Shedding Yoga's Nationalistic Skin

It is well accepted by now that the world of yoga is undergoing change—a "paradigm shift" as posited by many—in terms of narrative, pedagogy, safety, supply and demand, to name but a few shifts. This is only natural, as the history of yoga is rediscovered in the sense of being first contextualized as well as "factualized" through painstaking research. That is, we are moving away from establishing authority (of what yoga is or the true and authentic way to practice) "by means of hagiography and the editorializing of memory" (Singleton, 2010; e-loc 238).

We are on a yoga truth train, probably mid-journey or so, slowly but surely wriggling out of the skin of what I feel has been a nationalistic model of historical presentation to a more fluid, evolving and expanding model of belonging.

Over the last few years, I have slowly but steadily learned that a lot of what I was taught in history class as a young Bulgarian child and student has been at best romantically exaggerated and embellished, usually creatively interpreted, and plainly untrue and made up at worst. A recent two-part article by Ivan D. Stoyanov (available through librev.com and in Bulgarian only) provides a fascinating perspective on one of the most revered periods in the individual and collective Bulgarian psyche: our Vuzrazhdane (Revival or Renaissance) period (roughly 18th century until 1878), which is popularly presented as the period in which the Bulgarian people organically initiated the process of self-determination and national identification in the face of the Ottoman oppressor, which culminated with the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman/Turkish yoke (with the help of the "bratushki," i.e. Russia) and established the modern Bulgarian nation-state.

Officially, the Vuzrazhdane period is the history of the (re)birthing and becoming of the Bulgarian nation. The root of the word, razhdane, means birth. The prefix vuz- means either to do something again or to do something that leads to a result. One can say that the Vuzrazhdane period is ontological to what it means to be a Bulgarian.

Instead, Stoyanov argues that nationalism in Bulgaria and elsewhere was championed by newly emergent local capitalist elites/classes as a revolt or emancipation against the feudal framework of their societies. It was a quest for more economic, political and educational rights; that is, it was class struggle, not national struggle. Nationalism proved a great tool—a convenient "us" versus "them" framework complete with territorial claims—for these new elites to gain political capital, influence and power, especially when employed over masses of population characterized by low literacy rates, lack of socioeconomic development, and a largely survivalist way of life.

The ideology of nationalism and the nation-state is intimately dependent on how history is taught and narrated for mass consumption, especially to a young, impressionable and malleable population (children and young adults), primarily relying on an external enemy and constantly instilling a sense of superiority over and hate toward that enemy (whether concrete or more diffuse) in order to promote social cohesion at home and raise willing soldiers for the inevitable future aggressions or injustices against the nation-state.

As such, history exists in at least two forms: one for a small circle of professional scholar-historians and amateur enthusiasts and the other for the masses. The latter version is a lot more entertaining, often based on single or multiple personality cults, which are cultivated to mesmerize (or dumb down, some might say) the masses. This model of mythologized historical presentation for mass consumption has become clearly outdated and no longer serves the needs of the Bulgarian people and their society.

Similarly, the 21st century has seen scholarly research on yoga starting to seep into and inform the knowledge and practice of contemporary committed practitioners. Mark Singleton (2010), in Yoga Body, documents the quite recent (as opposed to ancient) origins of modern postural yoga practice, despite that fact that "factionalism and vested interests in the management of memory are still alive and well in the realm of modern yoga" (e-loc 236).

A lot of the historical narrative of 20th century yoga was based on creative interpretation of historical fact and some fantastical storytelling, often centered around gurus or charismatic leaders, feeling at times like a convenient ideology, like nationalism.

