I recently read an article in the NY Times called How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. In it the author, William J. Broad,  talked about his experience with a yoga posture that threw his back out and details an extensive interview with Glenn Black, a well known yoga teacher out of the U.S..   Black has worked with various, sometimes high profile,  yoga teachers whose bodies have deteriorated in some way through mis-guided, over-cooked and under-sensitive practices.  

In addition, Broad cites numerous sensational examples of people who have experienced injury directly associated with yoga.  One prominient, unnamed teacher from the U.S had to have hip replacements after years of deep hip openers that destroyed the her joints.  Black himself had to get a spinal surgery for stenosis, the compression of vertabrae against the spinal nerves, which he attributes to extreme backbending and twists he performed as a younger yogi.

I've heard of such injuries myself.  So, sure, yoga can do harm.  But, pens can do harm if you use them to stab yourself in the eye.  Yoga is a tool, when misused can be detrimental - like any other tool.   The real question is, how does yoga get misued?  How do we know when we're misusing it or  being guided by a teacher in an inappropriate way?    Here is a list of ways to stay aware, and check in with yourself about the yoga that you're doing to ensure it's appropriate use:

- Black suggests that being aware is more essential than cramming in a bunch of postures just to say you've done them - which, he argues is simply ego.   I would strongly concur. This is the problem with a yoga devoid of awareness work.  These postures have developed within a system whose most essential component is self-observation.  The postures are meant to require presence, attention and deep mindfulness through challenging and subtle movements - this is how they spur the emergence of yoga, the yoking of mind, body and spirit.  The fitness by product of yoga that has been excessively elevated by Western culture strips this necessary component of the practice from it and then is shocked when people get hurt.  Really, we're just laying in the bed we've made.

-  Black also suggests that quite simply yoga isn't appropriate for everyone.  Slightly different, I like to think that not all yoga is appropriate for everyone.  Appropriateness depends on the unique "constellation" of mental, emotional and physical qualities a person brings to a class and how that particular class can meet those qualities with care.  So, before entering yoga a yoga class or practice it's essential to ask: "what is my unique constellation?"   and  does this class, teacher or practice honour what is real for me today and in my life more broadly? 

-  Also it's critical, and an integral part of the yogic path, to question the motivation for your practice.  What part of your ego are you trying to placate, aggrandize, avoid or deny through your yoga practice?  This motive is going to change the way that you approach each asana.  For example, you may find yourself placating warning signs, aggrandizing your ability, avoiding the truth of your limitations and denying your needs in any given moment.  Again, in traditional yoga as described in the Sutras, questioing the motives of the ego is central such that it's antics can be seen before they manifest in mental, emotional or physical injury.

-  Finally, we must stop conceding our better judgement to a teacher we think to be the expert.  Some teachers are experts in various ways, others are not.  No matter the level of expertise, however, a teacher cannot feel what is going on inside of you.  And no matter what kind of physical or philosophical acrobatics a teacher may be able to perform, they are no substitute for your deep care for your own well-being.  Most of us would like to give up our "self management" to an all knowing teacher, but in the end, there's no such thing. 

In the end, William J. Broad's point is important.  It is indeed possible to do harm with the tool of yoga.  But with ever deepening awareness of ourselves, yoga and those who teach it, we can not only avoid injury but reap the innummerable benefits that yoga has to offer us and our over 20 million North American comrades who embark on the practice each week. 
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All of existence comes alive in us.  When you really contemplate it isn't it true?  It is the Awareness that we are which perceives the heat of the sun, the smell of freshly blossomed lilacs, the glorious flavor of Haagen Dazs ice cream on our palate.  In awareness the inner world bursts forth as well.  The perception of hunger, the heat of our passions, the heaviness of our grief.  All of life, internal and external, become illuminated by the light of Awareness.  In the asmitamaya kosha we come to know ourselves as this Awareness.  We see that it's not that awareness is in the person but that the person is experienced in Awareness.   All our thoughts, feelings and perceptions do not really have a center.  There is no "me" that can be found at the whirling center of all of life arising and dissolving.  There is no me that can define an other, and therefore our separate existence from all of life cannot be proven.  When we allow ideas of who and what we think we are or should be fall away there is simply Openness left.  We Fall Open.  In this Openness the wall of ideas that used to block our fluid and everchanging experiences of life crumbles.  Concepts of right and wrong, good and bad no longer maintain a foothold in this expansion and life is allowed to simply be.  We come to know that everything that we once labelled as good or bad is made up of the same stuff.  All of it having a right to it's sacred expression.   

