The hips don’t lie: aligning outcome with intention in asana by Debbie Farrar
A Tale of 2 postures; Eka Pada Kapotanasana & Saithyliasana
Why are we ‘opening’ our hips?
Cult dynamics
How can we do better?
CONTEXT: It is everything. Without it there can be no nuance. Without it our minds are free to fill in the gaps with information gleaned from our own situation, experience and cultural norms. Here’s mine. Well, some of it. I don’t even have all of it and it’s my context. Like all contexts, it’s complex. Take this article for example; I started writing about variation in hip anatomy, but I ended up writing an article about the implications of variation in hips, morality, power, culture, intention, outcome and the intersectionality of them all.
1. Saithilyasana: Animal Relaxation Pose from APMB (1999)
Last year, I started teaching on a teacher training course at the Mandala Yoga Ashram in Wales. I’m teaching the anatomy & physiology and the professional studies modules. On the first residential week, I was teaching a 6.15am session in a style that was different to the usual style taught at the ashram. I had already offered various critiques of the biomechanics and listed benefits of the postures in the core text, Asana, Pranayama, Mudra & Bandha (APMB). So I thought I would demonstrate how a couple of the postures from that book can be very easily adapted and taught in ways that are kind to joints and congruent with developing functional movement patterns. Indeed in some instances, such as Saithilyasana (figure 1), they can be biomechanically kinder than than more commonly taught forms of the posture, such as Eka Pada Kapotanasana (figure 2). Therefore these postures do not need to have unproven benefits attached to them to ‘sell’ them to students. Indeed, I’m not even sure what ‘massaging the abdominal organs’ means, let alone if its possible, or whether it would be a desirable thing to do if it were possible. APMB is an old book, first published in 1966. Things have moved on a lot since then. Not just in terms of medical science and anatomical understanding, but also in terms of our understanding of psychology and culture. The Ashram has moved on too, having broken away from the Satyananda lineage in 1996. Their interest in moving forward is evidenced by their bringing in outspoken outsiders like myself to teach on their teacher training course.
2. Eka Pada Kapotanasana variation: Sleeping Pigeon
A TALE OF 2 ASANAS: SAITHILYASANA & EKA PADA KAPOTANASANA: Given this background, my intended learning outcomes, and a need to prepare for relaxation at the end of the session, I taught Saithalyasana (figure 1). Not dynamically as in APMB, but as a relaxation posture, like its name suggests. I had thought this would be a more straight forward asana to teach than my usual Dynamic Yoga & Feldenkrais inspired blend of joint sensitisation practices. After all, the pose is in APMB, and I’m teaching in the ashram of Swami Nishchalananda who wrote the book, in all but name. However, despite the earliness of the class, the APMB stamp of approval, and the otherwise quiet attentiveness of the trainee teachers, Saithilyasana was the asana that caused most confusion. Why? Because it was not a posture they had come across before. Most people were more familiar with Eka Pada Kapotanasana, and assumed I was teaching the sleeping version of Pigeon (figure 2). I hadn’t given the usual cues for Pigeon, we didn’t arrive at the pose in any way that suggested Pigeon, but like in all contexts, when we don’t have a map for something, we look for the closest thing we have that fits the situation. So I heard the following; Should my back leg be straight? Should I be over my front leg? I can’t do Pigeon it hurts my knees / hips. We’re not doing Pigeon! But a few people were trying to navigate Saithilyasana with their Sleeping Pigeon roadmap. So I said something like; this is Animal Relaxation Pose. Explore what feels comfortable and supportive for you and your joints. Find your own version of this. We’re not trying to make any particular shape. Imagine you are an animal trying to relax. Can you find a position that is so comfortable you feel as though you could relax here instead of lying on your back in Savasana? Following these instructions people started exploring, eventually one trainee said, ‘it’s like the recovery pose’. ‘Yes! It’s great if it’s like that for you, but it’s ok if it’s not like that for other people’.
Whilst seemingly innocuous, this situation bought to my mind questions of personal authority. In yoga culture, are we so used to being told exactly what to do and what shapes to make that we are unused to listening to our own bodies and finding things out for ourselves? Is this just a thing in yoga culture? Or is this symptomatic of a wider cultural dynamic whereby we are systematically encouraged to distrust our own inner authority and look to people who are more privileged than us in terms of education, experience or power to make decisions for us? Whilst it would be tortuous if we each had to make personal decisions for every aspect of life, and life can get a little easier if some decisions are made for us at a cultural level; is there a definite point where such an arrangement becomes abusive? From the findings of the 2014 Australian Royal Commission into child sex abuse at Mangrove Ashram, it is obvious that some Satyananda swamis were operating an extremely abusive cult involving ritualised child sex abuse. Yet this has still not been openly acknowledged by the Australian yoga authorities and reparations are still being sought (for more information see the valuable and ongoing work of Josna Pankhania; The Luminescent article in the references section is a good place to start). Because of this there is an understandable move in some circles to boycott the works of Satyananda.
