How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body (NYT article)

note: This investigative report confirms what I have felt all along: Castaneda was working for the Dark Side.
A supreme manipulator and super controller whose “witches” likely committed suicide to “be with him” after his death from liver cancer. His Tensegrity is basically hard, martial style qigong, perfect for angry weekend warriors, Get the juicy details below. – Michael

My name is Armando Torres. I have written this book in order to complete a task that was assigned to me years ago.
In October 1984, I met Carlos Castaneda, a controversial anthropologist and a writer on the subject of sorcery. At the time I was still quite young. In my quest for answers, I had looked into various spiritual traditions and I wanted to find a teacher. But, from the very beginning, Carlos was very clear in this respect:
“I don’t promise anything,” he said; “I am not a guru. Freedom is an individual choice, and each one of us must assume the responsibility of fighting for it.”
In one of the first talks that I attended, he severely criticized the kind of human idolatry that induces us to follow others, and to expect ready-made answers from them. He said that this attitude is a remnant of our herd mentality.
“Whoever sincerely wants to penetrate the teachings of sorcerers does not need guides. It is sufficient to have a genuine interest – and guts of steel. He will, by himself, find everything he needs through an unbending intent.”
-ARMANDO TORRES, Encounters with the Nagual

Like Tom Brown Jr., the Gracies, Masaaki Hatsumi, Dan Inasanto, and a million others, the Lin Kuei have also come under fire from the web militia.
-http://linkuei.com/

I don’t think hatha yoga really necessarily wrecks one’s body, but of course for somebody with weak constitution it can do that.

And also some things are not only for special force operators or Olympic Games Athletes. I mean maybe there is some misunderstanding concerning “angry weekend warriors.”

Association with jealous, stubborn and stupid weaklings can harm both one’s spirit and body.

This was not meant to be any way nasty comment, but it is like that in my opinion.

HOWDY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYRmnUGBVCw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHRsDuhFcTE&feature=related

What I simply meant is that it can work well and be useful if one is careful.

But one might somehow became wary with some of the religious aspects.

My personal choice would be Bihar School of Yoga from India because they have all kinds of people from sanyasis through singles to family persons and they have good selection of techniques.

But as completely physical discipline good starting point would be DAVID H. COULTER’S book Anatomy of Hatha Yoga, IMHO. Is has good points to make about all aspects, also about very basic meditation and breathing, and also about inverted postures like Sirsasana and Sarvangasana. In Ananda Marga they for example don’t like to teach inverted postures, because these are supposed to be too dangerous. Dadas of course are exception.

I personally mix practices from very different traditions and it’s not clearly working for all.

I’m sorry for nudity if picture below comes through.

HOWDY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EIA6_iARM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtNDvoxI3ck

(Page 2 of 5)

“They look at me like I’m crazy,” he goes on to say. “And I know if they continue, they won’t be able to take it.” I asked him about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips.” “One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints,” Black told me. “The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements.” I asked if she still taught. “Oh, yeah,” Black replied. “There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”

Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. Jagannath G. Gune, who helped revive yoga for the modern era, made no allusion to injuries in his journal Yoga Mimansa or his 1931 book “Asanas.” Indra Devi avoided the issue in her 1953 best seller “Forever Young, Forever Healthy,” as did B. K. S. Iyengar in his seminal “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965. Reassurances about yoga’s safety also make regular appearances in the how-to books of such yogis as Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois and Bikram Choudhury. “Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda, a guru who made 10 world tours and founded ashrams on several continents.

But a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people, a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals — among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities. In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.

Doctors traced the problem to an unresponsive nerve, a peripheral branch of the sciatic, which runs from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the legs. Sitting in vajrasana deprived the branch that runs below the knee of oxygen, deadening the nerve. Once the student gave up the pose, he improved rapidly. Clinicians recorded a number of similar cases and the condition even got its own name: “yoga foot drop.”

