About the Body: Headstand

Let’s not take a headstand out of the yoga practice!  Find a good Iyengar instructor and learn it from them! 

Around 2012 there were rumors that yoga  teaching  insurance would no longer cover classes where headstand was taught.  It was a rumor.  A  threatening one to us old school teachers who were under the gun at the time.   But headstand  is a posture which is open to debate.  In the classical schools it is the king of all postures.  In more modern accommodating classes, you may not ever encounter it. 

I am in the first group.  I studied and taught Jivamukti Yoga which has roots in the Krishnamacharya lineage.  Krishnamacharya was the root guru of three notable  traditions originating in his students  – Ashtanga (associated with K. Pattabhi Jois), Iyengar (associated with B.K.S.  Iyengar) and yoga as taught by T.K.V. Desikachar which he called “yoga”. 

At Jivamukti we practiced headstand for five minutes a day, and it was taught in almost every class.  I feared it deeply.  When K. Pattabhi Jois came to New York to teach I walked through my fear and took some of the classes the classes.  The first day he singled me out and did not let me run to wall during headstand.  He held me off balance in the posture for 12 very, very long breaths.  I was sweating bullets and seeing my life pass before my eyes.  The next day, he walked over, put in me in the headstand in a balanced way, and then walked away.  From that moment forward it was a favorite.

This was how it was taught in those days.  For me, this  was very effective. 

I’d had a long-standing issue in which  my cervical spine would lock up and cause much pain to me.  Going to the chiropractor helped but nothing really changed. 

I walked out of the Puck building that day and stopped on the sidewalk to stretch my post headstand neck.  As I stretched my neck the spaces between the cervical vertebrae expanded and my neck elongated in a way I’d never felt before.  I was already sold on yoga, but with that opening I was sold in a new way.  My curiosity about Patanjali, ancient sage of yoga and so called “jungle doctor” had been unleashed in my practice in a whole new way.  There was healing to be found in yoga.  The world looked a little different.

As a body worker and Shiatsu therapist I suspect in a casual unproven way that the pressure on my cranial sutures released some stress patterns in deep levels of my fascia.  (but don’t try this at home on your own, find a good teacher!). 

Remember headstand is just Tadasana, mountain posture turned around.  The posture is famed for the capacity to uproot all those places where we are stodgy and stuck in our ways.  It’s a fabulous transformer