Luke Ford

I went to youtube.com and put in “yoga” in the search box and looked at what came up.

Here’s the first video:

The video introduces itself thus: “Eager to master the arm balance? Equinox’s Briohny Smyth shows there’s no limit to what the artfully honed yoga body can do.”

This workout would be murder on the bodies of most Westerners. It’s entertaining to watch but it is a horrible model for an ordinary person. You try to become like this if you did not grow up doing yoga and you’ll only do yourself damage.

On Jan. 5, 2012, the New York Times Sunday magazine posted a long essay on the dangers of yoga for those who did not grow up practicing such flexibility:

According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”

Here’s the second video to come up on youtube for “yoga”:

Again, if an ordinary person tried to follow this, they’d likely do themselves damage.

The instructions list a whole bunch of things to do but there’s no awareness of how somebody might try to follow these instructions. The model certainly carries an excess of body tension.

If the average bloke tried to follow the directions, he’d likely tense and compress his neck and his torso and interfere with himself in numerous ways, raising his likelihood of injury.

Watching these videos and trying to imitate them without a long background in yoga would be like watching NFL highlights and then — without a background in football and the wearing of padding — going out and tackling people.

Here’s a video advertised as yoga for beginners:

Esther Ekhart starts off with some cat cow. She’s filled with unnecessary body tension and pulls her head into her torso, compressing her neck and back. This is a lousy model for anybody to follow. This will make movement and breath more difficult.

It would be much better to have a teacher who can free her neck and think about her head releasing away from her torso as her back lengthens to widen, letting go of unnecessary tension.

You’d also be better off allowing the head to lead the movement instead of the torso as Esther does.

Two minutes in, she advocates pushing the shoulders back and down on to the spine. This will feel lousy and it will constrict the breath and movement. I feel sorry for anybody who follows this teacher.

She advocates pulling the bellybutton in and up. Well, try that and see how you feel. You’ll experience constriction of your breath and of movement and of your emotions and of your availability to life and to yourself and to other people.

It’s tempting to believe that by doing various exercises you are taking care of your body but if you follow this teacher, and many of the other teachers on Youtube, you’ll only tighten up, deepen bad habits, constrict your breath and your movement, and lose your freedom of thought and feeling.

Here’s a teacher (Sadie Nardini) with elegant use and a safe workout:

I just put “Alexander Technique” into the Youtube.com search engine and the first suggested term was “exercises.” People want something to do. It’s so much easier than looking at your habits and learning to undo the habits that aren’t serving you.

The following video is titled “Yoga Exercises and Training : Alexander Technique Yoga”.

This is bizarre. No Alexander Technique teacher would teach in this way. She uses all this talk about holding the shoulders down and other exercises that aren’t part of any Alexander Technique lexicon. We don’t advocate holding positions, we try to teach developing orientations (such as the neck is free, the head is releasing away from the torso and the back is lengthening to widen).

Jennifer Parker owns Fluidity Yoga in Omaha, but I wager she is no Alexander teacher. She mentions none of the fundamental principles of the Technique. It’s weird to watch someone teaching “Alexander Technique” who shows no understanding of Alexander Technique.

At the end of the video, Jennifer urges people interested in the Alexander Technique to go find a professional teacher.