Tag Archives: asana

It “Shouldn’t” Hurt, But Sometimes It Does

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Image by Remara Photography on Flickr


If it hurts, come out of the pose.

Effort is fine, but you should not feel pain.


These are words that I have heard, and even said, in yoga classes many times. The basic idea is a very sound, because awareness of where the edge between effort and pain is prevents injury in yoga, as it does in other sports and activities. Additionally, it seems like pain is counter-productive to the more psychological or spiritual elements of yoga. However, as someone with a chronic pain issue, there is a little voice in my head that always says “but…” when I hear or say these instructions.

For me, a person with rheumatoid arthritis, yoga asana hurts. How much it hurts varies from week to week (or even day to day) and from one joint to another. But, it always hurts somewhere. The degree of pain can range from relatively unpleasant to the sort of pain that prevents me from practicing asana at all. But, there is almost always pain that is beyond a sensation of discomfort.

In class last night, every pose that involved pressure on my hands or wrists produced some degree of sharp pain. As you can imagine, this is a significant portion of the poses in a vinyasa class. However, I worked through it, because if I didn’t do vinyasas that caused pain, I would not be doing much vinyasa, and that’s not a place I want to be right now. I felt ok about having that pain while I was practicing, because this week it hurts to open an envelope, so I wasn’t surprised or alarmed to feel pain in downward dog. While I have read about pain-free yoga, I have never experienced it. I don’t say this to be dramatic or as a plea for sympathy. It’s just a reality for me in everything I do and thus it is part of my yoga practice.

I know I’m not alone. Many people experience chronic pain in one form or another, and some of those people are doing yoga (some do it as a way of dealing with chronic pain). Staying completely away from any sensation we might characterize as pain can be detrimental to achieving the benefits of yoga that can be gained for someone who has pain. But, that has to be qualified with a “within reason.” Working through some types of pain can result in exacerbation of the underlying conditions. It’s complicated.

You might be surprised to hear that I don’t have an answer to this issue (but not if you read here often, because I frequently don’t have a clear answer  – sarcasm alert).

I think the answer partly depends on what kind of yoga it is, and what the goal is. For a gentle yoga asana class or a class focused on relaxation, any level of pain or intensity might be too much. For a more physically active vinyasa class, or a yin class that can produce intensity for many people, we may need to expect that some students are feeling sensation they might characterize as pain and that this is ok, as long as the pain is not extreme, is not unusual, is not unbearable, does not produce dizziness or nausea, and is not in areas of the body that are very easily injured (e.g. knees) or where injuries could be quite dangerous (e.g. neck).

It also depends on the person. If the pain experienced causes the individual to clench up, to move a joint in an unsafe manner in an attempt to avoid the sensation, or to come “out of” the practice, then it is likely not advantageous to continue doing the poses that create that pain.

I think that part of the key here, as it is with so many things, is knowing the body. If I know my body well, then I’m better able to see where my edge is. It isn’t something that another person can ascertain for me. Some of that learning happens by going a little past that edge and feeling it after. Some of it happens by going a little past where you think the edge is and finding out that it isn’t really there. Some of it happens by learning to relabel some pain as sensation, or becoming more of a connoisseur of your own body sensations and thus knowing what feels like “normal” pain and what feels like “abnormal” pain, or what feels like a muscle or ligament pulling instead of some tension on a previously damaged joint. Yoga helps us to gain this kind of body knowledge.

The bottom line, for me, is that sometimes yoga asana hurts. That can be the sign of a problem, or it can be just a reality of the particular body doing the asana. As we can’t assume that anything will be experienced in the same way from person to person, we can’t assume that yoga shouldn’t hurt if it’s being done correctly.

Not Giving it My “All”

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This summer, I had some MRI testing done for an issue related to tremors.  It was a little scary at the time, but the final diagnosis wasn’t too traumatic.  However, the tests did reveal a hemangioma and 3 disc bulges (one neck and two lower back) on the spine.  Being a well-behaved yoga student, I discussed the results with my primary instructor, Beth, and she made some recommendations for my practice.  First, she suggested that I hold off on headstand for a while, and limit shoulder stand (using blankets and staying up for shorter times).  Second, she asked me to try to avoid a lot of stressing of the lower back by rounding, instead working on greater length in that area.  She made specific suggestions for that including bending knees more in forward folds, really working on the belly to spine during asana, and (the most DAH DAH DUUUUUUUM! for me) using plank pose instead of caturanga during vinyasa.

