A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers: The
Incorporation of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Anatomy into the
Practice
Mel Robin
Paperback, 8.25x11 in, 1128 pages, Illustrated,
Bibliography
Wheatmark, May 2009
ISBN: 9781587367083
Endorsements
"A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers provides a lucid
blending of Eastern and Western science that helps us understand
the human body from both perspectives! It is a major contribution
to both medicine and yoga."
— Rajvi Mehta, editor, Yoga
Rahasya, Mumbai
"This book is quite obviously the result of extensive thought
and effort on the part of the author. It contains a wide range of
information, blending present-day anatomy and physiology with
knowledge of yoga from ancient texts."
— Dr. Shirley Telles, Swami Vivekananda
Yoga Research Foundation, Bangalore
"There is a paucity of books such as this handbook ... I liked
the colorful descriptions and stories interspersed
throughout."
— Lois Steinberg, teacher and therapist,
Iyengar Yoga Institute of Champaign-Urbana
"The book is unique in its mixture of scientific explanation and
practical application...As a practicing Iyengar teacher with no
medical background, I have had little choice but to accept the
words of B. K. S. and Geeta Iyengar in their description of the
effects and benefits of poses...I have had no reason to doubt them,
but when teaching students with a Western mind, it helps to present
them with a ‘scientific reason' why."
— Renata Cardinal, certified Iyengar yoga
teacher, Watchung Yoga Arts Center, New Jersey
"Mel Robin's labor of love has combined his knowledge of modern
anatomy and physiology and traditional yoga beliefs (mostly in the
Iyengar tradition) together with personal opinion and analysis
based on years of teaching and practice within this tradition. By
painstakingly collecting this material together, he has done a
great service to the yoga community, especially those with an
interest in yoga therapy and the intersection between yoga and
Western medicine."
— Dr. Ruth Gilmore, faculty, Yoga Therapy
Centre, London
"A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers is useful for yoga
teachers and serious yoga students who wish to bridge their
understanding of Western and Eastern concepts. It may help
practitioners of other Eastern methods of healing find ways to
explain what they are doing to Western students or clients. Western
doctors who want to understand Eastern healing methods will find
the book extremely beneficial."
— Jessie Thompson, director, the Yoga Loft
of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Description
An excellent resource for teachers and students of yogasana,
medical professionals, and bodywork practitioners, A Handbook
for Yogasana Teachers presents novel aspects of physiology and
neuroscience as they apply to the practice of yoga. If you have
ever wondered why we do yogasana as we do, you will likely
find the answers within these pages.
About the Author
A former molecular spectroscopy researcher and award-winning
science teacher, Dr. Mel Robin currently devotes his time to the
practice and teaching of Iyengar yoga.
Excerpt
In the Beginning
The possibility of writing a handbook connecting the sciences of
yogasana practice and Western medicine was born in my mind
ten years ago. To this end, I combed the literatures of
yogasana and medical science as completely as I could, and
in an earlier edition of this handbook [709], published in 2002, I
laid before readers the juxtaposed pictures of the two sciences as
I found them. Inasmuch as the sciences of yogasana and
Western medicine have evolved independently of one another, it is
no surprise that direct comparisons of the two occur only
infrequently so that one is working to assemble a puzzle for which
many key pieces are still missing. However, considering the pieces
of the puzzle that could be connected, with a little imagination
one can then guess the shape and coloring of the missing pieces
with some confidence. I did this in several places, being careful
to point out that this "missing information" was only my best guess
as to what is going on and may well be incomplete, or even
incorrect.
Initially, the intended audience for the handbook consisted of
yogasana teachers with perhaps five to ten years' experience
(but not necessarily in the Iyengar approach [388]), who have not
otherwise been trained in science, but who probably have been
exposed to the medical side of yoga without understanding much of
that aspect. It was assumed in turn that these teachers were
working with beginning students, practicing those yogasanas
with which beginners most often work. It appears now that the
handbook additionally has found an audience among those doing
bodywork outside of yoga, and among yogasana students who
are not presently teaching. As I worked on the earlier edition of
this handbook, my feeling was that it would be the first and only
one of its kind to meld yogasana and Western medicine in aid
to both yogasana teachers and medical experts. And at the
same time, I estimated that I would be lucky if more than a hundred
copies of such a specialized book would be sold, filled with so
many ideas that would seem so foreign to most yoga teachers and to
most medical doctors. Still, I persevered with the thought that in
my way and from my position at the bottom of the yogasana
hierarchy, this nonetheless could be a meaningful contribution to
yoga. Indeed, how lucky one would be to make any contribution to
yoga after its illustrious history of 5,000 years!