However abuse of power in yoga circles seems to be so prevalent that if one were to boycott the works of everyone who abused their power, I’m not sure there would be any yoga left. Many people have recently spoken out about sexual abuse at the hands of Pattabhi Jois, the guru of Ashtanga Yoga, and physical abuse at the hands of Iyengar. So if I were going to boycott the works of all 3, I would not be teaching Satyananda’s Saithyliasana, nor Eka Pada Kapotanasana; since that pose is featured in Iyengar’s Light on Yoga and the advanced series of Ashtanga Yoga. Is not teaching these postures throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
When cases of abuse in yoga come to light, it is not rare to hear the phrase ‘we need to separate the teacher from the teachings’. Is that possible? And is it desirable? Is it possible that there are seeds of abuse embedded within the teachings if they have come from an abusive teacher? If someone can abuse another person with impunity and without care, is it likely that they would care about damaging a person’s joints? And yet some of the teachings do not actually come from the teacher who abused. Even if a book is published as the work of that teacher, sometimes, that teacher took no hand in the writing of the book. As with APMB, gurus can designate the hard work of writing a book to their followers, just putting their name to it, and taking all the credit. After all, if someone doesn’t care enough about human beings not to abuse them, are they going to care about copyright ethics?
I think we have a duty to consider if any posture or practice we are teaching does any harm, whether that is physical or psychological. Is there a potential for them to damage joints? In many cases this depends on how they are taught. If you present a posture as a desirable shape to make and add the suggestion of the promise or purity, wholeness or enlightenment to it, you can present any posture in a way that is potentially damaging. Even a posture that has never been taught by any abuser. So we as teachers need to take responsibility for not only what we teach, but how we teach it. Creating a general rule that we never teach anything that any abuser has ever taught, means that we are in danger of abdicating our ability to discern abuse from nourishment. Would we be missing out on an opportunity to develop our own teaching, and raise the game of yoga teaching by reclaiming practices, and reframing them in ways that are nourishing rather than punishing? Perhaps by teaching these practices, whilst simultaneously addressing the abuse that happened, we can challenge the culture that evolved around the practices; the culture that allowed the abuses to happen. Vilifying the practices completely and discarding them, just alienates people who are invested in that culture through identity or economics, and embeds them deeper into the culture that, from their perspective, we appear to be attacking.
Can we use the way we teach these postures to talk about the devices that unscrupulous or unconscious abusers can use to take away personal agency? One such device is to encourage students to dissociate from their physical and emotional experiences. Because of this I am much more wary of dissociative meditation practices that guide us away from our felt sensations, than I am of asana, which can be used to guide us towards the felt sense and therefore, the inherent wisdom of the body. We can teach any asana in a way that invites people to connect with their experience, or in a way that suggests they should dissociate from it. Given the choice, I prefer to give the authority to my body and let the sensations in my hips & knees decide whether to do saithyliasana or sleeping pigeon, and what they might look like. After all, the hips don’t lie; thanks Shakira!
3. Eka Pada Kapotanasana: Pigeon
EGO OR PERSONAL AUTHORITY? When I started getting serious about yoga as a young adult, I was very ‘conscientious’ and wanted to learn how to ‘do’ the postures correctly so I would be safe. I had already damaged my back doing gymnastics in my teens, and this started really playing up when I was about 20. My return to the asana of my childhood was from a place of seeking to heal my back. I found Satyananda Yoga, and it worked. My back has never complained since. I was always told to listen to my body by my Satyananda teachers in the UK. I trained as a yoga teacher with the BWY under a Satyananada teacher called Satyapremananda (Ken Simmons). Then I discovered other forms of yoga, like Iyengar and Ashtanga. They appealed to my desire to get better at yoga. If I’m going to do something I want to do it well, and if I got better at yoga, surely that would mean that I would be less likely to injure myself like I did in gymnastics? Although I never felt pain in Satyananda Yoga, I did feel pain in Iyengar and Ashtanga. And what’s more, I was told that I was lazy and that I should go further into the pain. Many times.