David Gordon White (2014) in his recent Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A biography writes about the "strange case" of T. M. Krishnamacharya, the father of modern postural yoga, with regards to his ever-evolving biography: "As his biographers note, the salient facts of Krishnamacharya's life are known through eleven pages of autobiographical notes written by him near the end of his life, as well as from their own accounts of his reminiscences and teachings to them. It is therefore curious that these facts have changed with each new biography: what one in fact sees in these books is a process of legacy building, of transforming an innovator of postural yoga into a 'universal man' of Yoga," which Krishnamacharya became "through his 'genealogical bloodline' and three types of training: direct revelation, a conventional academic education, and discipleship under a trans-Himalayan master" (pp. 197-8). White goes on to politely call into question all of these claims and to show that modern yoga's ontology (widely promoted as the marriage of postural practice and study of the Yoga Sutra) had much to do with nascent Indian nationalism and its quest for independence from the British, and was heavily influenced by "modern body culture techniques developed in the West and the various discourses of 'modern' Hindu yoga that emerged from the time of Vivekananda onward" (Singleton, 2010; e-loc 142). 

This foundation further crystallized into various yoga styles/schools/methods which can be thought of as yoga nation-states. One could say that we have (or had in some cases) the yoga nation-state of Iyengar, Anusara, Bikram, Ashtanga, Forrest, Jivamukti, etc., with a proliferation of countless tiny yoga nation-states usually called [insert name here]yoga.com or heavily affiliated and loyal to one of the big ones. Relations between the big yoga nation-states are/were not necessarily warring but they can certainly be characterized as uneasy, contemptuous, cool, disparaging and smirking. As with nationalism, cohesion and belonging was based on different styles proclaiming to be the best or the most, such as Anusara's former claim of being the most elegant method of alignment, for example.

Being the most implies that there is something or someone less, that there is superior and inferior, very similar to nationalism. All this has been usually addressed through the it's-all-good model of thinking, claiming that the superior-inferior language was not just a good old comparison (or negative advertising) but ultimately an expression of oneness such as "Truth is one, paths are many."

The 21st century has seen the democratization of historical knowledge and the questioning of nationalism (and capitalism) as useful (or unquestioned) ideologies of belonging and functioning, albeit very unevenly and subject to debate. But there are currents and they are felt.

Group affiliation and acceptance is a fundamental human need. The paradigm shift in the world of yoga that we are a part of is an ongoing evolution towards a more horizontal approach based on truth and fact, collective rather than exclusive knowledge, which might not be as inspiring, sexy or exclusive, but it shows maturity. As yoga is shedding its nationalistic skin, we are participating in the birthing of a different model of belonging.

Extreme Hardness and Extreme Flexibility: Survival Basics

I saw this NYT article, "Why Are Americans So Fascinated with Extreme Fitness," making the rounds on FB yesterday and actually reposted it because it spoke to something that I have been reflecting on for a while: overexertion and how this reflects the dominant culture's push for constant self-improvement and glorification of hyper-individualism as a trait to be striven for and celebrated.

Then, a couple of hours later three of my colleagues lost their jobs and a quarter of our small association staff were gone. They had middle class dignity and job security on Friday--all gone on Tuesday after the "holiday" weekend.

I had posted the following nuggets from the NYT article:

"For the most privileged among us, freedom seems to feel oppressive, and oppression feels like freedom."
 "Like the idealists and extremists who founded this country [i.e. the USA], the modern zealots of exercise turn their backs on the indulgences of our culture, seeking solace in self-abnegation and suffering."
 "Why can’t we suffer and sweat together, as a group, in a way that feels meaningful? Why can’t someone yell at us while we do it? For the privileged, maybe the most grueling path seems the most likely to lead to divinity."

After the developments at my work, I am rethinking  my post. Yes, it was a clever way to talk about an issue that is just starting to get traction. But I think there is more going on.

Extreme fitness is one response in the face of neoliberalism's demands for extreme worker flexibility, its demands to accept uprooting and ungrounding as a matter of course. It doesn't give you a second chance--it hacks off and moves on. This inherent instability and lack of basic dignity for the worker of the 21st century leads to a desire to be in control, to feel like you can weather the jungle out there.

