The Line Between a Strong Yoga Practice and Self-Flagellation

“Wow—you killed me!” cries a girl with exhausted glee as she exits the 100 degree yoga room. She demonstrates with pride how her knees are weak, eyes bloodshot, and fingers trembling.  Sweat drips from her like wax from a blazing candle close to burnout. Her yoga instructor praises her for her dedication and treats her physical disorientation like a badge of honor—proof of both the difficulty and high quality of his instruction.

Not an uncommon scene in 2020, now that the yoga industry has completed it’s rebranding metamorphosis from ‘spiritual stretching’ to a staple in the fitness community more easily equated to ‘abominable acrobatics.’

We are in a time where we the yoga we see on social media is mostly one-armed handstands and contortion-level backbends, so it’s easy to ascribe an expectation of physical performance to our understanding of yoga.  We can easily fall into the mindset of “the more intense the better,”–with the prevalence of hot yoga, and the popularity of vinyasa and other athletically-focused styles of yoga, including yoga with weights, it’s never been easier to up the intensity of your yoga practice. 

And why not, right? We’re busy. The world is fast-paced. A more intense yoga practice equals more benefits in less time, right? More productivity, yay!

Sounds great in theory, but in my five years of being a yoga teacher, it has struck me just how often experienced yogis get injured (myself included). That seems odd to me—isn’t yoga supposed to be about self-care? Yoga is often prescribed when recovering from an injury or when trying to prevent one, so why are all these dedicated, strong practitioners getting injured right and left? Why are we pushing ourselves to the point of injury? Can we still claim that it’s in pursuit of personal growth and connection to self? Or is it something else?

In my opinion, the danger comes in the mindset with which we approach our yoga practice.

Sure, part of the blame could be on the instructors—maybe they didn’t explain proper alignment in a pose, or they gave unsafe adjustments, or they made their sequence too challenging to execute safely. It’s easy for ego to get involved when teaching yoga. You want your students to think your class is hard, and thereby think that you are interesting and creative and special. We are human beings living on earth, and generally it is desirable and advantageous to be liked.

More often than not, when I see my experienced students get injured it is not because of anything the instructor did, but rather because the student was adopting that mindset that prioritized the intensity of the practice over the specificity of purpose.  While, yes, you want to push yourself to grow on your mat, I think it is just as important to ask why you are moving the way you are moving.

We often equate growth nowadays with struggle—i.e. ‘no pain no gain’— therefore, we feel accomplished when we have worked ourselves to our physical limit. We want to replicate those positive feelings of accomplishment, so we work ourselves harder and harder. We fear stagnation in our growth so we work harder yet. The risk is we are so focused on the pursuit of growth via physical intensity, that when our bodies begin to naturally exhaust, we sometimes stop listening. We become more dedicated to the push, the struggle, the work we are putting into our yoga practice, rather than the purpose behind it.

The motivation for pushing ourselves to unsafe places can vary—maybe it’s burning off the calories to fit into that bikini that has been taunting you for months from the back of your closet, maybe it’s holding a handstand longer than yesterday, maybe it’s beautifying a yoga pose to later snap a picture for instagram, maybe there’s a cute boy in the class and you want to show off for him how good you are at yoga, or maybe you respect the teacher a lot and you want to prove your worthiness through your practice. 

While lined up one after the other, as above, these motivators might seem laughable or exaggerated, it is normal for our minds and motivations to stray in these directions either consciously or unconsciously. When we allow this to remain unconscious and do not change our behavior, risk is introduced. In some cases, students are so dedicated to their (potentially misguided) physical practice that it almost seems like students are punishing themselves through their yoga practices—self-flagellation on the mat.

But is that really what yoga is about?

The practice of yoga is the act of continually re-focusing ourselves out of such performative mindsets, and instead tuning in to how we each individually operate on a deeper more habitual level. I think we get the most out of our mat when we root our practice in an exploration and celebration of self, viewing the poses and physical challenges as chances to connect to yourself on a deeper more profound level, rather than to prove your worth/dedication/etc.

I would argue yoga isn’t about the poses at all, but rather about how we interact with ourselves through the poses. What do you learn about yourself when put in a physically challenging and uncomfortable position and asked to just breathe? What mental, physical and emotional patterns surface? How can you learn to interrupt those patterns to bring a greater harmony and purpose to your life?

When you approach your practice from this mindset, the poses, no matter how intense or complicated, become vehicles of self-connection, opportunities to understand yourself more, rather than to out-perform yourself. 

Sure, you often want to leave a yoga class feeling like you’ve worked hard, but do you really want to work so hard that you’re exhausted, depleted, and drained? What is the point of that? Will you get a medal if you hold that pose 10 seconds longer today? Is the strength you build not arbitrary if you aren’t tuned into how it interacts with the rest of your being? How it supports you? What is the point of strength for the sake of strength?

There is a Sanskrit phrase, “Sthira Sukham Asanam,” which roughly translates to “may your yoga poses be both steady and joyful.” It doesn’t mean “work yourself to the point that you think you’re going to pass out because that’s the only way you can grow as a person.” I think sometimes we focus so much on the ‘steadiness’ of the pose—the rigor, the intensity, the alignment—that we sacrifice the joy of the movement. It’s easy to get impatient and headstrong–to commit to our projected growth at whatever the cost, even at the expense of our wellbeing. Is it really worth it to work that hard if you’re making yourself miserable in the process? How does that serve you?

It’s easy to become stuck on a hamster wheel of perceived productivity that is ultimately useless.

We are a goals-based society, so it makes sense that we want to grow. We want to work hard to reap the rewards. But we must remind ourselves to find balance along the way, or else we burn out or injure ourselves. If we are not careful we can develop a relationship to our yoga mat that reinforces unhealthy patterns, ideas, expectations, and relationships. Instead, why not use your mat as a place to identify and un-learn these detriments?

We as a yoga community can become so focused on acquiring strength and aesthetics that at times we forget that the whole reason for strength it is to unlock our compassion. We must be compassionate with ourselves while growing.

Can we give ourselves permission to be in-progress and grow with patience? Can we prescribe our yoga movement lovingly rather than viciously? Can we learn that part of growth is learning to take a step back sometimes?

Maybe see what happens if you use your mat as a time to connect with yourself rather than to test yourself.