Bernie Clark: The Truth About Yoga Anatomy & Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Bernie Clark is a renowned yoga teacher and author with a deep expertise in Yin Yoga. With several influential books, such as "Your Body, Your Yoga," "Your Spine, Your Yoga," and "Your Upper Body, Your Yoga," Bernie has extensively researched the intersection of anatomy and yoga practice. A student of many disciplines, including the teachings of Paul Grilley and Stuart McGill, Bernie advocates for a functional approach to yoga that emphasizes the importance of understanding individual anatomical differences and the body's unique needs. His insights have made significant contributions to the understanding of yoga as both a science and an art.

Visit Bernie: https://yinyoga.com/

Key Takeaways:

• Divergence in Yoga Practices: Bernie Clark discusses the importance of understanding individual anatomical differences, which suggests a shift from aesthetics towards a functional understanding of yoga.
• Stability Before Mobility: Emphasizing Stuart McGill's teachings, the episode highlights the necessity to prioritize stability for safe movements before exploring mobility under load during yoga practice.
• Functional vs. Aesthetic Yoga: Bernie advocates for a functional approach to yoga that focuses on individual intention and sensation rather than uniformity in physical appearance.
• Pain Interpretation: Discussion on the complexities of pain, urging caution with definitive causes of pain in yoga practice, emphasizing inquiry and personal awareness over standard adjustments.
• Insightful Realizations: Bernie shares reflections on the overemphasis on extreme poses and the cultural fascination with flexibility, urging a more balanced, health-centric approach to yoga.

Check out: 👇
8IN8 Ashtanga Yoga for Beginners Course Online- Learn 8 Limb Yoga in 8 Days - Get FREE coupon code for a limited time only (Regular price $88) https://info.nativeyogacenter.com/8in8-ashtanga-yoga-for-beginners-8-limbs-in-8-days/

Practice with Native Yoga Online - New classes EVERY day - Use Code FIRSTMONTHFREE https://nativeyogacenter.teachable.com/p/today-s-community-class

Subscribe to Native Yoga Center and view this podcast on Youtube.

Thank you Bryce Allyn for the show tunes. Check out Bryce’s website: bryceallynband.comand sign up on his newsletter to stay in touch. Listen here to his original music from his bands Boxelder, B-Liminal and Bryce Allyn Band on Spotify.

Please email special requests and feedback to info@nativeyogacenter.com

https://info.nativeyogacenter.com/8in8-ashtanga-yoga-for-beginners-8-limbs-in-8-days/

Enjoy new Native Yoga Center classes uploaded everyday on our online learning hub. Use code FIRSTMONTHFREE at checkout. https://nativeyogacenter.teachable.com/p/today-s-community-class

Transcript

Copy

Todd McLaughlin: 0:33

Welcome to Native Yoga Toddcast. So happy you are here. My goal with this channel is to bring inspirational speakers to the mic in the field of yoga, massage, bodywork, and beyond. Follow us at @NativeYoga and check us out at nativeyogacenter.com. All right, let's begin. Hello, welcome to Native Yoga Todd Cast, and I have a very special guest for you today, Bernie Clark. Yes, yes. Well, where to begin? You're gonna get a good taste and feel for what Bernie teaches and is all about in the podcast discussion, so I don't want to spoil any details. However, I just want to point

out: 1:28

please go visit him at his website yinyoga.com, and from there you will find all of his social media. He has an incredible YouTube channel and following. His handle there is at @YinSights1. He's written seven books. He has the Your Body Your Yoga trilogy, which comprises of Your Body Your Yoga, Your Spine Your Yoga, and Your Upper Body Your Yoga. He has a book called The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga. He has a book called Prana. He has a book called Yin Sites, and he has a book called Shiva Dancing at King Arthur's Court. He is just so nice and so knowledgeable and so down to earth, and I think his work is extremely important right now in the yoga community. I highly recommend you purchasing any one of his books. I'm currently reading Your Spine, Your Yoga right now, and I am just blown away with the amount of information that he is sharing. It is helping me big time with my own personal challenges that I'm finding with my body and my yoga. So, and he's given me a lot of insight and solutions, so that I'm finding that I can find a lot of joy still. So, thank you, Bernie. And on that note, all the description, all the links are in the description. Easy for you to find. Send us a comment. Share this episode. We really appreciate it. Let's try to get the word out about how important it is for you to take care of yourself in your yoga practice. All right. With that being said, let's get started, mr. Bernie Clark, I'm so happy to have this opportunity to bring Bernie Clark to the podcast. Bernie, first, I just like to start and ask you how you're doing and how you're how you're feeling today.

