Lawyers Type A? Who Knew?

I went to see a doctor earlier this week, and he diagnosed me as Type A. I am actually serious. Ok, maybe not a full diagnosis, but he said it was something he noticed. I sarcastically said to him, “what lawyers do you know that are Type A?” Then I tried to get around it and said, “but I work with kids.” His response was, “That’s a nice façade.” In other words, I could not get past him. I’m Type A.

Do you think lawyers have a reputation? (Of course I refrained from saying it was really a case of it taking one to know one. He is, after all, a neurosurgeon.)

He told me to stretch and relax. I saw another doctor the following day, and she wrote out three parts of a prescription for me: 1) Massage, 2) Yoga?, and 3) Stretch every 2 hours. What happened to the medical profession over night? She even told me to follow my gut.

But I think they were trying to tell me something. And it is partially about lawyers, but mostly it is about people in general who get worked up about a lot. We have to really try to calm down. We have to try to relax. We have to try to let go. Talk about an oxymoron.

What does it mean to be Type A? Well, Wikipedia, of course, has the answer. It was actually originally created as a theory to describe people likely to get coronary heart disease. I never knew that. But the general notion is that people who are Type A are high-strung workaholics. It is not surprising, then, that such people would become lawyers and doctors and other high intensity professionals.

But yes, that is why it is even more important for such people to incorporate yoga and meditation into our lives. But then comes the problem . . . workaholics always feel they have to be doing something. That sort of defeats the purpose of meditation. The point is to do nothing, even though that is sort of something. Sort of.  It certainly does not meet the definition of something for Type A personality folks.

But then there is an underlying problem, should I say, with Type A folks taking up something like yoga, particularly in the United States where yoga is synonymous with putting your foot behind your head and sweating to death on a mat. As the doctor said to me, and what I think prompted the comment about my being Type A in the first place, he was worried I would take his advice too far and push myself too much. The same is true for any asana-focused yoga practice. It can become too much, and even harmful, if not done in a yogic sense, but instead is done in a more Type A sense.

Of course, at its core, yoga is about balance . . . on all levels. It helps us see our limits work within them. But until we gain those tools from the practice, our well-patterned neural pathways run us. And as I have learned these past several months, those come back when the yoga falls away.

So what do we do about it? We learn to watch ourselves. Yoga is an amazing tool, and an amazing way of being. But it can be misconstrued, particularly by certain people, and there is no question lawyers and other professionals more likely than not fall into that category of people. There is nothing wrong with being Type A. One of my dear friends reminded me the world needs people like us. But we also have to be careful. We have to be careful not to hurt ourselves by trying to help ourselves. Most importantly, we have to remember to stop and do nothing sometimes. We have to remember to relax and let go.

Sometimes it is even a literal prescription. And that is where the question mark comes from above. The second doctor says yoga is fine . . . when it is. But be careful. We can benefit from working a lot and taking our work seriously. We can benefit from having order in our lives. But as the Wikipedia article points out, these traits can lead to being hostile and irritated with others. It is how we get to the downward spiral of emails.

So whether it is our bodies or our interactions with others, we need to be careful. And this week I had two doctors prescribe relaxation to me. Go figure. I guess that is why I’m sharing it with the world. It’s a great prescription for anyone, particularly those of us who may take even our need to relax a little too seriously.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Lawyers Type A? Who Knew?, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal. 

Proving Meditation Works?

Earlier this week, my uncle sent me the article, “The Morality of Meditation.” Similar to many articles these days, it is too short, and gives nothing but the briefest explanation of the topic, but it is an interesting idea.

The author, along with several colleagues, decided to test whether meditation actually makes people more compassionate towards others. The “test” they used was pretty clever. They had a group of people meditate for 8 weeks and a control group. Then they had people from both groups come back to the office where the waiting room had three chairs, two of which were already occupied. The subject always sat in the open chair, and then a fourth person came into the room on crutches and groaned in pain as he leaned against the wall. The question was whether the subject would give up his/her seat if the other two (who worked for the researchers) did not.

There have been many studies done that people are less likely to help others if they see other people are not offering assistance. Those studies, if you have never read them or heard about them, are actually quite frightening. Peer pressure is a powerful force, even when it is negative – not negative in the sense that you are doing something bad, but negative in the sense you are not acting. So others choosing not to act causes us to be less likely to act even to help someone in obvious distress.

