Asana – Frantic Shanti

Reconsidering Yoga Adjustments

^{(Title image: Photo by Shashi Chaturvedula on Unsplash)}

There is an expectation in the US that yoga practitioners are all young and flexible with great balance, but we know that’s not the case. Many people who might benefit the most from a yoga practice are certainly not.

When I started Yoga Teacher Training (YTT), there were two assumptions that most of us made:

“Full expression of the pose” is not accessible to every yoga practitioner.
(Photo by Carl Barcelo on Unsplash)

Every yogi strives for the “full expression of the pose”, suggesting that there is one perfect way to perform a yoga asana.
An important responsibility of a yoga teacher is to move students into the full expression of the pose, using hands-on adjustments if necessary.

Those two assumptions may:
(1) discourage students from yoga practice, particularly when you consider that yoga originally developed as a practice for men, and asanas do not necessarily take into consideration the female body (or diverse body shapes) even though the majority of practitioners in the US are female; and (2) may compel newly-minted yoga teachers to push students into positions that are wrong for their body shapes and can cause harm to them.

During YTT, however, we learned that the “full expression of the pose” as a concept was no longer taught and teachers were discouraged to refer to asanas in that way, no doubt in an effort to be more welcoming to a broad range of people.

My person belief is that hands-on adjustments are not necessary for yoga under most circumstances.
(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

We also learned how to do hands-on adjustments. The idea was that you needed to check with the student whether they wanted to be adjusted.

However, I myself have received adjustments in classes that I hadn’t requested or agreed to. It’s never been harmful to me and generally felt good, especially in settings where I couldn’t check my form in a mirror. Futhermore, the classes tended to be higher level, so there was probably an assumption on the part of the instructor that you’re in a more intense class for a reason, otherwise you’d be in a lower level class.

But you can probably see where I’m going with this. I tended to be one of the oldest students in these classes. I’ve done yoga (and a range of other exercise modalities) for decades, but my flexibility and balance have taken a hit from cancer treatment and various injuries. Unless a teacher is sensitive to that, we can run into trouble.

Additionally, I’ve seen less-experienced students attend more difficult classes because they were coming with a friend or couldn’t get to the easier class that they wanted, and decided to just “do their best”. That should always be good enough without putting a student at harm.

Yogis come in different shapes, sizes and levels of flexibility…and that’s okay.
(Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on
Unsplash)

My personal feeling? Stick with gentle verbal adjustments to relay the spirit of the asana and cue according to the class’ level, understanding that students will have varying ranges of flexibility. I do not feel comfortable doing hands-on adjustments unless the student is requesting it AND I know the student well enough to be familiar with their limitations, if any. That means verbal adjustment for students in a general class vs. POSSIBLY hands-on adjustments for a student that I’m teaching privately, where we can talk through how the asana feels in their body. Quite often, I will forgo hands-on adjusting altogether.

Finally, I leave you with a quote from the YogaUOnline.com website. Charlotte Bell proposes a difference definition of “full expression”, in an excellent article titled, What is Full Expression in Yoga Practice?: “Full expression arises in a pose when our bodies are aligned such that the wave of the breath is free to circulate throughout the body. It also happens when we have invested our full attention into the sensations arising as we move and breathe in the pose. The full expression is not dependent on what a pose looks like.”

Why I Get Irritated Searching for Yoga Photos

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This is getting annoying.

I’ve been posting a lot about yoga, specifically about yoga for cancer populations.

Yoga programming for such populations is *not* your garden variety beginner/intermediate yoga. With the possible exception of well-practiced, life-long yogis who experience a cancer diagnosis, most of the people taking these yoga classes will have limitations to their movement and will need thoughtfully-designed sequences that offer appropriate modifications.

In a number of cases, these individuals may be older (for example, the average age at diagnosis for a woman in the US with breast cancer is 62). Many of them will not have an established yoga practice but may be attracted to yoga due to its reputation as being a mind-body activity: people with cancer not only have to deal with the disease and physical side effects of treatments, but also the emotional repercussions of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Yoga can help.

So why am I irritated? Because the photo databank I use for my blog is replete with photographs of bodies in yoga poses. However, the poses shown are nothing that I would ever consider twisting a cancer patient into.

Make no mistake: the photographs are lovely, the yogis are impressively advanced, but what kind of a message does seeing mainly *these* kinds of yoga photos send to those cancer patients considering trying out yoga?
(Photo by Oksana Taran on Unsplash)

The yogis shown almost without exception are young and flexible. And when I’ve searched for “senior yoga” etc. to increase the diversity of the images…sure, I can find some but they’re locked behind a paywall (mine is a free blog without a budget for such niceities). Apparently, an older individual doing yoga is considered “exotic”.

