DOES YOGA MAKE SENSE?

Yoga is the fountain of youth. You are only as young as your spine is flexible.

Bob Harper

The Transformative Power of Yoga

An emaciated man, looking like a skin-covered skeleton, puts one foot behind his neck. He follows with the other foot, transforming himself into a bizarre human knot. Another man is raised high in the air, hooked by the collarbone by a construction crane. They do it without any emotion or any obvious reason. The sight is spectacular and a bit scary. "What creatures can be capable of such incredible feats?" These are my childhood memories from an old documentary about yogis in India.

The Lost Link Between Mind and Body

The word "yoga" in Sanskrit means "union", or the restoration of the lost bond between body and mind.

Some people think of yoga as an exotic exercise system used to master the art of contortion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The word "yoga" in Sanskrit means "union," or the restoration of the lost bond between body and mind.

"How can our body and our mind exist separately?" you may wonder. They certainly can. Moreover, they do so most of the time. Here's a good example: as you get up, putting weight on your leg, it suddenly buckles. You feel as if it is being prickled with a million tiny pins and needles. "Oh, my leg has gone to sleep again," you would say.

But where was your mind when the poor limb was sending it signals it failed to heed? "Stand up! Stretch a bit! Just move a little, you idiot, give me a chance to breathe!" Your mind was probably glued to a TV screen or a tablet and didn't care in the least for these desperate messages.

Each hatha yoga exercise affects a certain part of the body, an organ or a group of organs.

On a more serious note, each time we ignore a signal from the body, we break its communication links with our mind. As a consequence, individual muscle fibers and then whole groups of muscles get out of your mind's control. They become overstressed, tired, stiff, and sensitive.

What is the ultimate result? If we are talking about lower back muscles, it can lead to radiculitis, lumbago, or sciatica. Neck muscle problems can lead to shoulder pain, hand pain, and headaches. If your lower jaw muscles are ailing, you may face insomnia, chronic fatigue, and depression. Muscles are like the keyboard of a biological computer, that is, our body. By pressing the keys of your PC or Mac, you launch or exit certain functions and programs. Likewise, muscle spasms and inflammation impair certain functions of the body. This may lead to major disorders or even disease.

Untying the Knots

A muscle that gets from under the mind's control may suffer a spasm and become a source of a disorder.

So, if a muscle gets away from the mind's control, it may suffer a spasm and become a source of a disorder. How can we reconnect it to the mind and restore the union between the two? Let me remind you that yoga means "union." But how can tying ourselves into knots and inflicting pain on our bodies help?

Some yoga advocates would say, "No pain, no gain," but this answer is pretty shallow. Many yoga instructors and beginners alike share this fallacy. They treat this wonderful Eastern science as exotic rhythmic gymnastics. They try to learn various contortion tricks at any cost. This is bad for two reasons. First, even if you manage to get into any such shape, it will do more harm than good to your body. Second, this attitude discourages people who may feel that "these tricks are not for us."

The Real Yoga

Doing yoga right means viewing positions in a textbook or the instructor's directions merely as a hint, a source of inspiration.

Yoga, like love, is good at any age if only you understand and practice it the right way. What do I mean? The right way is when you view the positions recommended in textbooks or by the instructors merely as a hint, as a source of inspiration (limited by your imperfection) rather than a rigid model.

Let us say an instructor puts his hands on the floor and urges you to follow suit. As you bend your neck and barely reach your knees with your hands, your back sends you a signal to stop.

Yoga is first mentioned in the Vedas, a collection of sacred Indian texts, some of which date back to the 25th century B.C. or even earlier.

That's the moment of truth. Your mind heeds the voice of your compressed lower back. Communication has been established. Now patience, breathing, and attention rule. Take your time. Don't give any orders to your muscles. You have abused and neglected them for too long. Now that you have just woken them up, don't make them angry.

Listen to them. As you breathe in, move backward slightly to relax your muscles. As you breathe out, stretch them carefully a little bit. One, two, three… that's enough for the beginning. Now straighten up but do not lose your lower back's contact with your mind (unity = yoga, remember?). Feel how your stress dissipates and nice warmth and heaviness settle around the spine.

This is the start of genuine yoga, that is, body and mind reunification, the restoration of muscle awareness, and the resuscitation of abused and forgotten muscles. It supplies blood and oxygen to these muscles, making them soft and supple. This means that in a week you will likely be past the stage of “I can’t reach below my knees.” In a few months, you will be able to touch the floor with your fingertips, if not with your palms. The speed of progress will certainly vary among individuals. Muscle spasms are sometimes associated with blocked joints that hold the muscles in place like glue or nails. A skilled manual therapist could be of great help here.

In any event, don't forget that your main goal is not to bend down to the floor or set other pliability records. The meaning of yoga is that with every session, you should find a new group of deaf and uncontrollable muscles, listen to them, empathize with them, wake them up, and join them for a new long and full life.