What Are We Really Doing in Asana? Online Interactive Workshops on Injury Prevention in Yoga

by Kara-Leah Grant

Last August, I interviewed Matthew Remski almost a year ago about his project What Are We Really Doing in Asana?, investigating yoga and injury.

He’s been doing great work and has interviewed hundreds of yoga practitioners about their history of yoga injury – a topic that was largely taboo or silent until this conversation began.

The articles that Matthew has written, and the interviews that he’s done, are all going towards a book that he’s writing.

But in the meantime, he’s teaching a two-part online workshop covering the material he’s been investigating.

Matthew just sent me a link to the course, inviting me to join for free in return for sharing the workshop with my audience. He’s only generously offering an affiliate commission for sending people his way.

I don’t often do affiliate marketing, mostly because I don’t usually believe in the products I’m offered. But I do believe whole-heartedly in Matthew’s work, and the value of the material that he’s offering through these two workshops.

Here’s what Matthew has to say about the What are We really Doing in Asana workshop:

Discover important tools for understanding the many factors of yoga injury and equip yourself with key resources for building a sustainable practice for yourself and/or your students.

Course Highlights:

• 10 conditions that contribute to injury and how to address them
• Learn about asana in historical context through the latest available scholarship
• 2 key problems in the practice of “adjustments”
• Learn about identifiable and concrete problems in modern asana practice, and about the thought leaders who are addressing them.
• 3 tensions between religious and scientific paradigms in modern asana that confuse issues of safety and therapeutics
• How do we assess whether something is “therapeutic?
• Student/teacher/studio barriers to increasing safety
• Learn about how inequality is a structural cause of injury
• Most common injuries according recent data, and how to learn more about the risks of poses in individual circumstances
• 7 Strategies to improve safety in practice and in the classroom

It sounds like the kind of workshop that every yoga teacher and studio owner would benefit from, and yoga students who want to protect themselves from injury.

Best of all, you don’t have to go anywhere to participate. You can watch live on your computer when the workshops screen (Matthew will be using a mixture of slide, videos and audio) or you can watch a recording later.

The workshops take place on Thursdays, July 16 & 23: 7:30pm – 9:30pm EST, which is Fridays July 17 & 24 11:30am – 1:30pm NZ time.

You can find out more about the What Are We Really Doing in Asana Workshops here.

It’s only $US50 for both workshops, about $12 an hour, which is a fantastic deal.

(And yes, that is an affiliate link, so if you sign up for the workshop, I earn 50% commission).