No More Chaturanagas...At Least for Now

I am such a jet-setter...so, this past weekend I was in Los Angeles studying with my teachers' (Jill Miller) teacher, Glenn Black.  I went to a three day training with a pretty sad right shoulder to begin with and with every intention that I was not going do anything that would just aggravate it even more.  I was doing fine the day before I left, keeping it immobilized, but I think that I may have aggravated it even more by having to hoist my luggage into the overhead bin on my flight :(  I would say that during the three days I was there, a lot of attention was spent on the shoulders, lower back and hips, there was no set agenda, which was nice.  I won't go into all the details, but we worked on movements that were both dynamic and ballistic that allowed for full range of movement through the shoulder joint.  We did this as well as various other movements for the shoulders and by the end of the third day I came away with this new revelation.  I am not sure why I had never thought of it before but I guess it just dawned on me right there and then.  I swore that I would give up doing chaturanga dandasana.  No, not quite the same as having to give up chocolate, this was not a pose that I necessarily craved, but it just felt wrong for me to continue to beat myself up.  So, I vowed to no longer do this pose until I can make sure that I am doing it right.  I also felt an obligation to my students.  How could I put them through a somewhat advanced pose without ensuring that they were getting all of the necessary corrections on alignment?  I also didn't want to be wincing in pain in front of my class while doing it.

Many of us are already walking around with some type of shoulder dysfunction.  It may not be very noticeable now, but it is similar to what happens when you have back pain and you do something as simple as bend down to pick something up, and then feel the shooting pain.  I feel that this is similar to the shoulder as well as what happened to me.  My almost ten years of practicing yoga and at least six years of doing Ashtanga Vinyasa, I was always doing chaturanga dandasana, it was part of the vinyasa flow and primary series that I practiced.  For those unfamiliar with what I am talking about, below is a picture:

As you can see in the picture, there is a lot of weight being loaded in the front of the body.  The shoulders are and lower back are lifted and the elbows are pointing straight back and hugging in close to the body. When I started out doing Ashtanga, I was going into chaturanga from uttanasana or forward bend and jumping into the position as you see above.  If you could imagine, I was literally putting a ton of weight onto my unsupported and unaligned shoulders and I was doing this over and over and over again.  I never noticed any pain in the beginning and I was in my 20s during this time, so I felt great after every practice.  Then last year during an AcroYoga class, I was working on an inversion with my partner where I was the flyer and she had to have her knee somewhere along my right shoulder and something got knocked around in there or maybe the pain sensors just awakened and since then, I have been having a dull aching pain in my shoulder.  I don't blame it on AcroYoga and I also don't partially blame it on Ashtanga, but mostly to my habit of hunching my shoulders.  I still have to remind myself several times during the day to drop my shoulders.  My upper trapezius muscles are also rock hard from all of the tension that I carry as well as from hunching my shoulders forward.  So, with overly contracted muscles and incorrect alignment of my joints for who knows how long, I added insult to injury due to my yoga practice and not receiving correct alignment on my shoulders.  I am currently at a state where I need to be delicate with my shoulder as I am almost in fear that I will tear something in there.

I have two pretty good ideas of which muscles are affected and have been spending some time recently to massage and do some self myofascial release in those areas.  My next step is to work on strengthening the muscles around that area.  I even noticed this morning as I was reaching for a cup in the cupboard how I had to readjust my arm and shoulder to do the task of reaching, I am using other muscles to compensate for the ones that are too weak to do the job and therefore putting me in this current state.

So, because of this I will no longer do chaturangas, at least for now, until my shoulder is fully healed and can be assured that when I do them again, I am in correct alignment and out of pain.  Lastly, the other awakening that I had was that I need to do more self care.  My shoulder has been asking for some attention for some time now, about a year and a half and I didn't really listen and assumed it would just go away.  But, if I had started doing some type of self care for my shoulder, I would probably not be writing about this right now.  It gave me the great idea to offer a class or workshop starting n the new year about self care for the body.  Most of us rely on a yoga class or our massage therapists, bodyworker, etc. to relieve us from the pain that we endure.  How about putting some of that power as well as knowledge into your own hands?  Think about it, how often do you touch yourself?  I don't mean it in that way, but in a loving and healing way, a way that can help release tension and pain.  It can be something that you can do every day, whenever and wherever you want without having to pay a dime.  Be on the look out for that in 2011!