The New Yoga: From Cults and Dogma to Science and Sanity

By Rob Walker

The New Yoga: From Cults and Dogma to Science and Sanity!

Where did most of your yoga moves come from? A guru from the annals of Indian folklore? Or are those "thousand-year-old poses" really a twentieth century invention hidden behind a veil of tall stories? Were they based on movement science–or cooked-up creations with a big pinch of folklore? The New Yoga takes a brutally hard look at these critical questions. It proposes six radical steps to strip away the nonsense and provide common-sense yoga for the future, based on movement science:

• Stretching is not the primary goal. Really? Yes. More important are ten other benefits including two new buzzwords, proprioception and interoception.
• Mobility tops flexibility. Focus on better control over a safe range of movement.
• "Practice and all is coming." Not so! Despite the famous guru's oft quotes words, we may never achieve certain poses. Trying will lead to injury.
• Avoid repetitive stress and encourage brain health with frequent and varying moves on and off the mat.
• 'Pretzels' pushing extreme flexibility lead to injury and misplaced envy. Hyper-mobility is not something to envy; it's sad.
• Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Maintain what works but question all for good evidence.
Rob Walker quotes a wide range of experts and speaks from his own 20-year yoga teacher-training experience. He dumps accepted dogma behind much current teaching and brings a fresh sparkle of evidence and science to twenty-first century yoga.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228823469

Rob Walker

About the AuthorRob Walker is an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher at the 500-hour level with the Yoga Alliance. He has studied yoga in India on three occasions and holds a fourth level of certification in Iyengar Yoga, a style he no longer subscribes to. Rob had a long and successful career in journalism in London and Canada before turning a passion for yoga into teaching twenty years ago. In 2001 he switched from writing on health care to owning yoga studios. His current focus and passion is training yoga teachers at his yoga college, helping them understand the principles and benefits of The New Yoga.

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The New Yoga

Copyright © 2020 by Rob Walker

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-2345-2 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-2344-5 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-2346-9 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part One

Chapter 1 The Surprising Origins of Modern Postural Yoga 1918–1947

Chapter 2 The Surprising Origins of Modern Postural Yoga,1947 to the present day

Part Two

Chapter 3 Controlled Range of Movement

Chapter 4 Frequent, Not Repetitive Movement

Chapter 5 Interoception and Proprioception

Chapter 6 Balance, Strength and Endurance

Chapter 7 Yoga: The Key to Improved Breathing and Longevity

Chapter 8 Pain Management

Chapter 9 Relaxation and Stress Reduction

Chapter 10 Yoga for Better Posture

Chapter 11 Functional Movement over Alignment

Chapter 12 Hypermobility, a Questionable Advantage

Chapter 13 Adjustments, To Do or Not To Do?

Chapter 14 Individual vs. Group Classes

Chapter 15 My Journey and How It Led to The New Yoga

References and Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Preface

"Any assertion that transnational postural yoga is of a piece with . . . Indian yogic tradition is . . . highly questionable."

Mark Singleton (2010, 27)

Many yoga teachers have started to question what is taught in yoga, what is of value, what is questionable and what is frankly, dangerous, or at best ill-informed. Perhaps for the first time The New Yoga takes a hard look at those concerns, recounts current yoga’s strange and unlikely origins and then suggests how asana (poses) can become safer, more inclusive and evidence-based.

Many have been led to believe the poses that dominate the physical practice of today came from the misty origins of yoga over several millennia. The New Yoga points instead to an American physical culturist and a Danish gymnast (among others) as more influential to today’s yoga, than cave-dwelling Tibetan mystics and Hindu seers of old.

But reluctant to throw out the baby with the bathwater, The NewYoga, seeks to maintain the amazing gifts and insights that come from Mysore, Pune and other Indian centres of yoga inspiration, albeit mostly created in the early 20th century.

Drawing on the wisdom of modern yoga historians, functional scientists, biomechanists, yogi anatomists and the author’s own experience, The New Yoga plays down the obsession with flexibility. Instead of the Cirque du Soleil image of yoga portrayed on Instagram, The New Yoga emphasizes strength, endurance, mindfulness, breath, posture and other gifts that yoga offers but are rarely the focus of current teaching.

The New Yoga recounts the myths and tales frequently fabricated to give authority to the guru’s own words. It shows the yoga we practice today was a transnational blend of gymnastics, body culture and performance with a tiny dash of ancient yogic spice.

It is a mixed blessing that there is no regulating authority governing the diverse world of yoga, as with massage and physical therapy. Yoga has always been free from the shackles of spiritual or secular authorities. But without official oversight, superficially trained teachers often teach the yoga of today in neighborhood studios. Some unquestioningly repeat the words handed down from generation to generation of well-meaning but sometimes poorly informed predecessors.

This book is not one of primary scholarship, but a serious attempt to bring an overview to the history of modern yoga and point us towards a more effective and safer future. Hopefully, this book will inspire yoga teachers to continually learn, question and grow; and for the discriminating students, they will choose yoga studios and teachers more wisely.

Introduction

Overview and Rationale: Six Key Principles That Overturn Your Assumptions About Yoga

Yoga is not about flexibility, stretching, or moving further or deeper into any posture. Yoga is about a way of living, which encourages moderation and mindful movement and thinking.

—Dr. Ginger Garner, PhD physical therapist,

author of Medical Therapeutic Yoga

In the last twenty years, yoga has bloomed from a slightly weird and questionable spiritual practice associated with a stereotype of hippies smoking dope to a mainstream pursuit of thirty-six million Americans. But what goes by the name of yoga has, in many cases, become confused between the yoga taught by the great Indian gurus of the twentieth century together with their first generation of Western teachers and, on the other hand, the overwhelming truths evolving from the march of science.