About 20 years ago I met Godfrey Devereux. His yoga was a bit like Iyengar and Ashtanga, a mix of the best bits of both of them, but it didn’t hurt. Why had he taken out all the postures that hurt? The answer is obvious in hindsight. But at the time I harassed him asking many questions about why different postures hurt and weren’t all these postures supposed to be good for everyone. I remember asking him once why he taught Utkatasana the way he did and told him that other people had told me that it was not the ‘right’ way to do it. He said what’s the right way to do it? I showed him. He asked does it feel right? No, it hurt. Why are you doing it then? Because they say so? It reminded me of a conversation I had with my Grandma when I was 5 or 6. Would you do everything they told you to? If they jumped off the end of Blackpool pier would you jump too? Damn, I was back there!
4. Modern mainstream culture: Sexual violence sells
So I really started listening to the sensations in my body. Pigeon (figure 3), was one of the postures that started feeling uncomfortable for my hips a few years ago. It’s a pose of display. The clue is in the name. On my BWY teacher training course almost 20 years ago, I was told to puff my chest out proudly with the attitude of a male pigeon in the spring. There is nothing wrong with display. Of course, I would say that, I was really good at Pigeon. But as much as I am now, for the most part, in the camp of functional asana, I do still think that display is an essential part of life, self expression and communication. It is just as much a part of our natural humanity as it is part of a pigeon’s nature. However, culturally, there have been many moves to curtail the natural human inclination to display; particularly for marginalised people in many communities. Indeed it could be argued that this is one of the ways that people become marginalised. Historically we have been shamed for daring to express ourselves, and our expression has been blamed for violent acts towards us, despite violent sexual behaviour being so much a part of mainstream culture that adverts like figure 4 made it into the public realm before being recalled. Someone actually thought it was ok to use rape to advertise vodka. I wish this were the only example I could find.
THE EGO & SPIRITUAL BY-PASSING: Perhaps because of this, display has been somewhat vilified and linked to that other often vilified thing, ‘ego’. Nowhere is this more true than in cultures where there is an imposed morality with regards to the display of sexuality and ego. Few things express healthily when they have been repressed and relegated to the shadows. And nowhere can the shadows of our healthy desires be more open to exploitation than in modern neo-tantra culture, where sexuality is celebrated alongside spiritual by-passing. Often modern yoga & neo-tantra cultures overlap into a mixture of moral judgementalism, body shaming, ego negating and spiritual by-passing. So, just like modern mainstream culture, albeit with a spiritual twist that helps us overcome our natural healthy sense of shame (as opposed to the toxic projectile shaming described above).
It’s understandable to me that this heady mix might lead some people to subjugate their natural desire for self expression to an outer representation of a shape that is presented as correct, perfect or ‘royal’, like Raja Eka Pada Kapotanasana, the Royal Pigeon. At certain points in my life, asana has been an outlet for some of my unexpressed feelings and desires, and it feels good to have an outlet for that expression. Especially since oftentimes when I tried to express myself, others would shut me down. I’d feel like I was taking up too much space or making people feel uncomfortable in some way. And then there was this thing called ego, that we were not supposed to have. Especially in yoga circles.
However, most egos I come across are small fragile things that need building up because they’ve been repeatedly & subtly belittled. It’s an awful and cruel thing to erode anyone’s sense of I am-ness. Even if it’s unintentional. Even if it’s done under the guise of spirituality. Especially if it’s done under the guise of healing them. They are already vulnerable if they need healing. And deep down, you must know that if you are presenting what you are doing as healing to them.
I know there are people who are egotistical. But not many. Even people who present as being egotistical are mostly only putting on a front to hide how vulnerable they are. The really egotistical people would never listen to, or be persuaded by, any talk about how big their ego is! That talk will only land in the minds of those who will be damaged by it. So it is pointless to blame ego for anything.
In yoga culture, we defend our bashing of the ego by saying it is ‘ahamkara’, our actions that come from a place of separateness, and that if we want to merge into the one-ness that exists beyond duality, we need to drop, kill or even annihilate our egos. Its unfortunate that ahamkara is commonly translated as ego since ahamkara is not ego in the Freudian sense. The way we use the term ego is not even ego in the Freudian sense. ‘Aham’ is ‘I’. ‘Kara’ is from the verb ‘kri’ meaning ‘to do’. Ahamkara would be better translated then as the part of the self that does stuff, our motivation. That which moves us. Our inner authority. Even if we accept that the goal is to move away from being identified with the self, there needs to be a part of us that starts that movement toward that goal. Ahamkara is an essential part of us that is required to move us toward immersion in the infinite beyond duality. Without your individual motivation to do, you cannot move, you cannot fulfil your dharma. You cannot be the missing piece of the whole that is you. The whole cannot be whole without you being you.
