DO NOT Trust Yoga Blindly • Yoga Myth and Reality

Why You Should Not Trust Yoga Blindly Yoga is a popular means of a healthy lifestyle and means of recovery for both athletes and regular people. During the last decade it has blown up in the world and became extremely popular not only as a practice but also as a lifestyle and even a fashion statement. Yet while many Yogis tend to shine an extremely positive light on the benefits of Yoga, nothing is always just bright, as there is a dark side to it which is often left unspoken of as well. Hi, my name is Rokas. I’ve been a professional Yoga instructor for the last 10 years and ran my own Yoga studio for 7 of them. Through these years I’ve personally experienced why you should not trust Yoga blindly and will share with you the why in this video. I began learning Yoga intensively when I was 19 while I lived in an Aikido, Yoga and meditation school as a live-in student. Not only was I introduced to the philosophical, cultural and mystical side of Yoga such as chakras, nadis, prana and more, I also did at least three Hatha Yoga classes per week, which included stretching, balance postures, breathing exercises and more taught by various different instructors. After living in the school for two years, eventually wanting to open up my own martial arts school I was suggested to become a professional Yoga instructor in order to have a more wholerounded studio. In order to become proficient, I set out for a month to visit India and deepen my Yoga knowledge there before, after three years of intense studying I was ready to start my own school in my home country. While I’ve gathered teaching experience during my time as a live-in student and ended up learning quite a bit about Yoga, when I started my own school I did not feel confident in my teaching skills as I felt something was missing. I was encouraged and blessed by my main Yoga instructor to teach, yet every time I taught I felt I wasn’t sure exactly what I was teaching. I knew all the main postures, breathing exercises, theory and main official benefits. I could pass them on quite well to my students too, yet still, I always felt a nagging feeling that something was wrong. I also had a feeling that others Yoga instructors knew much more than I did and that compared to them I was inferior. To fix this nagging feeling, I decided to start seeing other Yoga instructors to fill my missing gap, yet what I discovered was surprising. While I expected to be blown away by the superior knowledge of other Yoga instructors and was ready to fill my gaps of knowledge with theirs, each Yoga instructor I’ve met and attended, I either knew as much or sometimes even more than they did. That caught me off guard as I expected to be way inferior, yet while I still felt a missing piece in my method of teaching, I had to come to a conclusion that: “If I know as much as all these well known Yoga instructors, my Yoga teaching must be good enough”, and thus I continued to teach, trying to ignore the doubt I had. Everything changed though when a book called “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards” written by a pulitzer prize winning author William J Broad, came into my attention. As I dove into the book, it explained in detail how Yoga arrived to the West and how actually little it was tested by science to check and prove all the claims which it came together with. That reminded me of all my, so called “knowledge” about the benefits of various Yoga postures that I knew, which to me, always felt suspicious. It turns out most of them were just made up by various Indian Yogis and passed on from generation to generation, until it finally spread through the West as well. Regarding pretty much 90% of them there were no scientific proof to back up the supposed, claimed benefits and in the researches that were actually done, most of the times the benefits were very different to the oficial ones, if there were any at all. To reveal my nagging thoughts even further, the book gave a whole list of examples where the practice of Yoga was actually damaging to the body of the practitioner, often times leading to dramatic, life long injuries, since as it turns out, while many Yogis proclaimed Yoga to be completely safe and only beneficial practice, if practiced in the wrong way, which is by the way, not difficult to do, can lead to extreme injuries, which turns out - actually happened very often through the entire world. After having read the book I was finally sure of what was bothering me all this time. Despite the fact that I knew almost as much as most professional Yoga instructors, it turned out most of us did not know much about the reality of the body and healthy physical practice at all. We were all given some watered down, fantasy based information about how the body works and the made up benefits of the postures and exercises that our teaching was based on. Worst thing - many people came to our classes wanting to get better, to heal from various injuries or become healthier and in reality - they came to the very wrong hands of a bunch of people who were sure they knew what they are doing, although in reality they didn’t. That is such a dangerous “game” to be played, yet unfortunately it is still played in many Yoga schools across the world. Thinking about all of this, for a moment I still considered that maybe it was just me who was just unlucky and I’ve met the wrong people in my Yoga practice, who were unable to see the reality side of things. Of course, how good a Yoga instructor is also depends on himself and how much he is interested in the truth. I am sure that there are a handful of instructors who do know the science behind the body and physical health and teach it in the right way. Unfortunately, I am quite certain as well that such people are few out of many. This realization soon came to me when a close person to me attended one of the most famous and world wide spread month long Yoga instructor course, where after spending a month there and learning everything they had to give her, I still saw a huge amount of lack in her proper knowledge on how to teach a science based Yoga which would guarantee safety of the students, and that knowledge in the course was pretty much not addressed at all. While through the years I’ve seen many more dark sides of Yoga practice, this one was the most shocking one for me to discover. Millions of people entrust their health to the so called “Yoga professionals” without deeply questioning their source of knowledge and risk experiencing injury which may lead to lifelong consequences. Most Yoga instructors blindly trust their original sources too, without taking the time to look at the science tested methods and information of helping other individuals to maintain their physical health. There are endless numbers of so called professional Yoga instructors who passed a month long course, where they were mainly taught some Indian mysticism and a handful of physical exercises, with made up benefits and straight away went for teaching others. Does that mean Yoga is an entirely bad practice? Of course not. If learned and taught properly, it can be a wonderful, healing practice. Yet as in everything, it is essential that critical thinking is applied, that our sources of knowledge are properly tested and that we neither pass on dangerous information and practices, nor we allow ourselves to fall into the hands of such. While Yoga is painted in a very bright light, it is essential that we look behind it to know what we are really getting into.