Where does this leave modern postural yoga (MPY) and its bias toward opening and flexibility?
I think extreme fitness and glorification of flexibility in MPY are two sides of the same gory billboard.

Some of us react by building a shell from which we sometimes poke our head out, but mostly rely on the shell to bounce off the hardness of life. Some of us react by adopting an attitude of malleability. The more gumby, the better. The more like a rag doll whose legs, arms, torso and head can be arranged in knots that would make the distinction of its parts unrecognizable. Both are way to feel in control of one's own flesh. Both are survival training. Both are extremes. What about everyone else in the middle? You harden in some places, you loosen in other. You decompensate, you lose the natural turns and twists that you developed in utero that kept you resilient and largely pain free.

As much as we are asked to be hyper-responsible, we are also asked to trust that the universe knows best. That it is there and holding you no matter how shitty it gets. That it is all for a good reason. That you have to go with the flow. That if you are ever more flexible you can almost ensure that you stretch yourself out so thin that you become part of it all.


All of these responses do not create space; they take it away. All of these want you to believe that you are a king of your own destiny. But by definition you aren't. You aren't a 100% responsible, despite what the dominant narrative would have you to believe. As Matthew Remski says, karma is 1/3 your actions, 1/3 the actions of others around you and 1/3 randomness such as a flood, a mudslide or an earthquake.


In the face of massive labor dislocation and insecurity in the 21st century, the need to feel in control of one's own politic body is vast and reaching tipping point levels. The search for extreme fitness or extreme flexibility is a sign of not enough grounding. When you have no sense of stability, you either think you need to be more hard core or you think you are stiff and therefore need to stretch. Extreme fitness is combat training, a literal interpretation of survival. This morning, I was listening to a story about Wendy Rogers, a candidate for Congress, and one of the first 100 women pilots in the U.S. Air Force, who was training her 3-year-old grandson to do pull-ups because, she said, these skills need to be instilled from a very young age. Extreme flexibility is survival training too, but by disintegration. Because you feel so not in control that reaching more and more extreme ranges of motion becomes a way of feeling in control, of pushing against a boundary that says that you are you and then there is the rest. But maybe by breaking that layer of separation, the issues of the body politic become your issues and your issues become the issues of the body politic and dissipate.

The other day an Economist article called economic growth in the US and UK "healthy." I wrote them a letter (I will let you know if they publish it):

Sir - In your leader article, "Weaker than it looks," you called growth in the UK and US "healthy." One cannot call economic growth healthy if inequality is increasing or if the mean GDP per capita is much higher than the median. Growth is healthy only when it is balanced and sustainable, and allows everyone to progress with integrity, if incrementally. Growth in the UK and US is healthy if you are willing to call cancerous growth healthy.

My former colleagues are left to take advantage of the healthy growth and hope to recover in an era where extreme hardness and extreme flexibility are both required for survival. Something's got to give.

Flexibility or Space?

Using yoga (meaning asana here) to increase flexibility (the #1--and overwhelming--reason why people say they practice yoga, at least in the U.S.), coupled with a visually based model of instructing and marketing it, means that we become slaves of form and not function, whether we realize it or not. What if we shifted our paradigm and practiced with the idea of creating space, of increasing or restoring function?

There will always be someone who is more flexible; there will always be another stage of a pose that is inaccessible to you because you are not flexible enough. Do you see the pathology here? Do you see the dysfunction? "Function" is a funny word. It's relatively neutral when used to mean "an activity or purpose natural to or intended for a person or thing." But "function" is mostly used with "dys" in the front to denote some kind of abnormality or impairment. After all, we rarely say, "I am in a functioning relationship." It's almost as if "function" is redundant. We only think of function or its perceived/desired effects when we notice that it has become dysfunction. (For more on this, you might want to check out Drew Leder's Absent Body.) When someone says they would like to increase their flexibility, they are most likely saying that they are experiencing some kind of dysfunction such as low back pain or inability to tie their shoelaces without feeling humiliated and hamstrung, or something to that effect.