In the Freudian sense, having an underdeveloped ego is just as problematic as having a grandiose one. Our ego is not our enemy. Our separateness is not a source of suffering. It can only be a cause of suffering if we make the ego the enemy. If we make our ego our best friend, we can utilise it to express ourselves and find connection. But I tried to kill my ego at an early age, as a result of being exposed to a little bit of knowledge about Vedanta and psychology from the adults around me. It is true that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It led me to try to transcend the physical as a child through pranayama and meditation. And I developed a curious form of shyness. I was either not quite there, practising subjugating my ego, or I’d suddenly explode into expression and be told to be quiet; seen but not heard.
I hated having my photo taken for most of my youth, but when I finally found something I was good at, yoga; I found I was ok with people taking photos of me in yoga postures where I didn’t have to show my face. I’m not sure this equates to having a grandiose ‘ego’. More like having a small fragile ego. It was a subjugation of my inner authority. A way of being ‘there’ without really having to ‘be there’. I guess if the social media explosion had happened when I was still doing crazy asana, I might have easily got caught up in it and perhaps might have gotten into the habit of ignoring the felt sensations of my body for a yoga selfie.
DISSOCIATION (psychological detachment from the reality of one’s physical and emotional experiences): Any port in a storm. Life can be traumatic and sometimes when its so traumatic we cannot function, dissociation can be a remedy. Indeed the Satyananda devised practice of yoga nidra and its derivatives are being used to treat trauma in this way. I have many reservations about this. Many more so that teaching asanas from APMB. I think its only a useful therapy if we know to only stay there until the storm passes, and then to take other steps to integrate our traumatic experiences into our life experiences and narrative. Otherwise its back to repression. And its not just yoga nidra that does this. Many teachers and schools of yoga use asana to encourage us to dissociate from the body, and any sensations we might feel within it. Habitually ignoring the signals’s from one’s body means we disable our ability to be alert to any potential damage we may be experiencing. Whilst researching the origins of the Sleeping Pigeon pose, I came across the following instructions;
“Breathe into the sensations that are rumbling in your hips” (Crandell, 2017)
Reading it now, in the light of the repercussions of ignoring the sensations felt in the body recently highlighted in the UK press, it sounds quite irresponsible. However I cannot deny that I have found it beneficial to breathe into certain sensations that I experience in some yoga postures, and I have shared this practice with students, and I probably will continue to do so in certain contexts. I think there is a use for presenting the practice of breathing into the sensations as a way of down regulating chronic pain, but only in conjunction with a nuanced discussion about our relationship to that pain. However, this was added to the end of a short article about ‘mastering’ sleeping pigeon in 4 easy steps, as though its just one of the things that you need to do to ‘master’ the pose. Although I’m not sure that ‘rumbling’ in the hips should be put forward as something that is normal to feel. Do healthy hips rumble? If I were feeling rumblings, in my hips that are normally healthy, and therefore do not usually feel much in the way of strong sensation, I’d want to listen to what that sensation was telling me to do. Hang on, there might be something wrong here, maybe I should come out of the posture?
Dissociative practices, subjugation of one’s personal authority, ego negation, and mixed messages about sexually morality, have all too often been a recipe for the many formation of various types of abusive cults, of which yoga land has more than its fair share.
5. Modern mainstream culture: Subjungation sells
It’s all too easy to dismiss the people posting yoga selfies on Instagram as having a grandiose ego. Closer to the truth is that not only yoga culture, but mainstream culture removes us so far from our own sense of ‘I am-ness’ that oftentimes our ego is under developed. Without a healthy ego, it is difficult to set healthy boundaries and therefore it is more likely that one might allow dominating ideologies to infiltrate one’s nervous system. The most dominant ideology is, by definition the most mainstream, since it is the most prolific. Yoga and even neo-tantra cultures are merely microcosms of the culture around us. Mainstream culture is perhaps the most abusive cult there is. It’s practice of selling our own subjugation back to us for a profit is something yoga culture merely replicates. Often unconsciously.
Despite yoga often being presented to us as a means of breaking away from the mainstream and stepping into a different culture where one is more able to be oneself, more often than not people bring the ideologies that dominated them in the mainstream with them into yoga culture so they are unable to individuate and break away from the dynamics of the culture around them which glorifies shape over sensation. This is making oneself subject to the dominant ideology. And whilst its tempting to blame yoga culture for that, and declare cult dynamics are at play; we must also accept that mainstream culture, and the media through which its ideologies are purveyed, has played a much bigger part in the subjugation and repression of people without privilege than all the yoga cults in the world put together. And because of that it already has in place many mechanisms for dealing with situations where cult dynamics overstep the mark and abuses are perpetrated. Yoga culture is merely a small subset of mainstream culture. We need to remember that we are still protected by, and subject to its laws.
