Ouch!

If yoga is such a gentle practice, why are so many people getting hurt?

By Carrie Schneider

Even though your hamstrings are aching, you approach the first Sun Salutation of class determined to keep your quads lifted and legs arrow-straight, all the while ignoring an internal warning to shelve that ego. You wince: "Uh-oh, this is going to hurt," and push on through your pain, believing our competitive culture's myth that pain means progress.

For many American yoga practitioners, it takes an injury to learn how to advance at a safe and comfortable pace. The learning curve was precipitous for Robin Aronson, associate publisher of Tikkun magazine in New York, who wandered into a yoga class at her gym two years ago and fell in love with the sweaty, Ashtanga-inspired practice being taught there. "It was a competitive environment, and I became fairly aggressive in it. I wanted to be really good," Aronson says. "So if something hurt a lot it didn't stop me from trying to do it. I was excited and just wanted to go for it—that's the culture of the gym I was in."

Within six months Aronson had begun to experience the debilitating hip pain that eventually drove her off the mat and into the office of an orthopedic surgeon. The journey, with stop-offs at a variety of alternative and traditional health-care practitioners, was excruciating. "When walking home after a long day, there were times I would be in so much pain I could not breathe," Aronson recalls.

As an MRI confirmed, the source of Aronson's pain was not tendonitis or soft tissue problems—the misdiagnoses of a movement therapist and rheumatologist, respectively—but a torn labrum, the band of fibrous tissue that surrounds the socket of the hip joint. Two weeks after the test, Aronson underwent arthroscopic surgery to repair the tear.

According to Aronson's orthopedist, Dr. Bryan Nestor of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, "We can't be sure yoga is what caused it, but the extreme positions of the hip she assumed with yoga postures likely contributed to the injury."

Aronson is less equivocal about where her practice failed. "Some teachers at the gym really encouraged pushing yourself. I learned a lot about my body from them. But it was the movement therapist who said, 'Don't push; the point of yoga is not to do it until it hurts, but to find where it's right for you.' And I thought, 'Well, how about that?' That was not the instruction I'd received."

If there's no single definable answer for how Aronson got injured, one thing is certain: By disallowing her observations, by doing yoga rather than being it, she arrived at the zone of potential injury all practitioners enter when asana practice supersedes yoga.

Are You Pushing It?

The psychology of injury has long interested psychotherapist Stephen Cope, M.S.W., L.I.C.S.W., scholar-in-residence at Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (Bantam) due out this fall. In his 10 years of teaching and studying, Cope has observed practitioners from beginners to considerably adept students striving for perfection. These days, as more and more guests arrive at Kripalu Center demanding vigorous practices—a departure from Kripalu's slower, mindful style of yoga—Cope finds himself urging a return to clarity about the intentions behind practice.

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