This study found that people who had meditated were 3 times as likely to offer their seat to the guy on crutches. That is the “good” news. The not so good news is that it was still only about 50% of people. But their initial conclusion is that meditation does, or might, help people be more compassionate to others. (HUGE CAVEAT: I’m basing my understanding of this study on an article in the NY Times that was shorter than this post, and I have my own twists.) Also important, only 39 people participated in the study, and only 20 of them were asked to meditate. That is a very small sample.

All of those caveats aside, what does this tell us? First, I think it tells us that we as a society are obsessed with meditation as a fad. We want to know how it can help us. We want proof. I mean, what is the point of meditating if we do not get something out of it? I like science and studies as much as anyone, and I think I have even posted how excited I am about such studies in the past. But I’m getting tired of them. I do not want a scientist telling me meditation works. I just want to meditate. And I think that's my yoga side taking over my lawyer side. Lawyers like evidence. I really do like evidence, but I do not always need it.

But I see two other issues with this study, neither good nor bad, but just interesting. First, the guy who needed help walked into the room on crutches. That is an obvious injury. Of course, it does not appear he was really injured at all, just a research tool told to act in a certain way. I have been living for the past 6 months with the opposite issue. I look fine, but I hurt a lot. I feel terrible when I go to the grocery store and do not help bag my own groceries. I feel terrible when I choose not to sit because it is easier to stand, but then I am towering over people feeling like I am acting superior to them. I would have actually done the exact opposite of all the research subjects. I would not have sat in the empty chair. I would have stood up, and that’s probably true even before I was in pain. And so I wonder, how many of the research subjects had a reason not to get up for the guy on crutches? We do not all wear our lives on our sleeves. 

We all have hidden stories, and far more goes into those stories than whether we meditated that day. I would love to live in a world where we are all better at asking people their stories rather than making assumptions based on what we see only with our eyes.

And that brings me to my final point – what about compassion for self? This research study was conducted because the researchers were tired of all the studies about meditation being great for stress, memory, and intelligence. They wanted to show it helps people act more compassionately towards others. The article ends by saying, “The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.”

But they were comparing this study to studies about performance, not about self compassion. I have never looked for such a study, but I would be surprised if one existed. How do we test that? How do we know if we are treating ourselves as kindly as we should? How do we know when we are offering ourselves the amount of love we all deserve?

There is no question in my mind that compassion for others is a great benefit of meditating. I have meditated specifically to cultivate such compassion. And certainly, it’s great to have a little less stress in life as a result of meditation. And perhaps these are all areas that researchers will continue to study. But we also have to learn to have self compassion. After all, the heart pumps blood to itself first.

So while all these tests and research are happening, I may or may not pay a lot of attention. Interesting to see the proof, but the real magic, no proof needed, happens on the mat/cushion and in how we conduct ourselves to ourselves and in the real world, not how 39 people conducted themselves in an office on one particular day.

What changes have you noticed in yourself if you meditate? What changes have you noticed when you stop? That’s always my big clue to the benefits of meditation, and that has nothing to do with research.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Proving Meditation Works?, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

The Last Human Freedom

Freedom is an interesting word. It can mean physical freedom, such as not being in prison or enslaved. It can mean emotional freedom, as I wrote about three years ago. It can mean political freedom, which we are watching unfold around the world, but particularly in Egypt and Syria right now. And that is what we in the United States celebrate on July 4^th every year.

There are all sorts of arguments we are not free in our lives. We are expected to work and pay off debt. There is no country in the world without a government. And certainly there has been a lot of discussion about freedom when our phone logs are being watched by government agencies. But as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, governments “deriv[e] their power from the consent of the people.”

But as I have said many times before, I am not publicly political. What I think of the revolutions happening in Syria and Egypt, and what I think of Edward Snowden and the NSA, is not really important. But I think all these situations reflect perfectly what Jefferson said. We have to consent to any limitations on our freedom.

And that includes limitations on any type of freedom. Our deepest freedom, however, is one that we should never consent to limit, though many of us (including myself) often do.

