The Science of Yoga

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 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