Does Yoga hurt?
A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine had published an article titled “When Yoga Hurts” which had some alarming statistics about how yoga-related injuries were on the rise in the US.
It mentioned how people were getting hurt by either pushing themselves too hard or by taking lessons from Yoga instructors who didnt know enough about it.
Yesterday, I was alerted to two letters in the latest issue of the magazine that referred to the original article. They make some good points which deserve wider publicity. I am reproducing them in full below (emphasis mine).
The first one (”When it doesn’t hurt”) noted:
As a yoga teacher, I was taken aback by the article “When Yoga Hurts” [Oct. 15]. I fear its lack of balance might scare people away from a practice that offers far more benefits than drawbacks.
Yes, yoga -like Spinning and running-can be harmful if practiced incorrectly, but its more than 5,000 year history and its millions of practitioners worldwide attest to its benefits.
Besides building strength and flexibility, yoga has been shown to have a positive effect on depression, anxiety, insomnia and core physiology.
- Dave Emerson, Cambridge, Mass. US.
The second one (”Gain with No Pain?”) mentioned:
Yoga in its original form is a multi-faceted, millenniums-old discipline that spans physical, ethical, psychological and spiritual dimensions.
In our mass-market Western world, those aspects of yoga have largely been jettisoned, and the physical is marketed as a hot new form of callisthenics.
Used skilfully, the physical element offer benefits such as enhanced flexibility, agility and body awareness.
Used unskilfully they can, not surprisingly-damage muscles and ligaments.
Wise practitioners will proceed gently and carefully under a good teacher and eventually look beyond physical to yoga’s deeper potentials.
- Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, Psychiatry Department
University of California College of Medicine, Irvine, Calif. US.
Well said.
