The New Yoga: From Cults and Dogma to Science and Sanity

The New Yoga: From Cults and Dogma to Science and Sanity! Where did most of your yoga moves come from? A guru from the annals of Indian folklore? Or are those "thousand-year-old poses" really a twentieth century invention hidden behind a veil of tall stories? Were they based on movement science-or cooked-up creations with a big pinch of folklore? The New Yoga takes a brutally hard look at these critical questions. It proposes six radical steps to strip away the nonsense and provide common-sense yoga for the future, based on movement science: • Stretching is not the primary goal. Really? Yes. More important are ten other benefits including two new buzzwords, proprioception and interoception. • Mobility tops flexibility. Focus on better control over a safe range of movement. • "Practice and all is coming." Not so! Despite the famous guru's oft quotes words, we may never achieve certain poses. Trying will lead to injury. • Avoid repetitive stress and encourage brain health with frequent and varying moves on and off the mat. • 'Pretzels' pushing extreme flexibility lead to injury and misplaced envy. Hyper-mobility is not something to envy; it's sad. • Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Maintain what works but question all for good evidence. Rob Walker quotes a wide range of experts and speaks from his own 20-year yoga teacher-training experience. He dumps accepted dogma behind much current teaching and brings a fresh sparkle of evidence and science to twenty-first century yoga.