How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body

[Guest guest]

The NY Times reports on the state of yoga in America today. In 2011, an estimated 20 million practice yoga. The growth of yoga has outpaced it's capacity for safe training and endangered both participants and yoga as a healing modality. Yoga has grownup in America in the free-market rather than in a healthcare academic institution, to the long-term disadvantage of the potential profession.Simply stated, yoga (and it's fruit, meditation) need an institutional research setting in order to reveal it's benefits to humanity. Associating with a healthcare institution would be a win-win for both yoga and the defining institution: yoga would gain academic credibility and the assurance that it's teachers are properly trained and safe for the public, and the institution would gain 20 million + adherents, safely guided toward yoga and meditation's great therapeutic potentials. IMHO, chiropractic is the natural healthcare institution to absorb yoga and meditation.The Scientific Revolution, with it's emphasis on reductionist rationality, has historically denigrated body/mind approaches to human health. Dr. Palmer's third form of subluxation, auto-suggestion, points us professionally toward thinking as a critical form of human health expression, but remains professionally immature in it's understanding and practical application. While science has broadened it's investigation of the ancient "human science" of self-discovery represented by yoga and meditation, it has progressed largely via the efforts of motivated individuals. Professionally, allopathy is still distant from the practical revelations of Quantum physics that an energetic wave function underlies material particle functions; that "the way we think" can beneficially influence human health. The 'new physics' and the failure of pharmacological medicine is driving science toward the exploration of mind/body therapeutics. I'm sure that yoga and meditation, like all widely practiced but unlicensed activities, will be brought under institutional guidance sooner rather than later. Why not chiropractic? One further thought: the Yoga Sutras (of Putanjali), the ancient foundation of yoga, tells us that only two criteria (essentially the same) must be met when practicing asanas, or physical postures: 1) that every posture in gravity be completely at-ease; and 2) that there be no shaking in posture (that weight rests primarily on bones rather than fatiguing muscles). Both of these admonitions demand that a consciousness of feeling tone dictate relaxation onto the skeletal system in all postural circumstances. In an excessively vain culture such as America, the emphasis on yoga has been on external form, how one looks in pose, rather than seeking an internal awareness of deep relaxation in the midst of omnipresent gravitational forces, or how one feels moment to moment. Consciousness of one's inner state in gravity is the safeguard against injury while practicing yoga; anything less is not yoga.How Yoga Can Wreck Your Bodyhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?_r=1 & hp Sears, DC, IAYT1218 NW 21st AvePortland, Oregon 97209v: 503-225-0255f: 503-525-6902www.docbones.com