A day with Gary Kraftsow, or Know Thyself
Giving a written taste of any of these energy-rich conference classes is a challenge, but after spending most of the day with Gary Kraftsow (attending two classes and listening to his erudite offerings to a panel discussion on Saturday), I know whatever I say here will be woefully inadequate. Gary seems to know every word of the Yoga Sutra by heart--in Sanskrit--and gives the most provocative translations into English. He lived in Madras, India for four years, and began studying with T.K.V. Desikichar in the 1970s. He holds a masters degree in religion and psychology and rattles off dozens of stories and teachings of saints, yogis, and philosophers in the course of a class. As founder and director of the American Viniyoga Institute, he also has a wee bit of experience with anatomy and physiology and asana--and designed a protocol for a study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showing that yoga can relieve chronic back pain. Let's just say, Gary is a vessel of yoga knowledge, unlike anything most of us have ever experienced.
In "Common Aches and Pains: Upper Back, Neck and Shoulders," he gave us some basic anatomy and physiology lessons that I won't try to recap here. What I loved most of all he said was this: "Think carefully about what you do with the time you have for practice." He asked us what was more important: our hamstrings or our liver? Knowing that most of us are too busy to do it all, he asked: Do we really want to spend so much of our yoga practice stretching our hamstrings? If we're dealing with specific issues--like chronic neck pain, doesn't it make more sense to tailor a short (maybe 15-minute) practice for releasing neck tension and do it a couple of times a day?
"Your responsibility is self-investigation," he told us. To heal chronic aches and pains, he suggested that we discover our own dysfunctional neuromuscular movement patterns (the ways we move or hold ourselves--say with our neck craned or our back slumped--that contribute to our discomfort), and see if we can change them. Acknowledging that doctors, physical therapists, yoga teachers and others can help us, he said he finds that the most effective healing comes when we investigate our own issues, rather than relying solely on experts.
He offered several poses for releasing tension in the upper back, neck, and shoulders. And as much as I'd love to share them here, they are so unlike the poses most of us practice (and took a while for most of the students in the room to understand) that I daren't try without a lot more words and photos than this blog has room for.
What I can share with you was a profound meditation practice Gary offered in his "Meditation and Transformation" class.
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Gary Kraftsow is the founder and director of the