This type of exclusivity feeds the narrative that yoga is for youthful, injury-free people who have the funds to attend studio classes. Someone who might be older, recovering from surgery, limited in range of motion and conscious about their budget due to treatment costs…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt that yoga wasn’t welcoming of them and their needs.

This is, of course, so ironic, because of all the different exercise modalities, yoga is one of the most perfect for cancer patients. These are the people who need yoga the most!

Yes, I’ve written (griped?) about this topic before. Yes, we’re becoming more accepting of diverse bodies in diverse situations. But good luck trying to illustrate a blog post on yoga for cancer patients with actual photos of cancer patients doing yoga!

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I’m not expecting to easily find every type of person depicted doing yoga in a given (free) photobank. But in the US we have a problem with making yoga accessible, and the more images that we run of only a certain kind of human doing yoga, the more we inadvertently push the idea that yoga is only for that certain kind of human.

Finding Balance, Literally

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One of the striking benefits of mindfulness is that it amplifies the richness of our world. On a personal level, it’s revealed to me how tightly my mind and body are connected.

I truly believe that when you calm the mind, you calm the body and vice versa. This is particularly important for me because 1) I am prone to anxiety and 2) some of the breast cancer drugs I was given were cardiotoxic. Therefore, I have an inherent interest in keeping calm and avoiding stress.

Avoiding stress. HA!

After several anxious weeks that included trying to secure a new apartment and the possibility of serving as a juror on a 4-week criminal trial (for better or worse, neither one has happened), I found myself drained and unbalanced.

So for my Advent commitment, I’m working on getting my sense of balance back. And while I realize that yoga is much more than just one aspect of the physical practice, in my case, I believe that being able to calm my body, find a point of focus (drishti) and work on my balance go hand in hand with balancing my mind .

The moves that I’m using are uncomplicated and unimpressive, but I’m getting back to basics and rebuilding my balance foundation from there, even though I’ve found that there are more advanced balance moves that I can do that don’t seem to give me as much trouble. Go figure.

My daily practice has incorporated the following poses (asanas) with the intention of holding each for a prolonged period of time:

balance-practice-simple-by-frantic-shanti Download

Standing wind-release pose (Tadasana Pavanmuktasana): This is a classic beginner pose that I chose as a starting point. From Mountain Pose (Tadasana), shifting weight into supporting leg, float the other leg up forward, knee bent with options to draw it into your chest or, which I find more comfortable, have my hands in prayer or support the raised leg under the knee.

Tree pose (Vrksasana): This is the classic tree pose, weight on supporting leg, other leg bent with knee pointing to the side, but with the sole of foot on the inside of the supporting calf instead of the inner thigh, as we usually see it portrayed. I chose this because of the hip opening aspect and by keeping the foot on the lower leg, all my focus is on balance, without having flexibility become an issue, because that is also affected by stress–I found that certain muscles tighten up and throw things out of whack.

Warrior Three (Virabhadrasana III): This is an intermediate level pose in which body weight is in the supporting leg with the upper body bent forward parallel to the floor in line with the hips, and the non supporting leg stretched out back, also in line with the hips. I play around with arm positioning, alternating between arms stretched forward past my head, out to the side or behind me.

Has this been a humbling experience? Yes, it has.

My balance practice is not a competition, it is a gentle smoothing of my nervous system. I’m not trying out for Cirque du Soleil. Ever.
(Photo by GMB Fitness on Unsplash)

Balance poses are not my “thing”. They used to be no big deal, but that was in my pre-cancer life. Physical balance took a huge hit during cancer treatment and I found myself strangely off-kilter afterwards. Aromatase inhibitors’ effects on my joints certainly didn’t help either. It was exhausting to fight this deterioration when I already felt spent. Years later, I had been avoiding balance asanas in my practice, which means that what was suboptimal has become worse.

Starting out this time around I was terrible. And I mean embarrassingly terrible. When I moved into the first asana, it felt as though I’d been plugged into a light socket with nervous energy coursing through me, making it so difficult to be still. I couldn’t hold any poses for very long and Warrior Three felt like a constant struggle.

But even in the space of a week’s practice, I am getting better. These asanas were chosen with ease of progress in mind and I’ve decided to keep going with this well into the New Year. I can definitely use the work.

While it’s frustrating feeling like I’ve regressed so much, I guess that means my progress will seem even better, right?