4. Raja Eka Pada Kapotanasana: Royal Pigeon
RECENT PRESS COVERAGE OF YOGA INJURIES: The enticing goal of Royal Pigeon means that the basic form of Pigeon shown in figure 3 is often presented as part of a progression towards a more ‘advanced’ form; Raja Eka Pada Kapotanasana, the Royal Pigeon, as seen in figure 4. The royal pigeon gives two of the most widely regarded benefits of yoga postures; ‘opening’ the hips and chest. Given the sexually abusive cult dynamics described above, I am rather suspicious of why we should value ‘opening’ the hips and chest above all other parts of the body. But given that pigeon does both, it is popular on Instagram. Is it therefore one of the postures that has contributed towards the spate of articles in the UK national press last week about hip injuries among yoga teachers? Physiotherapist Benoy Matthews blames ‘ego’…
"What's achievable for one might not be achievable for others," he says. "People tend to do the same set positions, rather than what's achievable for them. Ego might mean them trying to take a position 'all the way' to the end when they should just stop where it's comfortable. Just because the person next to you can reach all the way doesn't mean it's necessary, or desirable, to do the same." (BBC, 3/11/19)
The British Wheel of Yoga’s spokesperson, Wendy Haring blames yoga teachers who were not trained on Ofqual regulated courses…
“"It's probably true in some schools of yoga, where people hold poses for a long time without modification, that's when there are problems. But learning about anatomy and physiology is a "major part" of BWP-approved courses. We would teach people how to modify poses," Mrs Haring says. She adds though, people teaching yoga do need to take care and advises anyone wanting to train to make sure their courses are Ofqual-approved." (BBC, 3/11/19)
A curious stance given that none of the BWY accredited teacher training organisations deliver Ofqual-approved courses. And who are these schools of yoga that hold poses for a long time? I recall being taught a really slow sun salute where we held each posture for a minute on my BWY Teacher Training Course. And the most painful practice for my hypermobile joints that encourages the holding of passive postures for upwards of 2 minutes, yin yoga, has only ever been taught to me by very well respected BWY teachers. Whilst there are some incredibly knowledgeable and up to date teachers within the BWY, like with anatomy, there is great variety everywhere. So, whilst I do agree with Wendy that there is a fundamental lack of anatomy and physiology training on many yoga teacher training courses, from all schools of yoga. No single accreditation is proof of an individual teacher’s understanding of, and respect for, their students joints.
Most yoga teacher training courses teach standard anatomy. Its understandable. Anatomy is often presented as being a standard thing in many fields. Look at the figure 3 showing of ‘normal’ range of motion at the hip joint which was taken from a slide from a seminar on hip replacement given by a doctor only 2 years ago. What exactly is ‘normal’? In the aforementioned BBC article, both Matthews and Pip White, professional adviser at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy suggest that not everyone is built the same. White says of yoga…
"…as with any form of exercise, it's important to do it safely and in this case, also understanding your own limits, as we are all built differently. Yoga is not about being in competition with anyone else. If you stay aware of your abilities and practise within your own limits, you will gain all the great benefits this practice has to offer." (BBC, 3/11/19).
5. Chaudhary (2017)
White and Matthews both seem clear that yoga will provide benefits if one stays within one’s own limits. Neither mentions holding postures for a long time. Indeed there are many benefits to be gained from holding certain postures for a long time, if one arranges one’s bones in a way that the weight of the body is able to go down to the earth through the bones. There is much evidence of this increasing bone density. Something that is very much needed by people suffering from osteoporosis. (Fishman, 2009).
But I agree with Haring in that some postures should not be held for a long time. Postures where the body weight is likely to go into the joints and destabilise them. For instance, Pigeon. Yes, the more basic forms of pigeon do sometimes have ‘benefits’ attached to them, such as stretching the piriformis muscle or ‘opening’ the hips. But are either of those things really beneficial? And if so, are they beneficial for everyone, or just a certain section of the population with very specific issues such as sciatica, a condition which pigeon is often claimed to help?
OPENING THE HIPS: Whilst maintaining healthy, well rounded, functional mobility of the hips is obviously beneficial; ‘opening’ the hips in one plane means you are closing them in another. So if we favour external rotation in our quest for ‘open’ hips, it is easy to see how this could contribute to an imbalance. At first glance, Pigeon variations might appear to get around this issue because although the front leg is externally rotated, flexed and abducted at the hip joint, the back leg is internally rotated and extended at the hip. So if we do both sides, presumably we are opening the hips in both planes? Surely this is a good thing?