Viktor Frankl, who was a holocaust survivor, said, “The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.” We get to choose how we respond to any situation. We can respond with anger and revolt. We can respond with acceptance. We can respond with fear. We can respond knowing we have joy and contentment within ourselves, and nothing external can change that. But we have to remember to consciously choose that response. Frankl further stated, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

I think it is important to look at the larger, political freedoms, not only for ourselves but for others. We live in a world where child prostitution and human trafficking occur. We live in a world where Google and Facebook are not allowed to exist in certain countries. But even if we had all of our political freedoms, how many of us consent to our own lack of personal freedoms? How many of us forget that space between stimulus and response to get to our last human freedom of attitude? 

Lawyers can be great at helping people obtain political freedoms as well as keeping people out of prison. But law does little to help us break free of our personal freedoms. Yoga, however, helps us there. It is not always easy. These are the limitations that are much harder to see. There is no whisleblower inside us to tell us when we are limiting ourselves. We have to learn to listen. And in that listening we have to ask if we are reacting or responding.

I notice when I am getting caught in my limitations when I am driving. Even after more than a decade of yoga and trying to learn to let go of my anger, when someone cuts me off on the road, I sometimes go into a fit of rage. Some days I can let it go quickly, but other times it boils inside of me even when I know it serves no purpose except to drain my energy. I know I am not alone in this. Road rage is a pretty serious issue and sometimes leads to death. Thus, driving is my teaching time as well. And I do a lot of driving.

Another common area of limiting freedom is our response to our physical bodies. We often feel defined by them rather than our higher Being. I cannot tell you how often I hear people say, “I’m too fat,” “I’m not flexible,” or “I’m in too much pain.” We let our bodies limit our souls. There is no doubt that our bodies have limitations at times. But look at the amazing examples of people who have done so much despite their limited bodies. Stephen Hawking, Roger Ebert post cancer, and all the stories you have hopefully heard of people on their death beds with a smile on their face and love in their hearts.

Our Being is bigger than our bodies and bigger than our road rage. No matter how limited we feel, we have to consent to giving up the freedom to choose our attitude. We can also choose not to consent. We can choose to feel that freedom regardless of external consequences. So, while people are celebrating a revolution over 200 years ago with barbeques, parades, and fireworks, how are you celebrating your internal freedoms?

Are you remembering to breathe deeply? Are you taking the time to ask if you are doing what you were put on this planet to do? Are you letting yourself forgive others as well as yourself? Are you finding gratitude in moments that at first are difficult? Are you choosing an attitude to serve your highest self or one that makes life more difficult? As Viktor Frankl said, this is the last of human freedoms. Nothing external has the power to effect us without our consent. It may seem difficult, or even impossible, to choose a different attitude in the face of adversity, but the choice is always there. What attitude will you choose?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Last Human Freedom, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

When Yoga Meets the Law

The title of this blog, Is Yoga Legal, was sort of a joke. A friend in yoga teacher training said she had it open on her browser, and her daughter looked at it and said, “Mom, is yoga legal?” as if there were an actual question of its legality. We all laughed and thought such a question would never arise.

But it did. In Encinitas, California.

A brief overview in case you are unaware of the case: Encinitas, California began to offer yoga in its schools. This yoga was funded by the Jois Foundation, the group that promotes Ashtanga yoga. Some Christians in town got upset by this and sued the school district for allowing religion in schools, something that, if true, would be a clear violation of the First Amendment if it is the school promoting that religion. The parents said yoga has a Hindu origin, and therefore, by allowing yoga in schools, the schools were promoting Hinduism.

To make a long story short, there was a several-day trial, with experts, and the judge ruled earlier this week the yoga in the school did not violate the First Amendment. Yoga is just exercise. YogaDork has a great post with some great quotes from the ruling. The Jois Foundation spokesman said the yoga was a way to keep children away from sugar and video games. Of course, the school district took out any reference to Sanskrit and called the postures by English names.

Here is the overarching sentiment from the judge’s ruling:

“Yoga as it has developed in the last 20 years is rooted in American culture, not Indian culture,” San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer said. “It is a distinctly American cultural phenomenon. A reasonable student would not objectively perceive that Encinitas school district yoga advances or promotes religion.”