Bernie Clark: 3:12

I'm good, Todd. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. Good to meet you.

Todd McLaughlin: 3:16

Thank you so much. It's really nice to meet you as well. Just to give you and the listener an idea of how I came to your work. I love yoga. I've been practicing yoga for quite a while. I into Ashtanga yoga and other various styles. I push my body really hard. Started started to develop severe back pain. Started going to doctors, getting MRIs, finding out I have spondylolisthesis, being told I should have a lumbar fusion surgery, and feeling like that's not what I envisioned for my my future and my current self. And so, a friend of mine who is big time into exercise fitness said, Todd, you have to read the Back Mechanic by Stuart McGill. I read I read his book. I was blown away by it, and what I loved about it was the information was great. I started to implement the information that he was providing. It was starting to rework my mind around what I believed was the ideal thing to do with my body, and just really love his work. And so, as I started integrating that, I thought to myself, "Man, it'd be so cool if a yoga person somehow broke down what mr. McGill was kind of bringing to the table in relation to movement, and then I speak with a girl named Liz Albanis, who's in Australia, who's doing a teacher training that I guess was involved with anatomy training that you offer, and she said, "Todd, you have to get your spine, your yoga by Bernie Clark. And so right away, I just figured, well, she. So excited about your work that, and I have heard of you before with the work that you do with Yin Yoga. I bought it, I started reading it, and man, it is exactly what I need. It is such a good book. I highly recommend every single person listening to get a copy of your book. You have a whole host of books that you've written, seven or so in total. But and so then in my mind, I said, okay, I'm going to read this whole book, and then I'm going to reach out to Bernie and see if I can get him as a guest on my podcast. But I made a social media post a little while ago, taking a picture of your book and commented about how amazing I think your book is, and you were kind enough to actually comment and say thank you, in which case I've been able to precipitate an interview with you before me actually finishing your book. Now on that note, there is so much information in here that I feel like I can read one page or two pages and just like work with that and digest it, and so it's not a book that I feel like I want to rush through because there's so much great information in here. So I guess I just really want to say thank you. I'm blown away by the level of expertise that you've put into writing this and the level level of research that you've done, and and it's just an enjoyable read as well. So I mean, as as deep as you go into understanding the spine, I feel like it's very entertaining. So even if I didn't really love anatomy, I think I could still really get the gist of what you're saying. So I just want to give you some kudos for the work that you've done. I think it's incredible.

Unknown: 6:37

Well, thanks, Todd. I appreciate the comments, the kind comments. Yeah, I'm a student of Stuart McGill, and you may have noticed he wrote the foreword to that book as well.

Todd McLaughlin: 6:47

I was so excited.

Unknown: 6:48

We worked together on some yoga for spine videos away back. So he's a great guy.

Todd McLaughlin: 6:56

Amazing, amazing. Well, one one thing that I'm I'm finding the most I'm most kind of blown away by is the concept that I have or had or have in trying to evolve in my mind about what am I trying to do in my yoga practice and having this feeling that reaching deeper poses, being able to do deeper variations of poses, was like my goal, and now when pain became more of a reality than what I expected, I feel like what you're doing with explaining some of these other concepts with the spine, relating it to what other exercise specialists have learned about the spine, and then looking at what we do with yoga in relation to really sometimes pushing really hard to do things that maybe are beyond what's smart for the tissues in our body or what our body's doing, can you talk a little bit about how you came to this realization and and how this has evolved for you over time?

