People sometimes object to astanga vinysasa on the grounds that it’s responsible for a lot of injuries. There’s some truth in this. Inexperienced teachers who adjust over-enthusiastically, coupled with A-type students who try to force their bodies into postures, can make for a high-risk combination. Wherever aggression and will predominate over readiness to surrender, there is potential for harm. However, my friend Angela suggests another way of looking at all of this. She says that the gift of astanga is to reveal to us the places where our body is weak or out of balance and then to offer us the opportunity either to heal these places or to create a state of chronic discomfort there. My own experience of practising astanga vinyasa bears out this view.

In Sanskrit the name for the primary series is yoga chikitsa, which is usually translated as ‘yoga therapy’. But yoga chikitsa isn’t therapy in any simple sense. In order to be truly therapeutic the primary series requires of us that we practise it with a little wisdom. Fortunately – paradoxically – a function of yoga chikitsa is that practising it grows our wisdom. That is to say, you may enroll for an astanga class with the intention just of firming your buttocks or feeling a bit less stressed, but quite soon you find that you are learning things about yourself, about your habits and your motivations. You begin to see where you are living in a way that does not truly serve you, and – almost without your willing it – you begin to choose more skillful ways of being.

At one stage I used to refer to my practice as ‘the path of pain’. I was joking, but only a bit. The path of pain was nothing to do with masochism. I tried really hard not to hurt myself, and I got intensely frustrated when I hurt myself anyway. Initially, I did my best to ignore my pain, hoping it would go away. (I had been involved in classical dance, so this way of dealing with discomfort was second nature.) However, the more I tried to ignore my pain, the more it waved its arms around. I have Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, so it’s quite easy for me to injure myself. I didn’t like this. I would watch more robust types pushing their bodies apparently without deleterious effect and resent the fact that when I tried to practise in a similar way I ended up with chronic tendonitis, strained ligaments, subluxations and a torn meniscus. The more I tried to push forwards, the more – in my eyes – I was forced backwards, into a practice increasingly ‘limited’ by injury.

Pain became a path when I started to understand that when I am injured, injury is the practice. Knowing this was one of the key transformational moments of my practice. We work with what is, not with what we wish it were or the way it was yesterday. When I completely embrace the way things are, a shift happens in my orientation. I am on the road of reality. Here, now, step by step, moment by moment. And when the practice is what is, it's no longer just about injury any more. Everything becomes the practice.
That injury is a great teacher is almost a truism, but it took me a while to understand how profound these teachings can be. They are not simply biomechanical in nature but have also to do with how we are in our whole life, as we manifest in our body. Yoga is the mirror that reveals to us the truth about our way of being. The way we hurt ourselves on the mat is the way we hurt ourselves in our life.

For this reason, it seems to me particularly important that we keep practising when we are injured. By this I don’t mean that we should carry on regardless, denying the pain or trying to ‘breathe through it’ – which will only exacerbate the injury. There is no place for this in yoga. Going ‘through’ the pain (in this context, anyway) signifies going beyond, that is, overshooting the place where the work is. It means missing the point and is often a form of avoidance or a symptom of attachment to the practice as a demonstration of physical prowess.

What I do mean is that we simply continue to step onto the mat, with our injury and with our mindful attention, and find appropriate ways of interacting with whatever is happening. This may involve modifying or completely changing our practice. Well, that’s OK. We change or we modify and we embrace all of that. Which means also embracing our reaction to needing to change or modify – our genuine reaction, including the nasty bits that we’d rather sweep under the yoga mat: our anger and our resentment and our sense of loss and our fear ... or whatever it is. If we just stop practising until the problem has (we hope) gone away, we remain forever ignorant of the knowledge that it has to communicate to us. Since this knowledge is always something that we really need to know, the pain will continue to recur, in one form or another, until we pay due attention to it.

Working with injury demands our sensitivity, our honesty and our patience. It demands that we love our injuries, spend time with them, respect them, listen to them. This is what’s happening now; this is the pathway. This is the teaching.