More troubling reports followed. In 1972 a prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell, published an article in The British Medical Journal arguing that, while rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in relatively young, healthy people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but also from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in whiplash — or certain yoga poses. Normally, the neck can stretch backward 75 degrees, forward 40 degrees and sideways 45 degrees, and it can rotate on its axis about 50 degrees. Yoga practitioners typically move the vertebrae much farther. An intermediate student can easily turn his or her neck 90 degrees — nearly twice the normal rotation.

Hyperflexion of the neck was encouraged by experienced practitioners. Iyengar emphasized that in cobra pose, the head should arch “as far back as possible” and insisted that in the shoulder stand, in which the chin is tucked deep in the chest, the trunk and head forming a right angle, “the body should be in one straight line, perpendicular to the floor.” He called the pose, said to stimulate the thyroid, “one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our ancient sages.”

(Page 3 of 5)

Extreme motions of the head and neck, Russell warned, could wound the vertebral arteries, producing clots, swelling and constriction, and eventually wreak havoc in the brain. The basilar artery, which arises from the union of the two vertebral arteries and forms a wide conduit at the base of the brain, was of particular concern. It feeds such structures as the pons (which plays a role in respiration), the cerebellum (which coordinates the muscles), the occipital lobe of the outer brain (which turns eye impulses into images) and the thalamus (which relays sensory messages to the outer brain). Reductions in blood flow to the basilar artery are known to produce a variety of strokes. These rarely affect language and conscious thinking (often said to be located in the frontal cortex) but can severely damage the body’s core machinery and sometimes be fatal. The majority of patients suffering such a stroke do recover most functions. But in some cases headaches, imbalance, dizziness and difficulty in making fine movements persist for years.

Russell also worried that when strokes hit yoga practitioners, doctors might fail to trace their cause. The cerebral damage, he wrote, “may be delayed, perhaps to appear during the night following, and this delay of some hours distracts attention from the earlier precipitating factor.”

In 1973, a year after Russell’s paper was published, Willibald Nagler, a renowned authority on spinal rehabilitation at Cornell University Medical College, published a paper on a strange case. A healthy woman of 28 suffered a stroke while doing a yoga position known as the wheel or upward bow, in which the practitioner lies on her back, then lifts her body into a semicircular arc, balancing on hands and feet. An intermediate stage often involves raising the trunk and resting the crown of the head on the floor. While balanced on her head, her neck bent far backward, the woman “suddenly felt a severe throbbing headache.” She had difficulty getting up, and when helped into a standing position, was unable to walk without assistance. The woman was rushed to the hospital. She had no sensation on the right side of her body; her left arm and leg responded poorly to her commands. Her eyes kept glancing involuntarily to the left. And the left side of her face showed a contracted pupil, a drooping upper eyelid and a rising lower lid — a cluster of symptoms known as Horner’s syndrome. Nagler reported that the woman also had a tendency to fall to the left.

Her doctors found that the woman’s left vertebral artery, which runs between the first two cervical vertebrae, had narrowed considerably and that the arteries feeding her cerebellum had undergone severe displacement. Given the lack of advanced imaging technologies at the time, an exploratory operation was conducted to get a clearer sense of her injuries. The surgeons who opened her skull found that the left hemisphere of her cerebellum suffered a major failure of blood supply that resulted in much dead tissue and that the site was seeped in secondary hemorrhages.

The patient began an intensive program of rehabilitation. Two years later, she was able to walk, Nagler reported, “with [a] broad-based gait.” But her left arm continued to wander and her left eye continued to show Horner’s syndrome. Nagler concluded that such injuries appeared to be rare but served as a warning about the hazards of “forceful hyperextension of the neck.” He urged caution in recommending such postures, particularly to individuals of middle age.