To determine that, I think we have to consider what is a normal functional range of mobility at the hip joints in both these articulations so that we can assess whether striving to achieve pigeon pose would take us beyond normal healthy functionality and therefore, potentially, into unhealthy dysfunctionality. From figure 5, we can see that whilst the external rotation of the front leg (d) in the version of pigeon depicted in figure 3 is within the 50 degrees of movement considered ‘normal’ range, there are some variations of pigeon that encourage the practitioner to bring their shin bone parallel to the front edge of their yoga mat, which would take the external rotation beyond the ‘normal’. Whilst I have previously critiqued use of the word ‘normal’ in this context, and not only accept, but wholeheartedly agree that there is no such thing as standard anatomy, I think the study of a large sample of individuals to give a mean idea of the anatomy that most commonly occurs, is extremely useful, and it is as dangerous to overlook this as it is to assume that ‘normal’ is anything more than a conceptual construct. Context is everything. And contexts are constantly changing. We need to be flexible in our thinking to keep up.
Although external rotation is often considered hip ‘opening’. Its not the only articulation of the hip joint that can be overdone in pigeon. The extension of the back leg is also problematic as it necessitates way beyond the 10 degrees that are generally considered ‘normal’ (see figure 5). If we look higher up to figure 3, it can be seen that attempting a large range of extension of the back leg at the hip joint has the potential to anteriorly tilt the pelvis in relation to the lower back, thereby increasing extension of the lumber spine as the thoracic region of the ribcage is brought towards the vertical. This can generate a situation where all the forces resulting from the effort required to make the pigeon shape are directed towards the posterior lumbar spine. The potential for collapsing the weight of the upper body into the lumbar and hip joints in pigeon requires a great deal of strength to mitigate, even if your hips have the degree of movement in them that allows the basic shape to be made.
Figure 6: LEFT: ‘Normal’ hip Clohisy (2017) RIGHT: Dysplasic hip
HOW DEEP ARE YOUR SOCKETS? This degree of movement could probably only be achieved by someone with relatively shallow hip sockets; precisely the type of hips that are prone to hip pain because they are unstable due to the acetabulum, or hip socket, not completely covering the femoral head, or ball at the top of the thigh bone (see figure 6). Shallow hip sockets are the most common cause of hip dysplasia. Without an X-Ray or MRI, it is difficult to tell if you have shallow hip sockets. However, common symptoms include popping sounds, or a sensation of the hip catching when moving, hip pain (Clohisy 2017) and having hypermobile hips…
“Hip dysplasia may not first appear in the form of hip pain. Many teenagers and young adults live for years not knowing they are walking around with shallow hip sockets. Initially, there may be some benefit from the shallow hip sockets in the form of increased flexibility which allows success at dance, gymnastics, ballet or cheerleading. Hip dysplasia may not be diagnosed until there’s an injury from a misstep or fall.” (International Hip Dysplasia Institute, 2018)
Figure 7. Debbie in Hanumasana in Phool Chatti Ashram, Rishikesh, 2006. The only picture I have. It predates social media & mobile phones. I took it with an actual camera that had a self timer. So I had to position it and run to jump myself into position. There’s a reason there’s no better pictures than this. Doing that hurt! And I had good teachers that told me not to do things that hurt (thank you Godfrey Devereux) and not to do things just because other people are doing them (thank you Grandma).
It is not a great stretch of imagination, and probably a wise precaution, to add Yoga to the above list of activities that are often self selected by people with hip dysplasia. As a child I was not very good at running or anything athletic, but I loved gymnastics and yoga because I could easily get into all the positions. In yoga I finally found something physical that I excelled at and could keep practising into my adulthood. I am a second generation yogi. My mother was easily able to do splits in both planes until a fall left her needing both hips replaced. I have my mother’s hips. They pop when I do my first Trikonasana of the day. They ‘catch’ when I do leg lifts. For much of my life I could do splits both ways. I practiced pigeon regularly to prep for Hanumasana (figure 7). I don’t know if I can still do splits. I stopped trying about 10 years ago, a couple of years after my mother’s first hip replacement, when a hip twinge made the penny drop. I actively started to work on ‘closing’ my hips instead.
SHIFTING YOUR TEACHING PARADIGM: Because of my increasing awareness of hip issues, my teachers and teaching changed significantly. I stopped going to most general classes after I saw a teacher collapse in a heap whilst ‘demonstrating’ Scorpion in a frenzied vinyasa flow class, and the teacher who taught the ‘yoga for bad backs classes’ repeatedly collapsing into her lumbar in her chaturangas, and the teacher with a metal rod in her spine encouraging her students into strong and ill supported back bends, and the teacher, who also advertises his counselling services, who did an unannounced arm balance on a student’s knees to make a point about them grounding their feet, and the teacher who pushed people who were not ready up into handstand, only to walk away from them as if nothing had happened when they collapsed into a heap.