In 2016, Diane Bruni, one of North America’s more prominent yoga teachers, started the Yoga and Movement Research Community on Facebook. Her aim was to provide a forum to challenge earlier assumptions handed down largely from those first Western teachers. In little more than three years the closed site boasts more than 28,000 members including many yoga teachers from around the world eager to read about and participate in a vigorous and serious debate about where yoga is going. Many are frustrated with assumptions about the imagined infallibility of the traditional yoga gurus’ teachings, their patriarchal culture and their unchallenged beliefs. Like the numerous yoga teachers and practitioners who subscribe to Bruni’s Facebook page, I have found my views evolving rapidly about what is important in yoga ideology and what needs to be discarded.

Ignorant of the facts several decades ago, I, and others implicitly credited the ‘big three,’ Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his students, Pattabhi Jois and BKS Iyengar, with virtually super-human knowledge of yoga asana handed down through the centuries from guru to disciple. One of my senior teachers suggested Iyengar may have ‘channeled’ his amazing insights. In Pune, India, it was widely suggested at his studio that he was a reincarnation of Patanjali, the ‘Father’ of traditional yoga, whose writings are said to be 2,000 years old. These were narratives that these gurus disingenuously conveyed to support the authority of their teaching. More recently I have been strongly influenced by The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by one of my yoga teachers, Norman Sjoman (1999), as well as Yoga Body by Cambridge scholar, Mark Singleton (2010), and The Path of Modern Yoga by Elliott Goldberg (2016). For the first time, these three authors brought the sobering spotlight of historical research into scholarly works and thereby illuminated the former shadowy origins of today’s yoga practices.

Singleton set the yoga world on fire by concluding that the ‘father’ of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya’s method was not handed down from guru to student over the millennia, as claimed by many early twentieth century Indian yoga pioneers. Instead it was a synthesis of several (current) methods of physical training that (prior to this period) would have fallen well outside any definition of yoga (Singleton 2010).

Maintaining the popular illusion about the origins of yoga, Krishnamacharya described it as a timeless pragmatic science evolved over thousands of years (Krishnamacharya 1938). But the truth is that under pressure from his employer, the powerful Raj of Mysore, and influenced profoundly by the body culture of early twentieth century India, Krishnamacharya pretty much invented the modern yoga we practice today, and later Iyengar codified it.

Krishnamacharya’s amazing reach through the decades to millions of practitioners happened despite his having no more than one Western student at his most influential period of teaching. And it happened despite Krishnamacharya’s near sociopath character (Goldberg 2016). How his unsought influence managed to be behind much of modern yoga is the curious and fascinating subject of a substantial part of this book.

Lately, new forces have been reshaping the yoga of Krishnamacharya’s world, including the movement sciences: biomechanics, kinesiology and exercise physiology. They are racing forward producing new scientific studies that either underpin or debunk modern postural yoga’s cardinal principles and dictates from colonial India. This has left many yoga teachers hovering uneasily between the sanctity of the past and the science of the present.

Expecting A-type weekend warriors in North America to safely navigate their way through back-of-the-book yoga poses—originally designed by Krishnamacharya for teenage Indian boys’ performances at the Mysore Palace—can, and does, lead to injury.

Meanwhile, my own anecdotal evidence from teacher trainees confirms that many teachers are still unquestioningly repeating unnecessary fallacious alignment cues, and are ignorant of evidence-based nuances in currently accepted biomechanics orthodoxy.

Let’s face it, most of the lineages were not scientifically based, says Dr. Ginger Garner, author of Medical Therapeutic Yoga (2016), and one of the most scientifically informed yoga teachers today. In a YogaUOnline workshop, she says she never aligned herself with a traditional lineage. I just listen to science and move forwards with biomechanics and neurophysiology based on what science is [telling us]. . . . Sixty or seventy years ago we knew nothing about biomechanics and neurophysiology (https://www.YogaUOnline.com March 2018). There have been enormous strides forward, even in the last five years. So yoga is long past due for an evolution, says Garner.

I agree, so what I announce here is to encourage yoga teachers to encapsulate the best of the past with the discoveries of the present in what I am naming for convenience, The New Yoga. This book and its six principles will, I hope, eventually replace complex explanations about honoring the past without deifying its sometimes-outdated instructions.

The New Yoga is defined through six principles that are fleshed out throughout this book:

1.The New Yoga will maintain the essence of postural yoga as mindful movement with presence and breath. It will observe instructions regarding yoga postures and alignment that are not in contradiction with evolving evidence from current movement sciences. Everything will be questioned with, Why are we doing this? And the answer may contain the phrase, It depends. Students will be invited to test the alignment cues interoceptively to see if they match the wide variations in dimensions and the structure of their bodies.

2.For The New Yoga, flexibility is not the primary goal of asana practice. Equal to, or more important is:

•Proprioception and interoception

•Wide-ranging functionally purposed movement rather than aesthetics

•Strength and endurance

•Balance

•Mindfulness

•Improved circulation

•Pain management

•Breath awareness

•Posture 

3.The New Yoga notes that controlled rather than extended range of motion has been the key to safe and successful athletic performance and movement in general. 

4.The New Yoga emphasizes the need for frequent and varied movement as the cornerstone of good physical health.

5.The New Yoga recognizes that our individual skeletal structure and body dimensions vary significantly and are the primary reasons for limiting flexibility. It is why we may never