How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
Danielle Levitt for The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 5, 2012
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.