The experience of Nagler’s patient was not an isolated incident. A few years later, a 25-year-old man was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, complaining of blurred vision, difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. Steven H. Hanus, a medical student at the time, became interested in the case and worked with the chairman of the neurology department to determine the cause (he later published the results with several colleagues). The patient had been in excellent health, practicing yoga every morning for a year and a half. His routine included spinal twists in which he rotated his head far to the left and far to the right. Then he would do a shoulder stand with his neck “maximally flexed against the bare floor,” just as Iyengar had instructed, remaining in the inversion for about five minutes. A series of bruises ran down the man’s lower neck, which, the team wrote in The Archives of Neurology, “resulted from repeated contact with the hard floor surface on which he did yoga exercises.” These were a sign of neck trauma. Diagnostic tests revealed blockages of the left vertebral artery between the c2 and c3 vertebrae; the blood vessel there had suffered “total or nearly complete occlusion” — in other words, no blood could get through to the brain.

(Page 4 of 5)

Two months after his attack, and after much physical therapy, the man was able to walk with a cane. But, the team reported, he “continued to have pronounced difficulty performing fine movements with his left hand.” Hanus and his colleagues concluded that the young man’s condition represented a new kind of danger. Healthy individuals could seriously damage their vertebral arteries, they warned, “by neck movements that exceed physiological tolerance.” Yoga, they stressed, “should be considered as a possible precipitating event.” In its report, the Northwestern team cited not only Nagler’s account of his female patient but also Russell’s early warning. Concern about yoga’s safety began to ripple through the medical establishment.

These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive reporting — they reveal trends rather than totals — but the spike was nonetheless statistically significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds of therapists.

Around this time, stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments — the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint — failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and dislocations.

In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors. The answers to the survey’s central question — What were the most serious yoga-related injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen? — revealed that the largest number of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of risk — nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warning — pointed to a decided shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.

In recent years, reformers in the yoga community have begun to address the issue of yoga-induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff — a yoga instructor and therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina — revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again. The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin Quistgaard, described reinjuring a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class. “I’ve experienced how yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt — and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis.”

One of the most vocal reformers is Roger Cole, an Iyengar teacher with degrees in psychology from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. Cole has written extensively for Yoga Journal and speaks on yoga safety to the American College of Sports Medicine. In one column, Cole discussed the practice of reducing neck bending in a shoulder stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of folded blankets and letting the head fall below it. The modification eases the angle between the head and the torso, from 90 degrees to perhaps 110 degrees. Cole ticked off the dangers of doing an unmodified shoulder stand: muscle strains, overstretched ligaments and cervical-disk injuries.

(Page 5 of 5)

But modifications are not always the solution. Timothy McCall, a physician who is the medical editor of Yoga Journal, called the headstand too dangerous for general yoga classes. His warning was based partly on his own experience. He found that doing the headstand led to thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition that arises from the compression of nerves passing from the neck into the arms, causing tingling in his right hand as well as sporadic numbness. McCall stopped doing the pose, and his symptoms went away. Later, he noted that the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose). “Unfortunately,” McCall concluded, “the negative effects of headstand can be insidious.”

Almost a year after I first met Glenn Black at his master class in Manhattan, I received an e-mail from him telling me that he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote. “Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”

The injury, Black said, had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists. He had developed spinal stenosis — a serious condition in which the openings between vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing excruciating pain. Black said that he felt the tenderness start 20 years ago when he was coming out of such poses as the plow and the shoulder stand. Two years ago, the pain became extreme. One surgeon said that without treatment, he would eventually be unable to walk. The surgery took five hours, fusing together several lumbar vertebrae. He would eventually be fine but was under surgeon’s orders to reduce strain on his lower back. His range of motion would never be the same.

Black is one of the most careful yoga practitioners I know. When I first spoke to him, he said he had never injured himself doing yoga or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming any of his students. I asked him if his recent injury could have been congenital or related to aging. No, he said. It was yoga. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”

Black recently took that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the subject deepened by his recent operation. But his warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was a little more emphatic than usual,” he recalled. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

i think pilates is safer. no twisting o joints. controled movement using core muscles

Another reason for the difficulty which is generally experienced in reaching a clear understanding of the concepts and principles of the subject, is that these differ quite radically from those which were employed in the classical models of mechanics and electromagnetism. Only by presenting the student with numerous particular instances of the application of the general principles to physical problems and the proper interpretation of the results obtained, will he eventually become so familiar with the landmarks that he will feel at home in the sub-physical world.
-DEREK F. LAWDEN, The Mathematical Principles Quantum Mechanics

