The Science of Yoga

having us do lots of stretching, limb movements, and pose holding but no inversions and few classical postures. His teaching was nothing like the regimented styles. Instead, he worked us from the inside out. His approach was almost freeform and it seemed as if he was making it up as he went along, switching gears every so often to better challenge the range of aptitudes in the room or to pull us back from what he perceived to be some kind of cliff. In so doing, he conveyed a sense of intelligent vitality.
    Through it all, he urged us to concentrate and try to develop our sense of attention and awareness, especially to the risky thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told us. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.”
    Playfully, he rejected any doubts about his style. “Is this yoga?” he asked as we sweated through an extremely unyogalike pose. “It is if you’re paying attention.”
    Black told us a grim story. In India, he said, a yogi from abroad had come to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in astonishment as three of the man’s ribs gave way— pop, pop, pop.
    After class, I joined Black and his companion, Evelyn Weber, on a cab ride back to their hotel. They said they were both born in 1949 and were turning sixty. Both looked much younger. “I am certified in nothing,” Black remarked at one point. “I have no degrees. All I have is a ton of experience.”
    Discreet and luxurious, Hotel Plaza Athénée was located on the tree-lined Upper East Side at 64th between Park and Madison, with sister hotels in Paris and Bangkok. We went up to their suite. Daylight flooded the rooms. Weber served nuts and tea as we talked of yoga safety. Black sat on a couch, relaxed but serious.
    He was amazingly blunt. My encounters with yoga denial and evasion had left me unprepared for such outspokenness and sweeping visions of better safeguards.It was radical. If Black ran the world, he would have many people—including many celebrities of the yoga circuit—relinquish not just difficult poses but the discipline itself. Students as well as celebrated teachers injured themselves in droves, he argued, because most were completely unprepared for yoga’s rigors.
    Black said the vast majority—”99.9 percent”—have underlying physical weaknesses and problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said. “Yoga in general is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class. There’s such a variety and range of possibilities. Everybody has a different problem.”
    Black said he worked hard at trying to recognize signs of danger and knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something—the Shoulder Stand, the Headstand, or putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.”
    I asked if he ever modified poses to make them safer.
    “Constantly,” he answered. Referring to our just-completed class, Black noted how we had done a standing pose where we had put our arms behind our backs, clenched our hands together, and stretched our arms up. “I could see people’s faces crunching, so I said, ‘Bend your elbows. ’ ” It was, he said, a safety valve.
    “To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems, and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’—it just doesn’t work.” Instead, he said, all classes had to be tailored to the range of particular student abilities on that particular day.
    Weber noted that she had been studying with Black for a decade and had never experienced the same class twice.
    Black said his guiding principle in teaching yoga was to downplay the asanas and put the emphasis on awareness. “It’s harder to teach,” he said. “But the risk of not teaching it is very great. If you just teach people to do an asana without taking them into deeper states of realization, their asanas are always going to be a struggle.”
    The superstars of yoga were so addicted to celebrity that they often overlooked the message of awareness and paying close attention to their bodies and anatomical limits, Black said. He told of famous teachers coming to him forhealing bodywork after suffering major traumas. “And when I say, ‘Don’t do yoga,’ they look