Further, practicing with the flexibility paradigm means that we (perhaps inadvertently) practice to get to a sensation of stretching. If you have above average flexibility, this means you are probably routinely going beyond what's reasonable from the point of view of the health of your joints and ligaments (especially over the long term). If you are below or averagely flexible, what you are probably feeling is not a muscle stretching but a muscle contracting, a muscle that's being pulled and telling you it's too much. What's more is that practicing in this context means that you need to practice constantly with ever-increasing levels of intensity to maintain (and potentially increase) the level of flexibility you think you need, usually at the expense of stability and well-knittedness.

Research discussed here indicates that static stretching led to increased range of motion (ROM) due to an increase in stretch tolerance (ability to withstand more stretching force), not extensibility (increased muscle length). Similar findings are discussed here. A review of this latter study asks a very important question, which many are trying to answer:

"...[I]f there is a reduction in sensation at a given joint angle without modification of the mechanical properties of the material [i.e., increased muscle length], this may imply that the joint ROM between the point of onset of pain and the point at which the muscle tears from being overextended is reduced. This joint ROM might be described as a “safety margin” during which the individual is aware of a strong sensation of pain and acts to reduce this pain. Reducing the size of this safety margin could potentially be detrimental to the risk of injury in certain sports, although studies are needed to assess this hypothesis."

The implications of this for long-term asana practice (focused on defining progress as the ability to execute more advanced postures) invite the need for serious consideration and reflection on the part of both yoga pedagogy and practice. 

When we practice with the idea of creating space in the flesh, the mathematical meaning of function makes the most sense: "a relationship or expression involving one or more variables." In this case, making flexibility the main or only variable in our practice negates the very meaning of function, because the human body is not a function with only one variable.

Concentrating on flexibility also encourages us to think linearly, almost unimaginatively, such as for example, "increasing the distance between point A and point B leads to stretching leads to flexibility." The human body does not work linearly. We are like a Pollock painting inside and not like a Mondrian poster.

Promoting flexibility as a virtue in yoga or a goal of one's practice gets our mirror neurons in overdrive at the expense of pausing to allow for perception and paying attention to the flesh kinesthetically (in space) and proprioceptively (felt sense of internal movements). Perception to our internal and external environment, in essence orienting ourselves, is a sort of pre-movement itself and as such is essential for movement education in asana practice, or dance and other similar activities. The flexibility ideal encourages a focus on a form, a shape, a pose, a snapshot in time.

Practicing yoga to create space promotes function, movement, connection within and without. As Matthew Remski recently taught in his excellent Ayurveda course (that I am currently taking), (paraphrasing) "Virtually every therapeutic action involves the addition or sculpting of spaciousness in the spine, joints, sensory, organs, etc." Further, it is "in perception [that] space conjoins."

It is in perception that we contain and can make sense of the infinite spaciousness within, and in perception that we realize that space contains us.

Rhomboids: Enter the Magician's Circle

I was scrolling through my make-believe Facebook feed the other day and came across this Yoga Journal blog post, which was posted by Amy Ippoliti on her Facebook page. The post was "liked" by about 3.5K people, which, coupled with the fact that it seemed like it talked anatomy, made me click on it.

The post summarized what the author (Kelle Walsh, the Yoga Journal’s Executive Online Editor) had learned from Ippoliti about the "yoga that helps" when it comes to shoulder tightness, pain or injury.