The procedure pioneered by Werner Forssman has probably saved the life of someone you know. Every year, millions of people undergo cardiac catheterisation. It is the standard way to look at how the heart is functioning after a heart attack, chest pain or other indications of a heart problem. A description of the procedure is enough to make you wince: a small cut is made in an artery-often near the groin- and a tube is is pushed in, all the way to the heart. It’s certainly not the kind of thing you would want to do to yourself.
-DAVID BROOKS, Free Radicals

If yoga asanas can wreck somebody’s body then how much more dangerous can pranayama be?

Coulter warns in his book about breathing exercises. Most important point seem to be on page 88 (section XIX). It is about certain rare form of sleep apnea. For example Gurdjieff, who should have been adept in certain type of energy practices, hypnotism and telepathy, was especially afraid of this or so it seems.

HOWDY

Ps. It’s now 4:06 am in Finnish time. I hope it was still OK to post this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB9m_xS7njg

Budget restraints at the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) have resulted in job cuts of up to 50 percent among alcohol researchers. The institute has also been forced to abandon its specially-bred alcohol dependent rats, which researchers have been using to study alcoholism for the past 50 years. Finland’s standing in the alcohol research field is now in jeopardy, with critics lamenting the rodent release. The rats will be sent to research labs in the United States, leaving their Finnish masters behind. The move comes at a time when Finnish scientists claim they were in the midst of vital experiments relating to brain triggers for alcohol dependence, reports YLE.
“We are researching medications aimed at suppressing drinking urges and improving stress management among alcoholics,” said the institute’s professor Kalervo Kiianmaa. THL’s Director General Pekka Puska claimed that significant progress had been made by the institute since the amalgamation of the KTL (National Public Health Institute) and STAKES (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health) last year. “Public spending is tight and that’s unfortunate as we’re dealing with an enormous problem,” said Puska.
The institute has used the specially-bred rodents in an effort to determine the development of drink dependence. Both alcoholic (AA) and tee totalling (ANA) rats have been bred for the programme, with the former always preferring alcohol to water when given the option. Many medications used for treating alcoholism that exist today can be attributed to heavy-drinking lab rodents.
Read more: http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2010/03/01/funding-cutbacks-force-alcoholic-rats-from-finland/#ixzz1mLzmoASu

In the early 1990s, it was safe to say that Dr. Ting-Kai Li was in possession of the largest and most famous collection of alcoholic rats in the world.

Housed in a laboratory near Dr. Li’s office at Indiana University, the “P-line” of rodents were freely self-administering the body-weight equivalent of one bottle of whiskey a day for a 155-pound man; a blood alcohol concentration that would have gotten them arrested on any highway in America. The P-line rats were seriously addicted to ethanol, the purified form of booze known outside the laboratory as grain alcohol, or white lightning.

“It’s actually the only line that’s been well developed in the world,” Dr. Li told me at the time, with justifiable pride. “And it has been developed through genetic selection for alcohol preference.” In other words, Dr. Li did not teach these animals to drink. He didn’t have to.

Dr. Li, who was until recently the Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which is the alcoholism wing of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), made it sound easy: “You take a stock with some genetic heterogeneity in it, and then you test it for drinking behavior, and there will be, say, two or three out of a hundred that like to drink, so you take those, and you breed them. And the ones that don’t like to drink, you breed those, and within ten generations you start to have a very good separation between drinking scores.”

Why would a rat drink alcohol, and why would anybody care? When I first spoke with Ting-Kai Li, the lack of suitable animal models of alcoholism and addiction was all too apparent. Without suitable strains of test animals, most genetic and neurobiological research would take centuries, and would involve ethical questions about human testing far stickier than the questions raised by the animal rights movement. Animal models are one of the primary pathways of discovery available to neurobiologists and other researchers.

The precisely spoken, self-effacing Dr. Li, along with neurobiology professor Dr. William McBride and their co-workers at Indiana University, were never really in the business of teaching rats to drink. They were in the business of discovering ways to make them stop.