The past few years have proved me wrong quantitatively. In the
intervening years, other books on the subject have come to my
attention, most especially those of Coulter [167], Raman [694],
Stiles [832], and Telang [851], the first three of which preceded
my publication by several months, and the fourth by several years.
Though differing in several respects from this handbook, Dr.
Coulter's book does cover much of the same territory and thus is
very useful to the student and teacher. In fact, had I known that
his book was on the horizon, I am not sure that I would have
continued work on mine! Rather than acknowledge in detail the many
points on which he and I agree, I recommend his book to you, with
the thought that in spite of the differing accents put on the
common material, having our two books in hand gives the student a
more evenhanded picture of the field than either does alone. The
books by Drs. Telang and Raman are recommended, as they present
views of the subject that are more Eastern in their approaches than
are those books published by us Western authors. Taken in
combination, these books give both the Eastern and Western readers
a more rounded picture of this developing field.
Anatomy and Physiology
Recently I have seen that more and more of the articles in yoga
journals discuss the anatomy and physiology of the postures, that a
much larger percentage of the classes given at yogasana
workshops today are focused on anatomy and physiology, and that all
yoga teacher-training courses now appear to offer anatomy and
physiology as distinct parts of the coursework. I think it is not
an illusion to say that interest in these subjects is quickly
gaining ground in the yoga community. It is my hope that this
interest will expand to include the newly burgeoning field of
neuroscience as well.
A Second Chance
The publication of the earlier edition of this handbook and its
positive reception by some yogasana and bodywork enthusiasts
has given me the time and stimulus to consider a major revision of
the earlier work, differing from it in being organized along
different lines while introducing many new topics of great
scientific interest (current to February 2007), along with their
relevance to yogasana practice.
In order to hold the revised edition of this work to manageable
proportions, certain parts of the earlier work have been omitted
and many of the figures have been redrawn in the interest of
improved clarity and accuracy. In this process, a certain amount of
repetition has been removed from the text while other explanations
have been expanded to make them more understandable. Additionally,
a few other discussions have been omitted entirely from the revised
edition, because they were felt, in hindsight, to be of only
minimal interest to the reader. On the other hand, the volume of
revised text has been greatly enlarged by the addition of totally
new material, for we have been in the midst of an explosive
increase of our understanding of the functions of various brain
centers over the past few years, almost all of which I find
relevant to yogasana practice. Thus, the revised edition
contains significantly more meaningful material of high current
interest, hopefully justifying its 100-percent increase in
bulk.
Most of the subsections in this new version of the handbook have
been further subdivided, using italicized subtopic headings ("A
Second Chance," for example), whose key phrases make browsing
the handbook faster and more interesting. Within the text, whenever
a particular item in one place has relevance to material in another
place, it will reference that related material parenthetically as
"(see also Subsection X.Y, page xxx)." These "hyperlinks" have been
inserted in the text to allow the reader rapid access to closely
related material without having to search the index. On the other
hand, for those who choose to go deeper/further, the index has been
internally cross-referenced with great detail so as to maximize the
number of such associations.
The appearance of this revised edition seven years after the
initial effort is embarrassing on one score: it really isn't right
that one pays so much for a book, and then, in a few years, finds
that it is out of date and so is forced to buy a revised edition.
All I can say in defense of this is that I have worked on the
revised edition so as to make a significant improvement in the text
and to incorporate a very large amount of genuinely new material
(so new, in fact, that it is just now appearing in the scientific
technical literature). Hopefully, the reader will find that this
augmented and revised edition is well worth having over and above
whatever merits the earlier edition had to offer.
What's Old, What's New?
If asked what the key phrase or idea was in the earlier edition
of this handbook, I would say, in hindsight, that it was the
largely unsuspected importance of the autonomic nervous system to
our practice of yogasana. I choose to say "autonomic nervous
system" because other textbooks on yoga rarely (if ever) mention it
at all, yet it is a substantial component of the earlier edition.
