11/08/2022
There's really no correlation between your capacity to do challenging ("advanced") poses and how your body feels.
There are plenty of people who can do hard asanas - but many of them are also in pain. And there are plenty of people who can't do difficult poses but are not in pain.
After years of dysfunctional practice, many people quit because of pain and decide that yoga is not for them.
Then they have to spend years rehabbing from the damage.
Difficult poses are more like performance art, if you can do them without any pain, good for you - but it's actually rare.
While poses like this one are used to suggest that the practitioner is advanced, in good shape, has a strong mind, and feels great, that's not always the case.
There's a dark side.
There are strong correlations between hypermobile joints and pain.
So many practitioners have hurt themselves from continuing to practice despite the body's strong messages of pain.
This may be because westerners have bought into the idea that hard poses are the goal. But this is inaccurate.
Yoga is not an external practice where the form is the goal. and the harder the form the better.
Yoga is a highly internal practice.
Being able to do hard asanas does not mean you are an advanced practitioner...but knowing when you shouldn't do them, and being able to find asanas that make your body feel stable, strong, and healthy, that help you balance your mind, and that help you develop resilience in your nervous system - those are the signs of a truly advanced practice.