To be like human alcoholics, the rats must also demonstrate both an increased tolerance to the effects of the drug, and the onset of physical dependence as manifested by withdrawal symptoms. And they do. The P-line rats develop tolerance, and they show acute withdrawal symptoms when researchers cut off their supply. The rats suffer tremors, seizures, and a rodent version of delirium tremens. They fall down a lot. They are also quick to avail themselves of a little “hair of the dog.” After a period of abstinence, they take alcohol again to relieve the withdrawal symptoms.

The P-line rats met every definition of alcoholism anyone could imagine, and the cause of their alcohol addiction appears to be strictly genetic. What was happening with the P-line rats was not explainable by resorting to arguments about simple learned behavior.

“How do you explain this difference?” said Dr. Li, all those years ago. “My explanation is that there are genetic differences among different individuals. You’re making the assumption that you expose them to the same environment, the same environmental influences, and yet they behave differently in terms of addiction.”

Today, we can safely say that Dr. Li’s hypothesis has proven to be true.

© Copyright 2008
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/2009/05/alcoholic-rats-of-dr-li.html

In 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug exenatide (marketed as Byetta) for the management of type 2 diabetes. It is a synthetic version of a protein, exendin-4, derived from the Gila monster’s saliva. In a three-year study with people with type 2 diabetes, exenatide led to healthy sustained glucose levels and progressive weight loss. The effectiveness is due to the fact that the lizard protein is about 50 percent identical to glucagon-like peptide-1 analog (GLP-1), a hormone released from the human digestive tract that helps to regulate insulin and glucagon. The lizard protein remains effective much longer than the human hormone, helping diabetics keep their blood sugar levels under control. Exenatide slows the emptying of the stomach and causes a decrease in appetite, contributing to weight loss. The saliva of the Gila monster contains many chemicals which can be deadly. One of these has been shown to affect memory. Several companies have been researching the abilities of this chemical to help memory loss due to various diseases such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and ADHD. Gilatide, derived from exendin-4, has been shown to dramatically heighten memory in a study with mice. Gilatide is likely to be researched further to provide help to Alzheimer’s patients.
-WIKIPEDIA

Indian yoga seems to be it’s own kind of science, but there also seems to be many misunderstandings and intricacies.

There is one interesting researcher from Taoist point of view. He is also somehow strange because of some of his theories.

In this case I now think his book which European edition is called Netherworld (also Oracles of the Dead: Ancient Techniques for Predicting the Future, authored by Robert K. G. Temple). First part of this book deals with Mediterranean oracle centers and second part with the I Ching. His idea was that mediaval witches were partly using knowledge what was left from these ancient very pagan traditions and of course certain Christian circles especially didn’t like them.

I don’t think that in University world they can anymore take him seriously, because of all these New Age like interests, but still there are some unusually clever observations that privately one could try to follow some of them.

Also for serious I Ching student there is quite a list of rare studies which one maybe otherwise wouldn’t bother to touch.

Also something else.

For example what about all these strange names for yoga asanas? There is of course clear link to Hindu myths.

Swami Satyananda Saraswati is teaching in his yoga books various odd practices and also as a form of magic which they clearly are not. Form example there is practice where one should start to observe one’s shadow and learn to read it. Carlos Castaneda is also promoting same thing is his novels. Also that most famous European alchemist Isaac Newton was known to be keen observer of shadows and their changing lenghts & directions through his life span.

My point with this posting was only that it seems that serious practice whether yoga or chigong requires serious effort. One cannot expect that things get easier, but that there is even more to study and practice.

HOWDY

http://www.youtube.com/user/ChosunNinja#p/a/D1BF41F3C29546B3/1/yqFNIVTqEfQ
http://www.youtube.com/user/ChosunNinja#p/a/u/0/2WbqcKqGEqE

For

Obviously one can never know exactly
without asking him. My intuition is
that it probably was kinky sex gone wrong,
and it is simply unfortunate that he
was found in such a compromised state.
S