My first reaction was something like “Ok, bend knees, got it.  No catur – WHAT?”  For me, caturanga is one of those poses that I do and feel like I am super strong.  The idea of not doing it at all during a practice was not happy-making.  But, I really respect and trust this teacher, and her reasoning made absolute sense, so I thought I should try it. The first class, it was hard to remember, and I felt conspicuous and a little aggravated.  But, my back did feel somewhat better afterward, and my belly felt more engaged.

The next week, my chiropractor also suggested maybe no plow, careful with any shoulderstand, and care with deep side twists (particularly where legs are uneven) watching for any pain and stopping if so.  So, I had another list of things to consider.

Since then, I’ve been bending knees for every fold, planking every caturanga, and limiting inversions to pinca myurasana, handstand, and legs up the wall.  And, over the  course of a few classes, I’ve gotten much more ok with it.  Yes, I know that I could push and go into those folds without bending.  I know I could barrel through a bunch of caturangas.  I know that I could do headstand for a few minutes, even if it wasn’t so comfortable.  But, I’m not.  And that’s ok.  I certainly would never want my students to hurt themselves for the sake of a pose, so I need to be able to get my ego out of my way for my own well-being.

Caturanga will be there when and if it is appropriate to get back to it.  Where do you hold back in your asana practice for the good of your physical body?

Namaste,

L

To Make the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange

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The German poet and philosopher, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) once said:

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”

I think of yoga in the same way.

After I started to study yoga as more than just asana, one of the things that drew me was the unification of opposites that I see in the philosophy of yoga (and then enacted in pranayama and asana):  the emphasis that to be separate is to be unified;  the idea that the positive requires the negative for existence; the grounding down to lift up; the pulling senses in to see that which is so much bigger than the self, and so on.  One of the fascinating ways that this dialectic of opposition is revealed to me through yoga is in making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

As we practice  pranayama, breath control, we engage in this interplay between strange and familiar.  In observing the natural breath, and noticing its qualities, we make something that we do 24 hours a day 7 days a week into a new specimen to study.  When we learn new forms of breathing, such as ujjayi breath or dirga pranayama, they are strange to us, but over time they become something so familiar in a yoga practice that we are not surprised by their inclusion in a class.  Yet they maintain that element of extraordinary.  The very practice of pranayama makes the everyday nature of the breath something amazing.

In asana, as well, I can see this in operation.  When I watch a student new to the practice confront poses that, at this point, are very normal to me, it reminds me of how the familiar the strange has become.  As I learn a new pose, in which parts of the body are contorted in ways I didn’t see as possible, the ordinary of the body  becomes extraordinary.  Even very basic things about the body can take on the character of unknown in an asana practice.  I have written before about how, when in an inversion, I lose the sense of where parts of my body are and how they exist in space.  If the teacher asks me to flatten out my lower back or tuck my tailbone when I’m upside down, sometimes I have no idea how to make that happen.  Body parts that are pretty definitely “mine” almost feel dissociated in some shapes.  Last night, during a practice, I noticed this twice.  Once, while in a twisted bound pigeon pose, I noticed that the toe I was holding didn’t really “feel like my toe.”  Later, while doing prep work for urdvha danurasana, our teacher asked us to position the right arm for the pose, and then reach over with the left hand and take hold of the right elbow and upper arm and manipulate it.  As I did so, I was astonished.  The mental sense that I have of my arms, that normally goes unchallenged because it is so normal, was completely dislocated.  I thought to myself “Is THAT what my arm feels like?”  I actually found myself turning my head to look at my elbow and arm (did I think that someone had snuck a new one in there?) to double check that I was really holding it.  In my head, I’m relatively big boned and sturdy.  The elbow/arm that I had in my hand felt weirdly spindly and small.  That minor preparatory movement for a pose literally made my body strange to me in that moment.

On the other hand (get it?  it’s an arm joke), body positions that, not so long ago, would have seemed weird or impossible to me, are now completely familiar.  Going through the flow from caturanga to urdvha mukha savasana to adho mukha savasana is as reasonable as walking from my desk to the door.  Coming into headstand, which I initially thought was so unfamiliar as to be impossible, seems a perfectly reasonable – even enjoyable – option.

It’s a wonderful thing to see how the normal and extraordinary are one, and yoga helps me to do just that.  Finding this in my practice encourages me to see it all around me.  The web of a spider is amazing and everyday.  The fact that my dog and cat have a relationship and communicate with one another is awe-some and common.  The existence of a box that let’s me send this blog through the air to thousands of people around the world is miraculous and an accepted part of our world.  The dialectic of the strange and familiar is both astonishing and utterly regular.

Namaste,

Lorin

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