I started practising and teaching the Dynamic Yoga Training Method instead. I had been following Godfrey Devereux around a fair bit anyway as my body clearly appreciated his teaching more than any other teacher I had ever worked with. The method was sensitive and nuanced, so when I started teaching it more explicitly many people were not ready for this shift. It is very easy to get very attached to ‘opening’ your hips. Class numbers decreased a bit as the people who wanted hip ‘openers’ went to teachers who would encourage them and work with them to ‘open’ their hips. However, many really appreciated the change, and other people came. People who had suffered hip pain and stopped coming to classes came back out of the woodwork when they heard my style of teaching had changed. People who were going to other classes but feeling hip pain, started to come to me to figure out some principles that they could take back to these other classes where they would use them to figure out if they could ‘open’ their hips safely. After a while, some people stop going to the classes that hurt and stay at my classes. But not all. The pull of yoga culture is strong. And if its the only culture that you participate in, as it was for me, well, sometimes you have to step away from your friends and save your own hips. Quite often its your friends that encourage you to do hip openers in some particular way that they do them in order that they are done safely. Those friends are attempting to justify their own position to you. I am sure I have been one of those ‘friends’ in the past; I know I have definitely had many of them.
8. The Piriformis Muscle (posterior view)
SCIATICA & THE PIRIFORMIS: Most people who come to me with hip problems have already tried many things to ease their hip pain, including the common go to posture for hip pain; Sleeping Pigeon (figure 2), allegedly the easier and more therapeutic version of pigeon. Designed to REALLY stretch out your piriformis and REALLY ‘open’ your hips. We REALLY have to stop thinking that stretching can be used to cure everything!
So, is there ever a need to stretch out the piriformis? Well, a gentle piriformis stretch could bring some relief to someone suffering from a certain type of sciatic pain caused by inflammation of the piriformis and the resultant pressure this exerts on the nearby sciatic nerve. However, we need to be aware that this is not the only cause of sciatic pain. Indeed, this this is called piriformis syndrome or psuedo sciatica.
Sciatica is generally caused by wear and tear of the lumbar spine, such as degenerative disc disease and spondylolisthesis. Stretching out the piriformis might not be such a good idea in these cases. The piriformis connects the anterior (front) of the sacrum to the greater trochanter at the head of the femur (see figure 8). Therefore in addition to being able to help with external rotation of the leg at the hip joint, the piriformis can also help to posteriorly tilt the pelvis by pulling the sacrum down towards the thigh. If sciatic pain is being caused by degeneration of the lumbar discs, possibly the worst thing you can do for it is to slacken off one of the muscles whose job it is to help keep space between the sacrum and the back bottom ribs.
Actually, I’m not sure that it is a good idea to put a lot of weight into any of your joints a the best of times. Joints are not weight bearing structures. They’re not even structures really. They are spaces in between structures, about which the surrounding structures move.
INTENTION & OUTCOME: A posture that looks incredibly similar to passive Pigeon is Saithilyasana or Animal Resting Pose. Well, it looks similar if you look at figures 1 and 2 at the top of this article, but then neither of those pictures are of actual people. Saithilya means relaxation or effortlessness in Sanskrit. Therefore the intention behind this posture is for it be restful. There is no suggested intention to ‘open’ the hip, stretch the piriformis, nor to align the body in any way. The only intention implied by the name is to rest. This means that the posture does not even need to look like it does in figure 1. For many people this posture looks like the recovery position. Perhaps seeing the pose with its intention to rest clearly in our minds might help us to see how, if we stick to that intention, without falling prey to our desire to increase flexibility, stretch a muscle, ‘open’ a joint or to progress to an increasingly more complex or difficult or aesthetically pleasing posture, then we might allow ourselves to modify the shape of the posture, so that our intention to rest actually leads to a restful outcome.
9. Saithilyasana: actual real people, guided towards the shape and then given permission to adapt it to make it as comfortable, restful & relaxing as possible.
If we mistake kapotanasana and saithilyasana, it is easy to see how the intention to rest in the present moment can get co-opted by goals for the future such as progressing to a more advanced posture, ‘opening’ hips or even fixing a problem. Yes, even the intention to fix a problem can be problematic as sometimes we try very hard to fix something by using a technique that might cause us more harm than good. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and we do not make our best decisions when we are in pain. And to help us heal we need to come out of the fight and flight mode pain puts us in and into rest and digest. In whatever shape that happens to look like.
Our need to heal often gets in the way of our ability to heal.