So, I guess the answer is, sort of. Yoga is legal so long as it is not really yoga. The Jois Foundation “Ashtanga Yoga” webpage says Ashtanga yoga “is an ancient system that can lead to liberation and greater awareness of our spiritual potential. The eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga (aṣṭāṅgayoga) can be described as eight disciplines.” I have discussed the yamas and niyamas on this blog. I have said over and over again there is more to yoga than asana, the postures.

But does that make it a religion? Does that mean it should not be in schools? Can yoga have a benefit when the spirit is removed?

Honestly, I do not have an answer. We had yoga in my high school. It was offered as part of our Physical Education program. No one thought twice about it. And no, I did not take that class (I was a band geek in the marching band instead of doing other PE). But several times since I have started getting into yoga more for myself, I have wondered whether that is where it should have been.

Just like the Pledge of Allegiance, children in the Encinitas School District may opt out of the yoga classes. But the parents argue that makes them feel ridiculed and somehow different, which is a test the Supreme Court uses for whether a school is endorsing a religious belief.

And if the Judge and the School District are correct, why do I have this blog? Why are there literally hundreds, if not thousands, of yoga blogs on the interwebs? They are not all talking about stretching. There are enough blogs and websites for that. And if we take the yoga out of the yoga, why not just call it a relaxation/stretching class? Is that not cool enough?

Yoga is a billion-dollar, secular industry in the United States. It is also an ancient spiritual practice of which asana is a small part. Both sides in the Encinitas argument are right. And based upon the facts of this particular case, the judge seems to have made a correct decision (I have not read the entire ruling, nor did I follow the case all that closely, but based upon the arguments and ruling I have seen, that is my early-morning, pre-coffee legal analysis opinion.)

But perhaps we need a different discussion. No one does it better than Linda over at Linda’s Yoga Journey. Perhaps mindfulness and deep breathing and stretching should be in our schools, but calling it yoga does create a possible assumption of something more. Do I really think schools are indoctrinating schools with Hinduism? Of course not. But do I think we lose something in the yoga world when judges rule that yoga is nothing more than exercise? Absolutely!

What do you think of the case? Did you follow it closely? Do you think the judge ruled correctly? Do you think the Jois Foundation is speaking double speak? I’m curious. Because, as I said, I certainly do not have the answers, but at least one judge in America thinks yoga is legal.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, When Yoga Meets the Law, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Good Guy Bad Guy

I just returned from attending another conference, and this one was focused almost exclusively on child abuse and maltreatment. It took place in Las Vegas. Let me just say that a conference with a focus on such difficult and heart wrenching topics really needs to be in a place where people can escape for some quiet time. Vegas is not that place. They blast music onto the streets. There were so many people we had to wait in line to get out of the Bellagio. It was an incredible conference, but I’m happy to be home!

On the last day of the conference, I attended a 3-hour presentation on child sex trafficking. Of course, as the speaker reminded us, we should really be calling it child prostitution. That is what it is. Trafficking sounds less bad, but it’s child prostitution, and yes it happens in the United States. And there is nothing ok about child prostitution. But something struck me during the presentation that made my yoga mind hesitate.

The speaker continuously referred to the perpetrators as bad guys. He often referred to himself as the good guy.

I want to reiterate that I find nothing good about child prostitution. But I also cannot wrap my head around this good guy vs. bad guy scenario. We all know it is child abusers who get treated the worst in prisons. There is something different about child abuse, particularly about child sexual abuse, than just about any other crime.

I have written about this issue before – “When we Dehumanize the Dehumanizer.” That post was also written after attending a conference about child abuse (a different conference, but both were great). And 1.5 years later I still find myself struggling with this issue. I still cannot find myself buying into the good guy vs. bad guy mentality.

Last time I mentioned Gandhi’s quote, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” But I think there is more to it than that, something deeper and more profound. We are all connected. I have known this my entire life. It was not until I started doing yoga, however, that I realized there were other people who realized it as well. Thus, if I consider someone else a bad guy, what does that make my connection to him or her? Because whether I like it or not, I am connected to that person even if we are never in the same room.

I still think we do better by addressing the actions as the problem rather than the person as the problem. We may be able to make the actions stop. But if instead we speak ill of people, then we begin to say there are people who are less than. That is dangerous because it has no end. At what point does our judgment stop? Perhaps child sexual abuse is the “easy” example, but if we start there, where does it stop?