Applying the same question to the present work, I would have to say
the key word in my mind is now "flexibility." As students of yoga,
I know that on reading this, your mind has skipped automatically to
the flexibility of the muscles and joints in the body; however, I
remind you of how tightly this body is connected by yoga to the
mind, to the emotions, and to the spirit. In this case, by
"flexibility" I refer not only to the muscles and joints, but just
as well to the flexibility and mutual connectivities of the
emotions, of the hormonal systems, of the peripheral nervous
systems, of the gross and subtle structures of the brain, of the
myofascial tissues, of the levels of consciousness, of the modes of
learning and remembering, and of our attitudes toward accepting or
rejecting both new and old ideas. In all of these areas, one can
find not only flexibility among students and teachers, but also
hyperflexibility, as well as a lack of flexibility.
To the more traditional aspects of Western medicine must be
added the recent advances in the field of neuroscience; suffice it
to say here that advances in the last few years have greatly
expanded our understanding of how the brain is connected to the
body, mind, and emotions, and this new understanding has made the
study of Western medical science vastly more relevant to the study
of yogasana. This subject now occupies a much larger
fraction of the text in the revised handbook than it did in the
earlier volume, and its discoveries not only illuminate the
discussion of the autonomic nervous system for yogasana
students, but may also soon overtake it in importance.
Definitions
Let us take a moment, then, to define our terms. By
"yogasana" is meant the scientific study and practice of the
traditional Indian postures, performed with alignment, strength,
and grace as per the directives of B. K. S. Iyengar [388, 393]. By
stabilizing the body through this practice, one can then stabilize
and quiet the mind. "Pranayama" is the science of the
control of the breath while in a stable body posture; when the
breath is controlled, it is refined, with the mind being quiet but
inwardly alert. Traditionally, by "Western medicine" we mean the
scientific study of body systems and their understanding in terms
of anatomy and physiological processes such as heart rate, blood
pressure, autonomic stimulation, muscle-spindle response, motor
units, hormones, learning, memory, etc. [196]. Note that a large
amount of high-quality "Western medical science" focused on yoga
processes has begun to surface recently in the Indian medical
journals (see, for example, the work of Telles et al. in this
regard).
The largest overlap of Eastern yogasana practice and
Western medical practice centers on the autonomic nervous system
and its branches, the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric
nervous systems; in anticipation of newer advances in both medicine
and the yogasanas, the handbook mentions many aspects of the
autonomic nervous system that are presently relevant to
yogasana work or could be so in the future. Of course, a
full discussion of the autonomic effects with respect to
yogasana practice entails descriptions of many other
subjects -- muscles, nerves, reflexes, the brain, bones, the
breath, vision, etc. -- and all of these have been included at the
relevant levels. An Eastern version of medicine, Ayurveda, also
exists with a wide following [473]; however, this handbook deals
exclusively with the relation between yogasana practice
[388] and the concepts of Western medicine.
Though there are eight limbs to the yoga tree of Patanjali
[391], the present work deals almost totally with the third limb,
the yogasanas or postures, only tangentially with the fourth
limb, pranayama, and not at all with the others. This is not
to say that they are not all equally important, but it is at the
levels of yogasana and pranayama that Western
medicine and the eight limbs of yoga have their largest common
ground. Hence it is at this level that the integration of
yogasana and medical understanding makes the most sense,
especially in the context of teaching beginning and intermediate
students.
A Rational Approach
This handbook deals with those aspects of yogasana that
are amenable to rational thought and experiment. Such a mechanistic
approach, I feel, is undeniably relevant to yogasana
practice for beginners. It is equally undeniable that the
mechanistic approach is less relevant for the more advanced
practitioner, for whom yogasana and its effects go far
beyond our Western powers to quantify, measure, or understand.
Perhaps we can think of the mechanistic approach employed here as
equivalent to the use of props, a practice that helps beginning
students and their teachers in the performance of the
yogasanas but which is not intended necessarily to be used
at higher levels of the yoga tree.
Scope
The present scope of this handbook can be set out in more
detail:
1) Though this handbook is meant to be a bridge between Western
medicine and Eastern yogasana, is not a description of a
mature field, although its component parts, medicine and
yogasana, each have long histories and deal with very
sophisticated subjects.
2) This handbook is centered upon the practice of
yogasana; rather than being a "How-do-you-do-it?" book
concerning the basic and intermediate-level yogasanas, it
deals instead with "What-happens-when-you-do-it?" The answers to
these yogic questions are framed within the neuroscientific,
physiological, and anatomic explanations of the body as given
largely by Western medical science. For teachers and
intermediate-level students of yogasana, a goal of the
handbook is to help you understand rationally what you already
"know" intuitively or have been told ex cathedra. In this
work, I attempt to honor aspects of the traditional hatha yoga
approach while focusing on the scientifically documented, objective
effects of yogasana practice on the body and mind, and
applying these proven concepts to the more subjective but
unquantifiable feelings often attendant to this practice.