Unknown: 7:59

Well, sure. I first kind of got a glimmer of this. Like you, I was an ashtangi. I'm a Type A yoga yogi, A for Ashtanga, and I also started to hurt myself by pushing myself through it. And in the early days, the goal of Ashtanga, at least the way I was practicing it, was you're in first series. The goal is to get the second series. Once you get second series, the goal is third series, or fourth series, or dance A or B, or whatever. So it's always to do more and more and more with the body. And then I met another person who went through a stanga named Paul Grilli, and Paul just really rocked my world because of two main things that he shared. One is the reality of human variation, that we're all different, and just because one person can put both feet behind their head doesn't mean you will ever be able to do that because of the nature of the bones, skeletal variation as he calls it, or skeletal variation. So that opened my eyes up to the fact that maybe I'll never get to second series or third series. Maybe the trying to get there is what's actually causing pain. Like I blew up both my knees tore my meniscus trying to do the various versions of lotus pose, and my hips just don't allow that. But you know, just practice all is coming. So just push through the pain, push through the pain, and eventually you get there. It says in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika that lotus pose is the destroyer of all disease. Well, my experience, it's the destroyer of knees, not the destroyer of. And I personally went through that, so I can kind of relate to what you said about your back. If you're trying to do the deep drive back to wheels, and you have to have a spine where the spinous processes are fairly large, there's no way you're ever going to be able to do a full extension there. This is what Stewart calls a kissing spine. Other people, they've got spines that are quite different. The space between the spinous processes is quite large, so they can do a lot of back. Before they hit, now yoga is not going to change this person into this person. It's just the nature of the bones are so different. So Paul Gurley's explanation of skeletal variation really woke me up. And then the other big thing is what stops me. Why can't I go into a full deep back bend and grab my ankles. Now the answer, as Paul pointed out, this is back in the early 2000s, late 1990s, is either tension or compression. You may have tightness in the front body, maybe the muscles are tight or the ligaments are tight or whatever, and that's preventing you from going further. But at some point, once you work through all that tensile resistance, what's going to stop you is bone-on-bone compression. So a typical yoga journey may be you first come to a class and you're trying to do a little cobra and you can barely get your chest off the floor. That may be tension. And over a few months and years, you start to go higher and higher and higher. But at some point now you're starting to feel it in the lower back. Now you've reached the point of compression, bone-on-bone compression, and there's no way to go around that. The spine really can't go around that point. So if you're not paying attention to what sensations you're generating during your yoga practice, you may never know that you've actually reached a physiological limit. And now you keep trying to do it. Now you're just asking for damage. That vertebrae may start to shut, slide forward, bundle of the tesis. You may break the restraining bones here, the set joints, and now there's no restriction, and that's because you just continually pushed the bones into the bones, and you just basically broke everything. So these two facts that Paul really woke me up to: human variation and tension and compression. That then changed my whole yoga practice. It changed the way I viewed alignment. It changed the way I viewed intention. It was just kind of life changing for me.

Todd McLaughlin: 11:58

Amazing. For those of you that are listening, I can see if you go to our YouTube channel, Bernie is holding up different models of the spine, so you're giving me visuals. But you're doing a great job of explaining everything verbally as well. So I think everyone listening can can really get what you're saying. I'm curious. Then at that point, Bernie, when you started to make that connection about sensility and and bone on bone touching bone and the stopping point, so to speak, what was your trajectory then for continuing your study and learning? Did you do a more trial and error process with your own body, and then when you started to then look for what information was available out there to help you to further your understanding, what direction did that push take you to?

