question—What were the most serious yoga-related injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen?—revealed that the largest number of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of risk—nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warning —pointed to a decided shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.

In recent years, reformers in the yoga community have begun to address the issue of yoga-induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff—a yoga instructor and therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina—revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again. The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin Quistgaard, described reinjuring a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class. “I’ve experienced how yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt—and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis.”

One of the most vocal reformers is Roger Cole, an Iyengar teacher with degrees in psychology from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. Cole has written extensively for Yoga Journal and speaks on yoga safety to the American College of Sports Medicine. In one column, Cole discussed the practice of reducing neck bending in a shoulder stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of folded blankets and letting the head fall below it. The modification eases the angle between the head and the torso, from 90 degrees to perhaps 110 degrees. Cole ticked off the dangers of doing an unmodified shoulder stand: muscle strains, overstretched ligaments and cervical-disk injuries.

But modifications are not always the solution. Timothy McCall, a physician who is the medical editor of Yoga Journal, called the headstand too dangerous for general yoga classes. His warning was based partly on his own experience. He found that doing the headstand led to thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition that arises from the compression of nerves passing from the neck into the arms, causing tingling in his right hand as well as sporadic numbness. McCall stopped doing the pose, and his symptoms went away. Later, he noted that the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose). “Unfortunately,” McCall concluded, “the negative effects of headstand can be insidious.”

Almost a year after I first met Glenn Black at his master class in Manhattan, I received an e-mail from him telling me that he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote. “Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”

The injury, Black said, had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists. He had developed spinal stenosis—a serious condition in which the openings between vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing excruciating pain. Black said that he felt the tenderness start 20 years ago when he was coming out of such poses as the plow and the shoulder stand. Two years ago, the pain became extreme. One surgeon said that without treatment, he would eventually be unable to walk. The surgery took five hours, fusing together several lumbar vertebrae. He would eventually be fine but was under surgeon’s orders to reduce strain on his lower back. His range of motion would never be the same.

Black is one of the most careful yoga practitioners I know. When I first spoke to him, he said he had never injured himself doing yoga or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming any of his students. I asked him if his recent injury could have been congenital or related to aging. No, he said. It was yoga. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”

Black recently took that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the subject deepened by his recent operation. But his warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was a little more emphatic than usual,” he recalled. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

Also here, from The Huffington Post, I include an interview by Eden G. Fromberg, D.O. with Glenn Black, relating yet further information on Yoga and injury:

“Yogi Glenn Black Responds to New York Times Article on Yoga,” by Dr. Eden G. Fromberg, 1/12/2012

The recent New York Times magazine article “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” (William Broad, Jan. 5, 2012) has stoked an international controversy, shaken the yoga world and focused the spotlight on my previously anonymous, reclusive yoga teacher, Glenn Black, who is liberally quoted within. A longtime, highly-regarded faculty member at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, Glenn is known for his gruff and demanding, yet deeply caring and precise teaching style. Joking, he told me that, among hundreds of emails, he was receiving death threats—the Times article doesn’t fully illuminate his uniquely wry sense of humor.

It is important to acknowledge the true damage on all levels that yoga can do when ego surpasses awareness and wisdom, when asana and goals trump deeply listening to the body, when yoga styles and methods are uncompromising, and when inexperienced or misguided yoga teachers lead bodies living modern lifestyles into places they are not prepared to go. The Times piece cites numerous articles from medical journals detailing yoga injuries ranging from joint degeneration and disc injuries to peripheral neuropathy and stroke. I have observed in my own gynecological practice that classical or contemporary yoga can contribute to symptoms of chronic vulvar pain and sexual dysfunction via painful ligamentous instability, hip injuries or herniated discs, overstimulation of already-stressed sympathetic nervous systems, and pelvic floor muscle spasms.

Upon deeper inspection, however, the physical practice of yoga and the injuries that arise from it do not seem to be the point. As the recent HuffPost entry (Jan. 10, 2012) illuminates, true yoga emphasizes spiritual exercises, discussing the eight limbs of yoga: yama (restraints), niyama (observances), asana (posture), pranayama (mastery of breath), pratyahara (withdrawal), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (higher levels of meditation).

Although Glenn has been barraged with interview requests and was just offered a book contract, he was kind enough to indulge me with some time to ask him questions of my own, punctuated in the background by soundbites from his Jan. 11, 2012 NBC News interview, in which an orthopedic surgeon detailed the hundreds of yoga injuries she sees in her practice alone. I recorded Glenn’s candid responses, which seem poised to generate yet more controversy and upheaval, as we wonder: What is yoga? And why are we doing it?

