Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

said, “Oh, we’re doing these straddle splits again,” and I avoided what could have been an unpleasant injury.
Congenital Weaknesses
    Our heredity can leave us with known or unknown physical weaknesses. Yoga practice aids in discovering and learning about these areas and also in strengthening and bringing them into balance. Similarly, old injuries and traumas may still be stored in the body and as you progress deeper into poses they may surface again in the process of healing and rebalancing the body.
Aggressive Practice
    No one wants to be left behind, and we all want to make good progress in our practice. Pushing through limitations can bring some benefits, but you must also have sensitivity and take care to learn your limits without letting enthusiasm get out of hand. Pushing through a challenge must be balanced by paying attention and knowing when to back off.
Irregular Practice
    Once you have established a good yoga practice over a long period of time, you will usually be able to quickly reestablish your normal abilities after missing some days or even months. Of course, consistent practice is better, but life often has other plans. Try to be as consistent as possible and work back slowly to your normal levels after a long hiatus. Injuries can also be caused by cooling off from starting and stopping practice within a given session. If you must stop for an important reason during a session, warm up and ease back in the flow. Practicing unconsciously and mechanically can lead to injury. It is important to stay warm, tuned in, and to practice with awareness, according to the body’s own limits. Demonstrating poses to friends or students, without being warmed up, can also cause injury. Teachers must also be careful if they demonstrate incorrect ways of doing poses. Lifting and adjusting students into postures is another area where teachers must be careful not to strain their backs and joints.
Old Injuries
    A well-thought-out asana practice eventually works its way into every nook and cranny of the body. Where there are old injuries, adhesions, weaknesses, or scar tissue, the asanas will sometimes cause the injury to resurface as the body is healing and restructuring. Be careful to move very sensitively and gently when working with old injuries. It’s also important to consult an experienced body therapist or yoga teacherand use the internal feedback system described in this chapter to work with injuries.
Other Causes
    We have already discussed many other important tenets of practice in the Ah Ha! chapter. Whatever the difficulty, weakness, or injury, your yoga practice can develop beyond mere fitness conditioning into your own powerful, self-healing system, but it’s important to remember always to deal with your whole lifestyle when looking for causes of difficulties. I forgot this once when teaching a medical doctor who kept getting headaches after his yoga practice. I experimented with various adjustments and sequences a few times in class before remembering to ask questions about his lifestyle. When I did, he told me that he drank ten to fifteen cups of coffee each day! He said he would cut back before coming to class, and this detoxification manifested the cause of his problem. After reducing his coffee addiction and drinking more water, his headaches ceased. No amount of asana adjustments would have helped him.

Working with Injuries
    Muscles, tendons, ligaments, or nerves can experience strain or injury. Usually the time it takes to heal follows in the same order. Depending on the severity, of course, muscle injuries tend to heal faster than similar-scale injuries to ligaments or nerves. Medical and physical therapists once advised rest, support, and immobilization of injured areas until they healed. Contemporary wisdom and experience has shown that getting an area moving again, as soon as movement is not detrimental, accelerates healing and allows the area to heal better, stronger and without adhesions.
    Many therapists suggest an acronym, called RICES, to guide treatment:
R is for Rest—resting the injury during the acute phase before it is advisable to start movement.
I is for Ice—icing injured tissue helps prevent swelling and speeds recovery.
C is for Compression—wrapping an injury can help immobilize the area and reduce swelling.
E is for Elevation—keeping the hurt area at or above heart level helps with circulation and prevents fluids from accumulating.
S is for Support—supporting the