During a retreat with Richard Miller I was in a gazing meditation with a partner.  Initially intimidating, the practice of looking into another person's eyes for 30 or more minutes allowed me to recognize that the same Awareness that was looking through my eyes was looking through my partner's as well.  Awareness was looking at itself.  I felt that very distinctly.  I, as Awareness, was looking at Me.  And not only that, but I was looking at Me, through Me.  I was both Awareness and the Object of Awareness.  I was both the Light of the Divine and the Immanence of the Human form.  This is Pure Being.  This didn't feel at all like a shift in consciousness, like in the use of psychedelic drugs.   It just felt like everything I once knew fell away for a moment.  Everything fell and what was left was Being, being.  Jean Klein, modern non-dual teacher said:  "When you know all that you are not, all that you are appears instantaneously and is not a thought".  

After the realization during the retreat, the filmline of my day to day activities didn't end but it felt stripped of personal agenda.   The inner critic that has so fervently run my life at times was on vacation.  I was hanging out in life; spurred to action by something other than my head and it's neurosis.  There was no yip yapping from the should's and ought to's in my mind.

And then, one day, it all came back. The little commentator within came barreling back and I was as fascinated by it's return as I was by it's sudden disappearence a month prior.  This commentator started being awefully bossy very quickly, controlling this, liking or hating that.  My mind had slipped back into a separate self sense.  Part of me felt so disappointed (my ego wanted to grasp this freedom and keep it forever!) and another part of me knew this was a natural movement.  We fall in and out of remembering our self as Everything.  But that's just part of the Everything too. 
 
Even though I continue to fall in and out of this remembering, life changed for me after that retreat with Richard, as it had after other non-dual experiences growing up.  As with every other Falling Open in my life, a little bit of my personal motivation to control my life (and everything else!) dissipated.  Now, I find myself more in tune with the rhythm of those around me, the cycles of seasons and emotions and all other wonders and less entranced by my own self contracted stories.  I'm not enlightened, whatever that means.  But, despite sometimes acting to the contrary, I have known myself as Light - and You as nothing less than the same. 
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My daughter, Rowan, is a crucible through which the depth of my yoga practice has been tested. She was only home a month when I was besieged by post partum depression, colic and sleeplessness. One desperate day I settled, with feeble energy, into downward dog. I breathed there, listlessly, and felt my exhaustion. I breathed and felt the sensations of pain, fatigue and self doubt live their way through my body. I breathed until I became completely and honestly present to the deep ache of motherhood – the ache of immense fear, anger, fatigue, confusion – and love.

As I descended deeper into experience my awareness held this ache like an old friend it asked me to change nothing. It did not challenge me to open where I had been tense from hours of pacing with my child. It did not push me to stay and build greater strength where I was weak. Daniel Odier, a modern teacher of Tantra, says; “rediscover the peace of the gaze that wants nothing”. The gaze of my awareness wanted nothing that day; it simply held the immensity of my struggle without demand.

And then my baby began to cry. In days past that would have started my heart pounding but this time was different. The awareness that was birthed in on my mat simply grew larger to include her cries within it's Grace. This “gaze that wants nothing” was big enough to hold Rowan too. In that moment I was not afraid of what the next hour would bring, be it painful crying or playful calm. That day I had rediscovered the peace of being aware without demand. And, I came to realize that my baby's sleeplessness, her cries and her smiles were like the sensations and experiences of a downward dog. Not good, not bad, just simply there – the blessed expression of Spirit in it's many forms. From that day forward I met my daughter in a much different way. I no longer felt the same pressure to “fix” her restlessness or control her schedule to suit my ideas about what should be. I no longer took her discomfort personally as if I had failed as a mother because I had not eradicated her pain. In the past I had “perfectly” aligned everything to get her to sleep and eat. But she showed me that, like in asana, there was a natural intelligence that was moving her young evolution forward in it's own way regardless of my effort and ideas.

Now, with every asana, cry and giggle I am reminded of this Will that is far beyond my own and how it attempts to guide me in the soft moments when my ego forgets itself. My child has caused yoga to flood through my life. She is the ease and difficulty of a downward dog, the fire of kapalabhati breath and the soft silence of savasana. She is the flow of life, without apology and before ego takes hold. She is my child and the greatest asana I have ever lived.
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