Why Injury Prevention in Yoga?

Here is the Core Reason for what we’re doing with DSL Let-Go Yoga.

It is a well-established fact that a large number of Americans are in a state of excess sympathetic overload in their nervous system. This is an over-activity of the Sympathetic Nervous System, responsible for the Fight, Flight, Fright & Freeze activities. Its the Emergency Management System of your human bodymind.

This system works fine if you get plenty of rest and regeneration in between emergency events. In earlier times, people probably had a lot more time in between the sabre-tooth tiger attacks or whatever the danger of the day or week was. But today, we are told by scientific research, that the constant, low-grade stains and stressors of daily life on the bodymind never really let up, not even when we are asleep.

The over-activity of this nerve system leads to slow, incremental breakdown of the various systems: muscles, glands, organs, vessels, connective tissue, and so on. The nerves themselves, of course, suffer in the long run, too.
It is also known that most people, if they work out at all, spend most, if not all, of their time, focusing on strength and endurance building types of activities. Even in the recent, modern trend of far more people practicing yoga, the systems preferred by the new majority are those that focus on strengthening muscles and building endurance.

We know this because many of the yoga studios who do focus on the less aggressive forms have lost a lot of business to the newer, more workout oriented systems.

I have, of course, nothing against getting stronger and more durable. And I believe that yoga IS, or at least can be, a great way to achieve this.

HOWEVER … There are many ways to get fit and strong. Yet there are very few ways that people can actually reduce the stress and tensions that accumulate in their bodymind. Those who feel they can get rid of stress via intense exercise are correct only up to a point. Yet this is somewhat of an illusion.

When you feel how tight and hard their muscles are, you realize that some of that stress might be thrown off. But much of it remains, stored in the form of Chronic, Excess Muscle Tension. People THINK they are getting TONED up. But in reality, this is at least somewhat superficial. They are in actuality getting TONUSED up. These two phenomena, Tone and Tonus, are very related but significantly different things. Tone is great, but too much Tonus is a disaster waiting to happen.

And Too Much Tonus is what you get by most of the activities and exercises, even many yoga forms, available and performed today. It could even be argued that the more tonus you get, the less tone you have.
And it is far more likely that if, and/or when, a person suffers long term chronic breakdown of one or more of their various bodymind systems, it will be from excess stress and tension, i.e., tonus, and not from too little muscle tonus. Many people who are very fit, with lots of muscle tone, are no where near as healthy as they think. That very tension, what they think is tone, in their muscles is what is going to get many of them in the long run.

While I do, again, think it is important to focus some attention on toning up of muscles, I believe MOST people should be more focused on tension reduction and de-stressing of the body. The little-known Secret is to increase Tone while decreasing Tonus.

I am going to go into far more depth on this issue in future blog-posts, and in my various articles, reports, e-books, and such on this website. (There is an e-book available, right now, if you don’t mind reading a not-so-rough draft of it. It’s in the e-Book section, called BodyMind BreakDowns. There, you can learn a lot about the Tone versus Tonus issue.)
For now, though, I want to point out that there is an ironic development here. … That is that many of those people who are doing yoga are doing it so aggressively — going too deep, too fast, too intensely, or with certain specific movements, and with not enough internal awareness — that many of them are suffering from the way they do yoga.

I have a growing list of Clients from L.A. to London who have been doing or teaching yoga for years and are (or were till they met me) developing tension patterns that are leading to, or already accomplished, breakdown of various systems of their body. They are developing aches and pains, restrictions of movement, loss of coordination, and so on. They are stunned to discover that it is the way they’ve been doing yoga that is the source of their challenges.

To solve this problem, I have, over the years, developed Ten Basic Principles for practicing yoga that will help people maximize the results they get, while minimizing, if not eliminating, the potential injuries that have been occurring all too frequently in the practice of yoga.

You can read about The Ten Principles HERE.

You can read about Tone versus Tonus HERE.