3) This handbook offers discussions of several scientific topics
in appendices that are somewhat off the main track (for example,
Section IV.D, page 856, concerning gravitational effects on
yogasana postures). Shorter expositions of materials that
are somewhat off the general theme of the text are also appended as
highlighted text boxes and/or as footnotes.
4) Though the subject is yogasana and medicine, it is not
specifically about yogasana as therapy. Still, where the
discussion unavoidably bears on yogasana as therapy, this
aspect is noted.
5) This handbook's approach is most strongly focused on the
yogic approach of B. K. S. Iyengar [388, 393] and his family, as
this is the most scientific of the various approaches to
yogasana (and apparently among the most popular, as it is
estimated to account for 30 percent of the fifteen million yoga
practitioners in the United States [781]) and so is closest to the
Western medical explanations of how the body functions.
6) Because this handbook offers rational discussion of the
reasons why we work the yogasanas as we do and why we feel
as we do while doing them, it can make yogasana more
interesting to students and so bind them more firmly to their
practice.
7) This handbook does not consider the great mass of medical
data and understanding derived from experiments on invertebrates or
nonhuman vertebrates.
8) In the past five years, many of those who have read
preliminary drafts of the revised manuscript independently have
written the same phrase in the margin: "Interesting, but what does
this have to do with yoga?" Thus sensitized, I have worked
diligently in the present work to make this connection as concrete
as I can, within the bounds of reason. Thus, esoteric subtopics do
appear in the text that seemingly may have no relation to your
yogasana practice; in these cases, they are included because
I feel that they are at least tangentially related, and that with
further thought, they may well become important to us in the yoga
world as our understanding broadens. (This point of view is
discussed further in the epilogue, page 821.)
9) A special effort has been made to make the index
multidimensional. As explained there (page 999), the
multidimensional aspect means that one can use the index not only
to find a particular topic in the handbook, but due to the
extensive cross-referencing within the index, one also can uncover
unique relations between any two topics. The index's formatting is
somewhat nonstandard so as to accommodate the breadth of its
information while keeping it to a reasonable length; please read
the introduction on p. 999 before looking up a topic. The text of
the handbook also can be searched electronically using Amazon's
"Search Inside" feature.
Refreshing One's Practice
My own experience (twenty-five years as student, twenty-one
years as teacher) is that one can more easily keep the experience
of yogasana practice fresh and bright in one's awareness if
one can make the connections between what is being experienced in
the yogasana and what one understands of the functions of
the body, mind, and emotions as put forth by Western medicine. At
the same time, I am well aware of how disjointed this medically
intense approach appears to be with most of yogic history; I ask
that you approach it with an open mind and see if it does not add
something fresh to your practice and teaching.
I have found this attempt at bringing Western medicine and
yogasana into a rational relationship to be satisfying, and
though there are many loose ends, the new awareness of the
connections has led me to yet more avenues to explore. Each of the
hours that one practices and each of the hours that one teaches can
be energized by understanding how these two sciences, which have
developed so independently of one another, have come to dovetail as
nicely as they do. Because the new avenues opened by simultaneously
considering Western medicine and yogasanas serve to refresh
and invigorate one's practice and teaching, it has been my
intention in writing the present edition to extend the number of
such connections to the maximum. In doing so, it has become a goal
in this handbook to take the mystery out of Western medicine and
out of yogasana practice but not the wonder of the
connections within each of them, and especially those between
them.
Who Does Yoga Today?
Information is limited in regard to this question, but data
gathered in 1998 in the United States and published in 2003 is
available [737]. In this study, it was found that approximately
15.0 million Americans had tried yoga at least once and 7.4 million
had done so in the year 1997, the total population being
approximately 200 million at that time. Among those who tried yoga
more than once in 1997, the male to female ratio was 32 percent to
68 percent; 68 percent of such practitioners were college educated,
and 93 percent were urban dwellers. These students also reported
that 64 percent used yoga for general wellness, 48 percent for
specific health conditions, and 21 percent for the relief of back
or neck pain. From these numbers, one can see that yoga already has
a strong medical flavor in the minds of Westerners, and it is a
goal of this work to strengthen it even more.