If we are presented with Sleeping Pigeon as a restful pose, would we be able to rest there? It may work for some, but it contains the same ideas of alignment that mostly do not honour the individual idiosyncrasies of the uniqueness of our joints.
MOVING FORWARD: If you have only ever done pigeon before, perhaps you could try a little experiment. Apply the intention to rest to the 2 postures; Saithyliasana and Sleeping Kapotanasana and see if that reveals any differences in how you approach them, and subsequently, what you might feel in them. But remember that the intention is to rest, not to find a stretch or feel any other sensation, or go anywhere or progress in any way, or to straighten out the back leg, or to make any particular shape, or to try to do any particular thing, just to find comfort and rest. No matter where the starting point is for that intention, they might both take you to the same place.
10. Saithilyasana: more actual real people, guided towards the shape and then given permission to adapt it to make it as comfortable, restful & relaxing as possible.
Fortunately, it is becoming increasingly more common for people to talk about having ‘opened’ their hips so much that they caused themselves irreparable damage resulting in hip replacement, like Jill Miller in 2017 (Miller, 2017) or like Kino McGregor’s pelvic plate displacement in 2015 or Diane Bruni tearing her rotator muscles off her bone in 2008 (Remski, 2015). So, the conversation about yoga injuries, or more accurately, the perils of having unstable joints, has moved on a lot since I started talking about it in my classes after my mum’s first hip replacement about 15 years ago.
Even since I started writing this article, the BBC and the Telegraph have both published articles warning of the dangers of instagram yoga on hip health (BBC, 2019). However, it is an oversimplification to blame ego, social media, lack of Ofqual accreditation or holding postures for a long time. For my mother, Kino MacGregor, and others, it is often a fall or knock that causes the injury rather than the yoga itself. And unfortunately people with hip dysplasia are more likely to injure themselves whatever they do. For some its figure skating, for some its yoga. And some people with shallow hip sockets like myself, have never injured themselves doing these activities because they got early warning signs from their mothers, teachers and, most importantly, the sensations in the hips. Maybe the publicity of these issues will cause more people to question the generally accepted narrative whereby hips & chests are still considered to be something that requires ‘opening’ at all costs in many avenues of yoga culture. I live in hope that talking about these things alerts people to the early warning signs and encourages them to adopt a Sensible Yoga practice that has as its authority the intelligence of the joints and the sensations to be felt in the hips. Listen to your hips. The hips don’t lie. Thank you Shakira.
Addendum: Thanks to the BWY for upholding my complaint about the assertion that Ofqual recognition is a necessity to ensure safe yoga teacher training and to Wendy Haring for her apology and explanation that the BBC had taken her words out of context and mis-represented her position. I still look forward to hearing that Wendy has talked to the BBC about this.
References:
BBC News Online (3/11/19) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50181155?fbclid=IwAR3l16l7SIL9i0GAsSFhoOfVb0O1jz8qHPH-lna28v-xX1qjUQGSV_dENAk
Chaudhary, D (2017) Biomechanics of the hip and total hip replacement: seminar slides: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50181155?fbclid=IwAR3l16l7SIL9i0GAsSFhoOfVb0O1jz8qHPH-lna28v-xX1qjUQGSV_dENAk
Clohisey, MD (2017) https://www.ortho.wustl.edu/content/Patient-Care/3205/Services/Hip-Knee/Adult-Reconstruction-and-Hip-Preservation-Overview/Hip-Dysplasia.aspx
Crandell, J (2016) Master Sleeping Pigeon Pose in 4 Steps: (Yoga Journal: online) https://www.yogajournal.com/poses/master-sleeping-pigeon-pose-4-steps
Fishman, L (2009) Yoga for Osteoporosis: A Pilot study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232144370_Yoga_for_Osteoporosis_A_Pilot_Study
International Hip Dysplasia Institute (2018) https://hipdysplasia.org
Iyengar BKS (1991) Light on Yoga (Thorsons: London)
Miller, J (2017) https://www.tuneupfitness.com/blog/surprise-surprise-you-need-a-total-hip-replacement-or-living-with-chronic-pain-without-knowing-youre-living-with-chronic-pain/
Pankhania, J (2017) A Culture of Silence: Satyananda Yoga (The Luminescent: online) https://www.theluminescent.org/2017/12/a-culture-of-silence-satyananda-yoga.html
Remski, M (2015) Kino’s Hip: http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/kinos-hip/
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2014-2015) https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies/case-study-21-satyananda-yoga-ashram
Satyananda, SS (1999) Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha (Bihar School of Yoga: Munger)
Wilson, JJ & Furukawa, M (2014) Evaluation of the Patient with Hip Pain (American Family Physician: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2014/0101/p27.html)