Everybody Upside-Down
By Yoko Yoshikawa
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Many yoga practitioners in the United States are probably like Peter—householders pressed by other demands and desires, unable to practice yoga daily. So they show up for class whenever feasible, and execute every pose that does not provoke immediate and acute pain.
Peter's teacher, like any good yoga teacher, urged his students to develop a home practice, but Peter had never found the time. While it's impossible to say how pivotal Peter's inverted practice was to his injury, it's worth asking the question: If he had practiced more consistently, more mindfully, could he have averted it?
Sirsasana (Headstand) and Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) are seductive poses—physically challenging, visually dramatic, and exhilarating. They are also surprisingly accessible. Despite the limitations of a tight lower back or hamstrings, most yoga practitioners can move into an inversion relatively easily.
As yoga grows ever more popular (there are more students practicing hatha yoga in California than in the entire country of India today, asserts Larry Payne, coauthor of Yoga for Dummies), students are enthusiastically practicing Headstand and Shoulderstand across the nation—in crowded Ashtanga classes without props, and for fairly long periods (10 minutes plus) in Iyengar Yoga classes.
Unfortunately, however, beginning and veteran yoga students are showing up in the offices of bodyworkers, chiropractors, and medical professionals with compression of the upper spine and impaired mobility in the neck, presumably from the practice of inversions.
In a culture that emphasizes competition and achievement, some students are clearly flinging themselves into inversions too soon. Couple that with the desultory nature of many people's practices—one class a week at best, on a drop-in basis—and classes that are too large for the teacher to see everyone in a given pose, and you have the recipe for possible disaster.
How, then, do we evaluate and approach inversions, poses that are said to be invaluable and that possess distinct physiological benefits? We can start by sculling back through the years and studying the role of inversions in classical yoga, at the river's source.
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