I still do not have the complete answers to this. I struggle with seeing the way humans treat other humans, whether as child abuse, war, or bigotry. It hurts to see on any level. But I wonder whether we accomplish any good, or whether we create far more harm, when we talk about good guys and bad guys.

When I was a camp counselor many years ago, I remember in our training on discipline, we were told never to tell a child he or she was bad. We could say the action was not right or even bad, but the child never was. I know there are a lot of people who think that sort of parenting/discipline is not strong enough, but I can say I never had to call parents on my campers. It worked. I do not know if it works everywhere, but it worked for me there. I see no difference with any action, no matter how abhorrent.

And now, because of my yoga training, I can understand why. As soon as I begin to judge others, I judge myself. We are deeply connected, and whatever I say and do will definitely come back.

What do you think? Do you talk about people as good or bad? What are the repercussions if we do?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Good Guy Bad Guy, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Restorative Bliss . . . Just What the Doctor Ordered

Until yesterday I had not been to a yoga class since the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Thus, it had been nearly 7 months. Yes, SEVEN! I cannot believe it either. That is not to say I have not “done yoga,” whatever that means. But I had not attended a yoga class. Nor had I attended a group meditation. I sort of felt like an appendage was missing. 

But my back is at a place, at least for now, where it is safe to move a bit. I asked my doctor and my physical therapist if it would be safe to go to a restorative yoga class. I even showed the physical therapist some ideas of what that might mean. They both said it should be safe as long as I was careful. So, I waited for a class I had wanted to attend for quite some time, taught by a friend of mine, someone who understands my current physical limitations. It felt like a homecoming when I walked in the door, even though I had never been to that particular class before. It was a familiar world, and a world I had greatly missed. 

Restorative yoga is about turning inward and, well, restoring ourselves. It is aptly named. It nourishes the parasympathetic nervous system in a way that no other form of physical asana, except perhaps yin, can do. With props for support, and holding poses for 3-5 minutes, or longer, the body can surrender and open in ways it never feels safe to do when moving too much. It gives our bodies and minds time to move beyond habits and into resetting our nervous systems and brains to actually relax. 

But for me, it was still a place where old habits came up. There were poses I could not do, and others I had to modify a great deal. Of course I know that the point of yoga in general, and restorative yoga in particular is to meet ourselves where we are, wherever that is, but it is difficult to know what my body was once capable of doing and now knowing it cannot do that right now. I was embarrassed that I could not do one of the poses at all. Even the alternative poses seemed scary for my body. It was difficult not to do them, but I knew it was best.

So instead I just simply lay on my back with my knees bent and imagined I was doing what everyone else was doing. I tuned into their energy and their release, and for a brief moment, I felt a bit of my own. We all absorb the energy of those around us. How many times have you noticed when someone came into a room when you did not hear or see them enter? If we are constantly around people in stress, our bodies and energies respond with like stress. But when we are around people who are coming together simply to let go, surrender, and safely allow their bodies and minds to relax, we can do the same. In fact, we automatically do the same, even when we are programmed to hold the stress in.

And yes, that is exactly what my doctor prescribed. She told me to relax. Of course, about an hour before the class when she called me, I reminded her I was going to a yoga class, and her first reaction was, “be careful.” I had to remind her it was a restorative class, and she sort of laughed and said, “then relax and restore.” So, my doctor stopped short of actually prescribing yoga, but she came close.

And it felt amazing to be back in that space, back in a world where people aim to be calm. And it was a wonderful reminder that yoga has so many different facets and ways of being for us. We all move so much in our lives, almost never stopping. Restorative yoga is the antidote to those physical and mental stressors. It cannot cure all ills. I still hurt. But it cracked the way open into a memory of relaxation and restoration of body, mind, and soul. And that should be what every doctor orders.

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Restorative Bliss . . . Just What the Doctor Ordered, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Knowing Anatomy

Yoga teachers, in general, do not know a lot about anatomy. That's a controversial statement, for sure, but hear me out. Many people become certified to teach yoga after a weekend workshop. The vast majority of us become certified after 200 hours, many of which are spent learning how to do asana, and sometimes learning about the other seven limbs. Anatomy may be discussed, but I would doubt even ¼ of yoga teacher training programs have a skeleton in the teaching room and whether there is in-depth discussion about how muscles, bones, ligaments, and fascia interact.