EF: What kind of injuries have you seen in the yoga practitioners who come to you for bodywork?

GGB: Pinched nerves in their neck, low back tightness, injuries to hips and knees. People often come to yoga classes with injuries that get accentuated, too.

EF: What about shoulder injuries?

GGB: Chaturangas are the worst things for shoulder problems and create repetitive use syndrome. Putting weight on a joint, one side is always stronger than the other, one side will eventually pay a price, one will compress more, one will stay open, some ligaments will tighten up, others will loosen.

EF: What is the best way to overcome injuries from yoga?

GGB: Remedial exercises that overcome the source of the injuries. And people need to get bodywork. Not just any bodywork. They need to look for people who work on really moving the joints and connective tissues.

EF: What yoga poses should people generally avoid?

GGB: Deep knee flexion with weight is not so good for anybody, especially Americans who don’t use their knees correctly. To put a knee in a rotational situation puts strain on ligaments and tendons. Sitting poses are hard on hips, where external rotation is limited. Tissues don’t want to do it. Never do headstand, shoulder stand, or plow.

EF: The New York Times article talked about neurological damage and strokes resulting from compression of the head and neck in those poses. What about arm balances?

GGB: With arm balances, lifting the head up is a problem and restricts blood flow. You should really hang the head, but most people lift it up, as a counterweight, I suppose. You have to be careful with the lower back and cervical spine. Any time you do flexion, extension, even rotation will deform those nerve plexuses. Even one nerve can have impingement and cause a problem.

EF: You now have a spinal fusion and screws in your lower lumbar spine to stabilize herniated discs and spondylolisthesis. How did your own yoga injuries come about?

GGB: Extreme backbends, and twisting coming up from my hands on my ankles. I overstretched my ligaments and destabilized my spine.

EF: What is your advice to the modern yoga student seeking to avoid injuries?

GGB: If a student is a total neophyte or even has some experience, the instruction is to be careful and listen to yourself.

EF: What do you think about the backlash that is coming from the statements you make in the New York Times article? It’s all over blogs, Facebook and the news. A lot of yoga teachers are saying now that they do in fact teach in a way that avoids injuries, and others are clearly feeling threatened that their livelihoods are in jeopardy, that it will discourage new students from trying yoga.

GGB: They are not teaching yoga. They are teaching physical exercise. They can do it in any gym. Yoga is an art and a science, and if you take just one small aspect, you never get to the higher end of it. Yoga is not taught correctly by many people.

EF: Your classes are known as rigorous and demanding on all levels, and you have often said that you demand your students to practice in a way that is not “mediocre.” What do you mean?

GGB: Most people have a limited view of yoga and approach it as a physical discipline, that’s what can make it mediocre. Awareness and consciousness are no longer emphasized, and yoga somehow became relegated to physical exercise. You need to do in-depth, serious practice in pranayama and yoga nidra, and hope for higher stages of yoga to happen. Now, everybody takes what they want, but it really gets back to the yamas and the niyamas. If someone’s an asshole, it doesn’t matter how he does the pose, he’s still gonna be an asshole.

EF: People have reacted very strongly to what you say in the New York Times article. They call you “angry” and an “asshole.”

GGB: I am not the most personable person on the planet, but I’m looking out for every person in that class.

EF: I have heard you speak about the “myth of asana.” What does that mean?

GGB: It is a myth that it’s safe to do asana without awareness and consciousness.

EF: I have long felt that doing more asana, like Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I), is not an effective way to get better at doing asana, and wonder if asana is even the point.

GGB: You don’t need to do specific poses to achieve awareness and consciousness. Elevating your consciousness comes from awareness and developing the ability to relax. This does not mean just having a drink and watching the news. It takes dedicated practice, such as pranayama and yoga nidra. You can use asana in a way, but it is not the best way. If one is an athlete and physically conditioned, physical practice could initiate some of that, and then the practitioner can feel the difference in savasana. But if you are in pain, you can’t do the practice, your mind will just focus on the pain.

EF: How does the ego get in the way of the safe practice of yoga?

GGB: Ego is the main obstacle to obtaining what I’ll call superconsciousness. Ego is a good thing because it gets you through life, but it also gets in the way of reaching perspectives we normally don’t have that were directly experienced by the yogis. The old sages had the capacity to reach these different perspectives. They noticed the unity rather than the separateness of everything. Things like technology and stressors that inundate us make it harder to attain this perspective in modern life and make it harder to access. Yamas and niyamas come before everything, but if they are even mentioned nowadays, it’s a cursory intellectual thing about how to treat animals well and not pollute the earth. It comes down to your basic psychology, it comes down to the depth of training. I was asked if going one or two times a week to yoga class, is that okay? Yes, but it is not the goal of the eightfold path to keep yoga only as a physical exercise, and you still need to be careful and cautious.

