Curing An Epidemic of Over-stretching with Parighasana
Curing An Epidemic of Over-stretching: Rewiring our Experience from Stretch to Support with Parighasana
1. An Authentic Spiritual Warrior: Surrender Stretch, Embrace Support
In the realm of yoga, the ubiquitous metaphor of a 'warrior' within poses a paradox. Often, we've encountered classes where the instructor guides us into a 'warrior' pose, urging us to stretch our limits and push through discomfort. This relentless pursuit, referred to as 'doership' in yogic tradition, stands as a major pitfall for practitioners. It leads us from mindful awareness to a zealous fixation on achieving an arbitrary goal at any cost. This duality does not pave the path of growth; rather, it ultimately leads to injury, a truth affirmed by scientific findings and personal testimonies— as we will see in the text to come. Shambhavananda yoga values a different kind of spiritual warrior.
There is no doubt that the spiritual path is a challenging one, requiring sacrifice and persistence, but the challenges that we face are predominantly within us, and these battles are actually won through surrender. The Yogic Tradition teaches that the bliss we seek is actually within us, and that this bounty isn’t won by overcoming someone or something else, but by becoming ourself. As the following lessons teach us, doership usually has the opposite effect of our intentions— it seems that the harder we push ourselves towards a self imposed goal the further the joy we seek from that goal stays from us.This doesn't advocate for complacency, but rather emphasizes the necessity of balancing effort with surrender, ease, and gratitude. After all, as countless traditions have taught, we reap what we sow in life. Thus, our aim in this chapter is simple: to equip you with the tools to plant seeds of buoyant support in your hips, ensuring a lifetime of graceful stability and resilience.
2. A Perfect Storm of Hip Tightness: The scenario that has led many to overstretch their hips is familiar: prolonged sitting makes our hips feel tight and the perceived remedy is stretching— which is both true and false because the underlying issue often lies in weak hips manifesting as a sense of tightness. Attempting to address this, many overextend their hip joints, inadvertently inducing joint laxity and eventual wear and tear. Our unconscious attachment to the sensation of stretching, coupled with anatomical variations between contemporary practitioners and the pioneers of yoga, has sparked a pronounced surge in hip injuries within this specific category of poses. This issue is especially disheartening as yoga is often pursued for injury prevention and recovery. This is not a novel occurrence, nor an isolated case, but rather a well-documented medical concern that bears significance for both yoga instructors and practitioners alike.
In 2015, a yoga teacher immersed in the Iyengar tradition, aged in her early forties, found herself needing hip replacements due to injuries sustained from her yoga practice. Two years before her eventual surgery, she authored an article titled "Yogis, be careful with your joints," cautioning the yoga community about a tangible problem she and her fellow practitioners were encountering. In her words, "all too many longtime practitioners now own artificial joints to replace the ones they overused." Subsequently, a journalist from the New York Times embarked on an investigative report to delve into her assertions. Engaging with medical professionals of diverse backgrounds, he swiftly discerned that this issue was far from an isolated incident; it had become an unsettlingly common reality. He recounted, "To my astonishment, some of the nation's top surgeons declared the trouble to be real—so real that hundreds of women who did yoga were showing up in their offices with unbearable pain and undergoing costly operations to mend or even replace their hips.”
3. Embrace the Power of Support: Rethinking or approach to the hips
At the heart of the issue lies the tendency within the yoga community to overly prioritize hip opening over hip stability, often favoring aesthetics over authentic experience. Poses such as Trikonasana, Virabhadrasana two, and Lateral Angle are undoubtedly enriching postures with boundless benefits when approached from a perspective of solid support and stability. However, when executed solely for the purpose of achieving external hip rotation, they frequently pave the way for long-term injuries.
To better understand the nature of over-stretching in our hips, it is important to have an anatomical understanding of the joint itself. Numerous hip-opening poses aim to stretch the muscles at the front and inner regions of the hip, often tense due to the perpetual hip flexion, sitting, experienced throughout the day. Although the sensation of stretching these muscles can be gratifying, prolonged stretching eventually results in their overextension, and the initial feeling of stretch progressively retreats closer to the joint capsule until the practitioner begins stretching their precious ligaments.
Encircling the hip's joint capsule—its socket—is an array of robust ligaments offering support, including the Illiofemoral and pubofemoral ligaments. These ligaments function to constrain joint movement, preventing excessive stretching. However, an insatiable craving for a heightened stretch experience drives us perilously closer to the joint itself, exacting a substantial toll in the form of ligament laxity.