When I was new to yoga, I used to ask my yoga teachers for help before and after class with various injuries. With my current injury, long before it became surgery-worthy, I asked a world-renowned teacher for some ideas. Granted, he spent five minutes with me instead of longer private sessions, but at no point did he say, “you might have a disc issue.” Even after my 20-hour Anatomy for Yoga class, I had no idea what I was facing.

And perhaps that is the lesson.

One of my pet peeves with lawyers who represent children, or do any work with families, is that they often say, “I’m a lawyer not a social worker” when asked to help clients through the mess that is both juvenile and family law (emotional mess, not necessarily system mess). But I remember my great uncle once telling me that, as a lawyer, he had to know his clients’ businesses better than they knew them themselves. How else can you properly advise them? In other words, we lawyers have to understand our clients on the deepest levels. There is no other way to be a proper lawyer.

And perhaps this is the lesson yoga needs to learn from law. Yoga teachers not only have to know asana (the law), they have to know the scientific anatomy as well. We may not be doctors, but we have to know the body incredibly well. As yoga takes the country by storm and becomes a multi-billion dollar industry, there are a lot of discussions we need to have. There is a lot of talk about whether yoga is, at its roots, religious. How much of “true” yoga is lost in the gym culture? Do we really have to chant? Do we really have to know Sanskrit? What about this meditation? And you want me to “live” my yoga off the mat? What does that mean? Those are all really important questions, and I have struggled with all of them myself in my life and on this blog.

But at the end of the day, the vast majority of people at least start with yoga as a physical exercise. I did not, and it took me a long time to recognize that other people do. Most of them.

So perhaps the most important question, if only to keep from hurting people, is “how much should yoga teachers understand about the clients we serve?” I was talking to a fellow yoga teacher friend the other day and opined that perhaps my current injury is really an opportunity to share these issues with others going forward. I will never teach a yoga class the same again. I had a doctor spend two hours with me the other day, and much of that time was an explanation of how and why spines get weak, why discs herniate, and how that affects the rest of the body. Prior to that discussion, I had read a ton on sciatica, studied yoga anatomy, and read my own books, but what she told me was news – a new way to look at this issue. And it made a lot of sense.

So, what are we really doing in yoga? I am not always pleased with the current specialization of professionals in our culture. My spine surgeon cannot explain medications to me. A pain doctor cannot explain anatomy to me. But the bigger issue facing yoga, and perhaps the law, is that we simply are not willing to take the next, and most important step. As yoga teachers, we have to know the body better than anyone. We cannot say, “I’m a yoga teacher not a doctor.” (For the record, I have not heard anyone actually say that except to say they cannot diagnose.)

There is absolutely no question that the huge benefit of yoga is the ability to turn inside and know our bodies intuitively better. That is amazing and wonderful. But it is not the entire picture, certainly not in a 24/7 culture where as soon as class ends people are back on their cell phones. Living in an ashram, we would have the time to truly and fully know our bodies. And for people who choose that path, thank you! But for the rest of us, let’s use the information we can from modern science. We can look at x-rays and MRIs and understand the body on an entirely new level. Together, intuition and science can give us the insight about ourselves to truly heal.

This multi-billion dollar industry has brought us cute pants and cute slogans, but has it brought us health? We can argue ad infinitum about whether yoga has lost its true essence because of this explosion of people participating, and my answer would be yes. But I think there is an area where we can all agree yoga teachers, and the yoga industry, need to step up their game.

If we are going to be sharing this with the masses, we need to understand the masses better. We need to know the bodies first. We need to know them intuitively, as the yoga masters have for centuries, and we need to know them in a way in which we can speak to a modern audience, to the people whose only time to themselves may be on the yoga mat. We need not take out the other seven limbs to do this. This is an addition, not a subtraction. And for the people who take classes, our clients/consumers, whatever word you choose, you need to tell us to step up our game. You need to ask your yoga teachers what they really know about anatomy. It is, after all, your body. 

What do you know about anatomy? How do you share that with yourself and others?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Knowing Anatomy, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.