EF: The New York Times article mentions B.K.S. Iyengar, and his classic book, “Light on Yoga.” Would you talk about your time studying in India with Mr. Iyengar?

GGB: I went to Pune in 1987. He had a way of doing things. He was brought up in the British education system and had a hard, mean, certain way of doing poses and people thought it was way it was supposed to be done. Once a girl came up to Mr. Iyengar saying she was having trouble in headstand. He gave her instructions in how she should do it, and it was overheard by some of his students, then before you know it, everyone in the world was doing headstand like this poor woman.

EF: Do you have any credentials for teaching yoga or doing bodywork, or is it all based on experience?

GGB: I have no credentials at all. I didn’t get certified in Iyengar yoga, because I wanted to be able to do human movement and animal movement and have it be fun.

EF: What do you think of all the yoga teacher trainings and licensing that’s going on now? There are so many 200 hour teacher trainings churning out yoga teachers. You once made an analogy to “locusts.”

GGB: Those certificates they get even for 500 hours are worthless, because like in bodywork, unless somebody has a gift or innate understanding or depth of experience, they will just regurgitate what they have learned and apply it to the situations they are presented with. True ability comes from actually doing the practice.

EF: It seems that many inexperienced yoga teachers spend a lot of time updating their websites to attract students, rather than spending the time gaining the experience they really need. There are even workshops and private coaching designed specifically to help yoga teachers market themselves.

GGB: Updating websites will not help you gain consciousness. Yoga is no longer taught as a direct experience that originated the whole process. There are myriad amounts of people teaching asana in myriad different ways. They are very dogmatic in their approach, in the way they want the pose to look and be done, and if a big name or Madonna came to their class, then they become so large that they turn it over to their assistants to do all the work, who don’t have the skill or genius. As yoga teachers, they don’t hear about the injuries because they are up on the pedestal. Yoga is said to be the end all, but how many people can even take a deep breath without a problem? Most pranayama lasts for 30 seconds, a small part of class. It is rare to see pranayama done for an entire hour and a half.

EF: Are there any great yoga teachers that you know of?

GGB: Kofi Busia is one of best asana teachers around. Whether his students get hurt, I have no idea. But he is holding headstands for a long time, and people don’t say anything.

EF: What is your opinion about trademarking yoga?

GGB: I think that trademarking is an abomination.

EF: How do you deal with it when your students trademark the material you teach?

GGB: I don’t deal with it.

EF: Many yoga teachers present what they teach as having come from ancient lineages that are hundreds if not thousands of years old, before trademarking it, of course. What do you think about that?

GGB: Asana was only developed 80 or 90 years ago. Patanjali (author of the ancient yoga sutras) was talking about sitting poses. Headstands weren’t done when Patanjali was alive. Asana came from Indian military exercises. Indians are small people next to the British, and they developed a series of calisthenics to make them strong. They were already flexible, and they also wanted to do sitting poses. They named it Ashtanga due to the eight limbs of yoga, and asana is one of them, but just why somebody called it that, who knows why? Those sequences have nothing to do with real Ashtanga yoga, the eight limbs of yoga.

EF: Do you believe that, as many texts and teachers say, that vegetarianism is an important aspect of the practice of yoga?

GGB: Vegetarianism being essential to doing yoga is a myth. Tibetan yogis are heavy meat eaters.

EF: What about veganism? For example, I understand that the more recently certified Jivamukti Yoga teachers are required to sign an agreement pledging to maintain a vegan diet. This is something that has long been emphasized to Jivamukti yoga students, including in prenatal yoga classes.

GGB: Some bodies can do it, like Virabhadrasana III (Warrior III), some can’t do it, and shouldn’t or they’ll hurt themselves. Some people need concentrated protein, others don’t. If a serious practitioner dictates to themselves that it is totally immoral to eat an animal, I say, more power to you.

EF: What about in cases of illness?

GGB: Hatha yogis view the body as a vehicle for spirituality. You can’t do higher practices if you are ill, you must take care of the body first.

EF: What is the goal of yoga?

GGB: We have limited intellect, we have no idea what Samadhi is and if it’s same for everybody. To become more conscious and more aware and more able to deal with the stress that is constantly inundating us, I think that’s the best we can hope for in this day and age. The ancient sages had experiences beyond what the senses and the mind can contemplate. They realized that the body and mind are obstacles to awareness and spent a lot of time exploring that. It’s probably the basis of religion. But nowadays, after a yoga class, within seconds the students are looking in their pockets for their cell phones, so how long does it really last?