4. Labrum Damage and Implications: This laxity sets the stage for the joint to over-extend and encroach upon the cartilaginous matrix enveloping it—the labrum that lines the hip socket, known as the acetabulum. The culmination of these factors results in hip impingement, where the femoral head (the hip's ball) presses against the acetabulum (the hip's cup), causing actual tears within the cartilage lining.
In such instances, the labrum—cartilage encompassing the acetabulum—can sustain harm, triggering stiffness and discomfort in the hip and potentially leading to the development of arthritis. Washington University Physicians have documented that individuals afflicted with hip impingement might ultimately require total hip replacement surgery. This is the very scenario that our author Charlotte Bell and her contemporaries encountered, occurring just two years after her essay's composition.
5. Hip Replacements Abound: In his exposé on the subject, William Broad recounts the perspective of Michael J. Taunton, an orthopedic surgeon from the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Taunton disclosed that he first recognized the peril several years ago and now annually undertakes 10 to 15 hip replacement surgeries on individuals practicing yoga. Alarmingly, approximately 90 percent of these cases involve women. Broad's piece, titled "Women's Flexibility is a Liability in Yoga," underscores the anatomical origins of this concern. The contemporary yoga class, as it exists today, was largely shaped by male practitioners in India. Men's narrower hips allowed for increased external rotation with fewer consequences of hip impingement. Consequently, this issue was not as pronounced for them. However, due to the wider hips and therefore greater angle of hip rotation available in female yoga practitioners, these challenges are becoming increasingly tangible as they complete their first or second decade of practice.
6. Pausing to Feel the Path: Sowing Seeds of Surrender
The pressing question then becomes: How can we recalibrate and reimagine our approach to these timeless asanas in a manner that effectively supports the 82% of students in your forthcoming class? The first step to this shift in ideology comes from slowing down and beginning to feel the experience of the posture as we participate in it. Many of the issues explained above were the result of practitioners believing that there was a destination beyond their immediate experience— withstand this pain and you will somehow arrive at a destination free of pain. This is simply not how the yogic tradition views functional movement, as we described earlier, the maxim is a balance of effort and ease, Sthira and Sukha. To find this balance we have to start to feel more as we move in our postures, to feel the path as we walk it. The Shiva Sutras encapsulate this notion as "Anusamdhitsa," signifying the process of progressing towards a posture and then momentarily pausing to reestablish a connection with the path and essence of that posture. This approach, as outlined in the Sutras, allows the practitioner to 'arrive' at each juncture of their journey, fostering an approach that allows us to progress with inner sensation and avoid injury. This concept fundamentally embodies surrender—an act of progressing towards a posture while meticulously sensing every facet of the path that leads you there. As the Sutras teach it, “Here, just begin with some movement, any movement, and stop. Hold the beginning point of that movement with awareness. In Sanskrit, this state is called anusaṁdhitsā. By holding the very beginning of that movement, the goal of uniting the seeker of God consciousness with the God consciousness they seek, the spiritual aspirant with that to which they aspire, the one who recites mantra with mantra devatā, that Lord for whom the mantra is recited, is achieved.”
Summary & Reflection
The modern yoga community's fixation on extreme stretching, particularly in hip-opening poses, has led to a surge in hip injuries, challenging the practice's inherent goal of holistic well-being. Deep-rooted beliefs about hip flexibility, influenced by anatomical differences between past male yogis and today's predominantly female practitioners, drive many towards harmful extremes, resulting in issues like labrum tears and necessitating surgeries such as hip replacements. To combat this, there's an urgent need to shift the focus from mere stretching to understanding the anatomy and emphasizing support, stability, and mindful engagement with poses.It is important to prioritize hip stability over excessive opening, drawing inspiration from the Shiva Sutras and the concept of "Anusamdhitsa" to promote a mindful and supportive journey in postures.
Have you experienced pain or instability in your hips or low back after pushing deep into yoga poses? How can we strike a harmonious balance between the metaphorical 'warrior' mindset and the nurturing embrace of support in our yoga practice, ensuring that we cultivate growth while safeguarding ourselves from the potential pitfalls of overstretching and injury?
How do you understand the concept of Andusamdhitsa in your movement practice? Do you feel this is something you do a lot of, or something you wish you did more of?