December 10, 2011
It is a well-guarded secret that yoga teachers, too, experience pain and injury. We may make things look easy depending on the teacher's experience, but, as with any physical activity, yoga can also injure, especially if the poses are not done correctly and repeated over time, and/or one muscles through a pose by sheer determination of the ego. Sure, it happens to everyone. Even yoga teachers can be overwhelmed by the ego, especially when the teacher teaches by teaching only, rather than by guiding.
When I am teaching a class, and I know that we are doing a pose that is very often misaligned, then I always say, "If you are feeling pain, do not stay in pain. Get yourself out of the pose, realign your body, and try again." Realigning the body is the operative word here--no amount of doing anything over and over again the same wrong way will make the pose feel better to the body. If something hurts, then something is not right.
Sometimes though, I will ask students to differentiate between pain and unfamiliarity. Yoga poses get the bodies into a kind of alignment of muscles and bones that one may not be familiar with and, thus, one may feel uneasy or even afraid of getting oneself into the posture. Then, it is not pain, rather, it is the unfamiliar use of the body that one is experiencing. That is a good thing. The possibilities from there are endless.
I found this by Kino McGregor, via Yoga in the Dragon's Den blog. Here Kino is talking about Ashtanga yoga, the discipline of yoga that so many are afraid of trying because it is so notoriously hard on the body. But what she says applies to everyone in all schools of yoga, whether they are teachers or practitioners.
It is a well-guarded secret that yoga teachers, too, experience pain and injury. We may make things look easy depending on the teacher's experience, but, as with any physical activity, yoga can also injure, especially if the poses are not done correctly and repeated over time, and/or one muscles through a pose by sheer determination of the ego. Sure, it happens to everyone. Even yoga teachers can be overwhelmed by the ego, especially when the teacher teaches by teaching only, rather than by guiding.
When I am teaching a class, and I know that we are doing a pose that is very often misaligned, then I always say, "If you are feeling pain, do not stay in pain. Get yourself out of the pose, realign your body, and try again." Realigning the body is the operative word here--no amount of doing anything over and over again the same wrong way will make the pose feel better to the body. If something hurts, then something is not right.
Sometimes though, I will ask students to differentiate between pain and unfamiliarity. Yoga poses get the bodies into a kind of alignment of muscles and bones that one may not be familiar with and, thus, one may feel uneasy or even afraid of getting oneself into the posture. Then, it is not pain, rather, it is the unfamiliar use of the body that one is experiencing. That is a good thing. The possibilities from there are endless.
I found this by Kino McGregor, via Yoga in the Dragon's Den blog. Here Kino is talking about Ashtanga yoga, the discipline of yoga that so many are afraid of trying because it is so notoriously hard on the body. But what she says applies to everyone in all schools of yoga, whether they are teachers or practitioners.
"It is not enough to feel pain and push through; actually pushing through some types of pain is pure insanity. Instead pain is your teacher on a much deeper level that forces you to dig deep into the heart of yoga... Pain is your motivation to learn healthy alignment, better technique and more efficient movement patterns.
If the way that you approach your physical body leads to injury and suffering it generally indicates that it is time to use that sensation to motivate yourself to try a new method of movement. Many people take their first experience of pain in yoga as a sign to change styles of yoga, but if the deeper question of technique and alignment is not addressed the same injury will just reappear later.
If you can recognize pain as a signal to retrain your movement patterns to an empirically sound method then you will find a new freedom in your yoga practice. Rather than jumping ship from one style of yoga to another the best course of action is to use your rational mind to learn a new approach to the postures and movements that give you pain. Discovering a healthy use of the body and making small adjustments to your approach will alleviate pain caused by unhealthy movement patterns. If you listen and change your approach the pain eventually disappears.
When yoga says that pain is your teacher it does not ask you to plow through blindly. Instead pain is your motivation to make the changes in your technical approach to movement in order to be healthier and ultimately free from the kind of pain that will injure you."
There you have it. Kino's words take the phrase, "no pain, no gain" to a whole different level. Letting pain be our guide in taking yoga to its core may be a strange concept to those who think of yoga as just stretching. On the other hand, letting pain be the guide in getting deep into the heart of yoga practice may be strange to those who think of yoga as that which produces only pain and subsequently think of yoga as a fitness routine. In the end, we use pain in order not to be in it. And in order for us not to be in it, we also have to know what it is.
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