This is a very personal opinion and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt.
I have practiced yoga for thirty years and have taught it for nearly twenty years. In that time, I have seen a great change take place with regard to yoga injuries. While in the 1980s and 1990s there was little mention of injuries, today the discussion of them is everywhere. Why should this be the case? Here are a few guesses:
- The expectations about yoga thirty years ago were enormous. People who were involved in yoga were doing something exotic. The practice was sacrosanct and, if they got hurt, their injuries resulted from their own misunderstandings and their failure to perceive the practice correctly. Therefore, few people talked about any of their injuries.
- Many people who practiced yoga in the past were involved with strict lineages. These linages were hierarchically organized and people practiced at the level their guru told them to. This often meant that the students moved more slowly and that their guru kept an eye on their development.
- People who experimented with yoga on their own either had a good sense of their body — and thus moved according to their ability and did not get hurt — or they used the practices indiscriminately, and when they did get hurt, they dropped their yoga quickly. These people usually did not talk much about their failure.
Then, with the enormous rise of the popularity of yoga in the late 1990s three things happened:
- Yoga became overall more physical.
- The speed with which movements were executed increased.
- And, as the expectations about quick results rose, the size of yoga classes increased, often drastically.
In many of the thousands of yoga teacher training programs that were offered all over North America the focus moved from holistic training to physical poses and towards perfection of individual postures. Meditation and breath work were increasingly less emphasized.1 In addition, while yoga classes had traditionally always been small — the traditional yoga instruction in India took place between the teacher and a single student — the “yoga boom” in the early 2000s increased the size of yoga classes dramatically. Many more people got involved in yoga, and many expected quick results. With yoga’s popularity came the event of yoga publications and books. Pictures of particular poses — executed to perfection (often by former ballet dancers) — gave students an understanding of what the poses “should look like”. This had nothing to do with the students’ own abilities or body conditions, yet it nevertheless set up an image and a goal in their minds that they thought they had to reach.
Taken together, these three factors can easily be seen as a reason for the rise of yoga injuries. Greater emphasis on physicality and larger, faster classes — in which the teacher is less able to see what the individual student is doing — both increase the chance for more injuries. Add to that the pressure to execute the “perfect” pose as seen in a yoga magazine, and you have a recipe for problems.
If yoga injuries are the disease, what is the cure? For me the answer is simple and is contained in a single word: awareness.
- If there is greater awareness on the side of teachers who are sufficiently trained to see the individual condition of each student, there will be fewer injuries. (This may involve a reduction in class size.)
- If there is greater awareness on the side of the students, they are actually moving closer to the goal of yoga because focused awareness is what yoga is about (see the Patanjalayogashatra). Increased awareness means that students can feel their bodies and know at every point what they are doing. It means that they learn to pay close attention to their movement patterns, limitations and abilities. And it means that they increase their awareness of the flow of breath and of the flow and structure of their thoughts — and that awareness will feed back into a greater attention with which they can follow their practices.
There are probably a host of other causes for yoga injuries, but my feeling is that, if we follow these points, we may already see fewer of them.
Oda Lindner
1 By the way, it is worth mentioning that the required hours of training for a certified yoga teacher in North America are less than those for a licensed hairdresser.
1 By the way, it is worth mentioning that the required hours of training for a certified yoga teacher in North America are less than those for a licensed hairdresser.