I will concern myself today with only a couple of the points made in this post because they are simply incorrect:

• "...engaging the rhomboids, slide the scapula (not shoulders) back and down, creating softness here, as the chest fills up bright." The rhomboids retract the shoulder blade superiorly and medially. That is, they elevate the shoulder blade and draw it towards the spine. The rhomboids cannot and will not draw the scapula down the back (that would be what the lower fibers of the trapezius muscles do). Although the rhomboids, along with the traps and the "posterior" portion of the serratus anterior muscles, are the "glue" that holds the shoulder blades on the back when we exert force through the arms (see Keller, 2008), focusing solely on the rhomboids is problematic. The rhomboid activation tends to turn on the levator scapulae and the upper traps, a recipe for tension in the upper back and neck. Further, overusing the rhomboids to create shoulder stability can, over time, flatten the upper back. Keeping with the spirit of the post that everything is connected, it is simplistic to zoom in on the rhomboids without acknowledging their intimate connection with the serratus anterior muscles, for example.
• "Fill up your waistline." If I want to take my arms overhead--as in, for example, upward hands (urdhva hastasana), down dog or handstand--and my shoulders are tight, in order for me to complete the movement that I am aiming for, my spine will respond and arch. The post says: "we often create such extreme extension in the waistline that it compromises movement of the shoulders." In fact, the waistline goes into extension because my tight shoulders have reached their range of motion limit. But since I am determined to take my arms overhead, my spine has no choice but to respond by arching. When the arms are not weight-bearing as in warrior 1, for example, the simplest solution would be to bring the arms into the front plane of the body (i.e., in your line of vision). So, aligning my shoulders to fit my range of motion will fill up my waistline. But "allow[ing] the side waists to fill up" when my shoulders are past an integrated range of motion is, in my opinion, not possible.

Although the "plug your armbones into their sockets" instruction--also mentioned in the post--is not so problematic as the two points above, I feel that plugging your arm bones is effective only to a certain extent. The problem really is not that the arm bones are not plugged into their sockets, but that the arm bone-scapula rhythm (gleno-humeral rhythm) is not balanced. As Trish Corley recently commented on a Matthew Remski WAWADIA blog post, "A stable shoulder comes from strong scapular muscles that work in a timely manner to rotate the scapula in a particular rhythm that coincides with the position of the humerus." When this rhythm is lost, imbalance, pain and injury ensue.

What is even more concerning about this post is that it was written by a Yoga Journal editor, a publication that claims to be a mainstream authority on yoga, and that it was liked by thousands of people on Facebook (the post seems to have been removed though), many of them presumably yoga instructors.

I am currently reading a book by the late Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, which documents the initial years of Stalinist terror in the late 1940s to mid-1950s in Bulgaria and how the cult of personality and party dogma led to an individual and collective abdication from responsibility and conscience. Markov says (translation mine): "It seems to me that the connection between cult and dogma is natural. There is no cult without dogma. Buying into a cult simplifies personal responsibility, and buying into dogma simplifies intellectual responsibility. Buying into a cult, one can justify erring. Buying into dogma, one can justify not thinking." I can't help but draw some parallels between what Markov describes and some of what is going on in the world of yoga and asana these days.

For more on shoulders, I recently led a workshop on handstand and forearm balance, which discussed the shoulders in this context. Here is a link to the handout I distributed. As always, I hope it is helpful and stimulating, and would love to hear any and all comments, feedback and questions.

p.s. The title of this post comes from the etymological origin of rhomboids. In English, this muscle’s name is the magician’s circle, or oblique angled parallelogram-shaped muscle. The term rhomboid is derived from the Greek rhombos meaning “a magician’s circle,” a shape represented by an oblique angled parallelogram.

Allow Your Core to Happen

I recently led a workshop titled "Allow Your Core to Happen." So much of what we think about the core propels us to work harder, to feel like we need to gain or acquire something we don't have, to achieve some state of core-stasis/core-ness and, subsequently, to hold on to it, as if it is something that's fixed and unchangeable.

My practice and studies challenge this notion, and my workshops and classes endeavor to convey that. Below, I am sharing the presentation that I prepared for this workshop in the hopes that you will find it not only helpful and educational, but that it will also lead to an inquiry and discussion on your part and on the part of the people with whom you choose to share it.

I would love to hear your feedback, comments and questions. Enjoy!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxsk0tVbtkkARE1hSFhOSHVjdFU/edit?usp=sharing