The Science of Yoga

at me like I’m crazy. And I know if they continue, they wouldn’t be able to take it.”
    He said yoga celebrities seemed to have a predisposition to engage in not only personal denial but social evasion. “A yogi I know was going to be interviewed by Rolling Stone and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about injuries. ’ ”
    I asked about the worst injuries he had seen, and Black rattled off a long list. He told of big-name yoga teachers doing the Downward Facing Dog so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips. One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joint. The socket had become so degenerated that she had to have a hip replacement.”

    Downward Facing Dog, Adho Mukha Svanasana
    I asked if she still taught. “Oh, yeah. And there are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs that they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”
    Black said that he had never injured himself or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming any of his students in thirty-seven years of teaching. “People feel sensations, sure, and find limitations. But it’s done with mindfulness, not just because they’re pushing themselves. Today, many schools of yoga are just about pushing people.”
    He told of his students reporting back to him on the aggressive tactics of other instructors. “You can’t believe what’s going on—teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”
    Black also chided students who practiced yoga for the excitements of status and cachet. “They take a class to show off their Missoni T-shirt or their leotards,” he said, scowling. I asked his opinion of Yoga Journal, which over the decades had gone from a geeky nonprofit published by the California Yoga Teachers Association to a glossy magazine filled with ads for sexy clothing, travel adventures, and miracle weight-loss drugs. He declined comment.
    While many gurus and yogis over the decades had remained silent on the threat of injury, or had denied its existence, or had grudgingly made limited concessions of danger, Black insisted that the threat was now indigenous to the discipline and just waiting to strike. He argued that a number of factors had come together in modern times to heighten the risk.
    The biggest was the changing nature of students. The poor Indians of yoga’s past normally squatted and sat cross-legged, the poses thus being in some respects an outgrowth of their daily lives. Now yoga had become a Western fad, swelling its unskilled ranks. Urbanites who sat in chairs all day now wanted to be weekend warriors despite their inflexibility and physical problems. Amateurish teachers ruled like drill sergeants and pushed cookie-cutter agendas. Such factors became all the more deadly, Black argued, with the distractions of modern vanity, which kept students and teachers from focusing on the importance of the here and the now, from listening to their bodies and understanding when they were about to cross the line from a wholesome stretch to excruciating harm.
    The result was an epidemic.
    “There has to be a degree of seriousness and dedication,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to get hurt.”
    The first scientific light on the topic of yoga injury fell decades ago. The reports appeared in some of the world’s most respected journals—including Neurology, the British Medical Journal, and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The high-level debut signaled that the medical establishment saw the findings as important information that practicing doctors needed to know if they were going to help patients. The reports began toemerge in the late 1960s, soon after the West had become newly interested in yoga.
    A number of early findings centered on nerve damage. The problems ranged from the relatively mild to permanent disabilities that left students unable to walk without aid. For instance, a male college student had done yoga for more than a year when he intensified his practice by sitting upright for long periods on his heels in a kneeling position known as Vajrasana. In Sankrit, vajra means “thunderbolt.” The position, also called the kneeling pose, is sometimes recommended for meditation. The young man did the pose for hours a day, usually while chanting for world