The Science of Yoga

requires at least 500 hours—equal to about three months.
    Compare that to Iyengar. It requires candidates for teacher training to have studied the style for a minimum of three years, and then trains them for a minimum of two years and administers two examinations to ensure the requisite progress. As we have seen, it is the Iyengar people who have redesigned some of yoga’s most dangerous poses. Teacher training puts much emphasis on how to lessen the risks.
    My reporting on yoga injury kept producing surprises, none bigger than those involving Glenn Black. In late 2009, almost a year after meeting him, I received an email. Black said he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote. “Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”
    I caught up with him at Plaza Athénée. He said the surgery had taken five hours, fusing together lumbar vertebrae three, four, and five. He would eventually be fine but was under surgeon’s orders to take it easy with his lower back.His range of motion, he added, would never be quite the same.
    He had done it to himself, Black insisted. The injury had nothing to do with trauma or aging but instead had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists. To me, that recalled the wear and tear injuries of the elder yogi whose Headstands led to limb tingling, as well as Timothy McCall and his arm troubles.
    In Black’s case, it appeared that long practice had resulted in spinal stenosis—a serious condition in which the openings between vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing severe pain. Black said he felt the tenderness start twenty years ago when he was coming out of such poses as the Plow and the Shoulder Stand. By 2007, the pain had become extreme. One surgeon said he would eventually be unable to walk. So the master teacher—a man who had been quick to speak of yoga’s dangers and to put down instructors who underwent stealthy rounds of reconstructive surgery—prepared to go under the knife.
    Black said he became quite moody as the date approached. “It was incredible,” he said. “There was a lot of turmoil.”
    I asked if the problem couldn’t have been congenital or the result of aging. No, he argued. Black said he was sure he had done it to himself.
    After recovery? “I’m going to be a decrepit old man,” he joked.
    The moral?
    “You have to set aside your ego and not become obsessive,” he replied, instantly serious. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”
    Black said he had recently taken that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the subject deepened because of the surgery. But his warnings—articulated with new vigor—seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was a little more emphatic than usual,” he said. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”
    Black said the results were entirely predictable. “More people are finding out that yoga is causing injuries.”

V
HEALING
    L oren Fishman kept getting seduced. He studied mathematics, logic, and philosophy at the University of Michigan and Oxford and, on the side, dabbled in yoga and meditation. But he kept getting attracted to new subjects, kept wanting to learn something that would help him minister to what he considered an ailing world. In England, he stumbled upon Iyengar’s book and became entranced. The yoga was so clean, so anatomically sophisticated, so advanced compared to anything else he had encountered. The book became his bible. At the same time, Fishman kept up his wanderlust, going to India to learn Sanskrit and ancient grammar so he could look for clues to the origins of mathematics.
    One day in 1973, a friend mentioned that Iyengar lived nearby. Ah, Fishman thought—the master. The young man from Chicago was already a long way from home. But he wanted to go farther.
    Fishman knocked on Iyengar’s door and was surprised when the yogi himself answered.
    “What do you want?” Iyengar growled.
    “I want to learn your yoga.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I want to heal.”
    “That’s my great thing! Come in.”
    Fishman told the yogi of his dreams and then checked into a nearby hotel. It had a lush rooftop garden and everything an itinerant scholar could possibly want. As a teacher, Iyengar was