Everybody Upside-Down

Let gravity work for you. Inversions are good for your lungs, heart, thyroid, and more.

By Yoko Yoshikawa

Unfortunately, however, beginning and veteran yoga students are showing up in the offices of bodyworkers, chiropractors, and medical professionals with compression of the upper spine and impaired mobility in the neck, presumably from the practice of inversions.

In a culture that emphasizes competition and achievement, some students are clearly flinging themselves into inversions too soon. Couple that with the desultory nature of many people's practices—one class a week at best, on a drop-in basis—and classes that are too large for the teacher to see everyone in a given pose, and you have the recipe for possible disaster.

How, then, do we evaluate and approach inversions, poses that are said to be invaluable and that possess distinct physiological benefits? We can start by sculling back through the years and studying the role of inversions in classical yoga, at the river's source.

Fountain of Youth

Yogis in India have experimented with their own bodies and breath in search of enlightenment for at least 5,000 years. What they came to understand about themselves was a direct result of sustained self-study and contemplation, or svadhyaya.

In their stringent meditation and ascetic practices, over the slow unfolding of days and months and years, they came to know and love the deep, enduring movements in the body—the pulse and rhythm of fluids and electric charges—and put exercises, images, and language to those movements, so we could follow.

The ancient texts state that there are seven main chakras (or psychic energy centers) along the vertical axis of the body. At the risk of being reductive, one might describe hatha yoga as practices designed to raise prana, or life force, up the spine, the path of the chakras. David Gordon White, in his fascinating book, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (University of Chicago, 1999), writes of an "inner void" that begins at the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine. It runs upward through the heart, and ends at the fontanelle, or "cleft of brahman," known as the brahmarandra, in the cranial vault. He quotes the Kathaka Upanishad (6.16), which states: "There are a hundred and one channels of the heart. One of these passes up to the crown of the head. Going up by it, one goes to immortality."

The Natha siddhas and other Tantric schools, forebears of the hatha yoga tradition, believed that amrita, the nectar of immortality, was held within the cranial vault, at the seventh chakra, the sahasrara chakra. The valued nectar, meting out our days, dropped down through the center of the body and was consumed in the fire of the torso. Turn yourself upside down, the reasoning went, and amrita would be retained, thus prolonging life and preserving one's prana.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika lists Viparita Karani Mudra as one of "the ten mudras which conquer old age and death." Unfortunately, that requires a daily practice of Viparita Karani Mudra for three hours!

From the Goraksha Shataka, a twelfth- or thirteenth-century text on hatha yoga, we learn that "in the region of the navel dwells the lonely sun, whose essence is fire; located at the base of the palate is the eternal moon, whose essence is nectar. That which rains down from the downturned mouth of the moon is swallowed by the upturned mouth of the sun. The practice [of Viparita Karani] is to be performed as a means to obtaining the nectar [which would otherwise be lost]."

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