Unknown: 12:52

Yeah, so when I first met Paul's around 2004 2005, this just fascinated me. So through his teachings and some other pointers he gave me, I started to get much more into the inside of yoga. And in Yin, he says we're targeting the deeper connective tissues of the body, and that opened up the whole world of fascia to me. For the next 10 years, I just started to get into anatomy and fascia, and why exactly do we even have tension? Where is the tension? What stops me if it's muscular tension? Okay, I can feel it in the muscle, but sometimes it's not the muscle at all. It could be tension in the tendon. It could be tension in the ligaments. Can be tension in the fascial boundaries around the joint capsule. So this just opened up a whole new world. What are we actually trying to do in our yoga practice, if we're working just through the tensile resistance, well, where is that, and how do we affect that? So yoga is not just about stretching muscles. So I developed an idea of spectrum, the "what stops me" spectrum. I called it, and on one extreme, you have tension in the skin. It's trivial, but you know, 2% of what stops me is just the skin itself, maybe tight, or maybe you've got scar tissue in there. Then you have the muscles, then you have the tendons, then you have the ligaments, you have the joint capsules. But you also have something called the superficial fascia beneath it all. Like if you rub the back of your hand, it looks like the skin is moving, but the skin is adhered to the next layer, which is called superficial fascia, and the superficial fascia is gliding over top the deep fascia, which is over top of the fascia that wraps the muscles. So we've got these layers of fascia. Normally, they're quite lubricated, but sometimes they get stuck together. And fascia is like a three-dimensional body stocking. It's like imagine wearing a jumpsuit that goes from your toes to the top of your head, but it's three-dimensional and goes inside as well. Easy illustration that I ask people to do in my courses is if you have a shirt or a jacket or a sweater that covers your shoulders, and you pull down on the bottom. And you try to lift your arm up. You notice I can't do it. You let it go, and I got lots of ease of movement. But as soon as I restrict down here, I can't move. Now, if you only pay attention to your shoulder, you might think I've got some problem in my shoulder. But what's stopping you with some restriction lower down? And that's our fascia. Our fascia is continuous throughout the whole body. Now we give it different names, and that might sound like it's different. Like in the upper arm, it's called the brachial fascia, in the forearm, it's called the antibracial fascia, and that becomes the pectoral fascia or the thoracolumbar fascia down to the fascia latte and plantar fascia. But it's actually all one. If you have a restriction in one place, like maybe you had an appendix taken out or a C-section. Now you got some scar tissue there, and now it's stopping you from moving your shoulder. So what stops me? Well, it's not your deltoids. It's not your pectorals here. It could be the fascial thing. So I just started to investigate all this stuff with clues from Paul and going to fascia conferences, and I kept nagging Paul to write the book. I wanted a book that would explain all these variations and what stops me. And he said, "No, I'm not into doing books. I'm into videos and courses and stuff. So said, "You do it. So I said, "No, I don't really want to do it. You're the expert, Paul. You do it. But by 2012, I realized he wasn't going to do it. So I just decided. Well, this is a great way to learn.

Todd McLaughlin: 16:23

Wow! So in

Unknown: 16:23

2013, I started my journey to write this book I had in mind, which turned out to be three books. I just wanted to go through the whole body. I started with the lower body, then the middle body, and then the upper body, and became this trilogy of your body, your yoga, your spine, your yoga, and your upper body, your yoga, and it took me eight years to to research all that and document all that. So basically, what you've got in these books is my PhD thesis, if you want.

Todd McLaughlin: 16:50

Wow, that's amazing! And so, so you actually you did all the research for all three, and then then took it upon yourself to to to write one, publish that, write the next. Publish that, and now the third one. Publish it. How long did that process take? If you researched for eight, were you kind of writing it as you were going, so that by the time you got to the yeah, amazing. So

Unknown: 17:11

I started with the first book, Your Body, Your Yoga. I had the visualization of the whole trilogy, but I put them actually five volumes. The first volume is just on the physiology of the tissues, like what is stasha, what is bones, what is cartilage, and how does water play a role in here? How does the nervous system play a role? So the first volume, which is the first half of your body, your yoga, is just the physiology of the tissues and how do tissues work, and then the next three volumes are all on different parts of the body. So your body yoga is from the hips to the feet, and then the second, your spinal yoga is the actual body, including the lungs, if you will, and then the fourth is your upper body. So it's the shoulders, arms, hands, and the fifth is an overarching look at proportions and how the length of your arms versus the length of your legs is going to affect what poses you can do and how you do them.

Todd McLaughlin: 18:04

Yes,

Unknown: 18:05

or the length, something called the kormic index. I said this once in a class. I noticed a woman had a very small kormic index, and she thought I said karma index. She thought, "Oh, I've got a small karma index. Not karma, kormic, and that is basically your sitting height divided by your standing height. Now, if you have a very tall torso, it's going to be kind of hard to do some jump throughs. If you're sorry, easy to do jump throughs. If you have a short torso and long legs, it might be harder to do jump throughs.

Todd McLaughlin: 18:37

Yes. Yes.

Unknown: 18:38

Your proportions, like how long your arms compared to your legs? How long is your is your shin compared to your thigh? How long is your arm compared to your neck? Some people will never be able to do headstand because their arms are just shorter. You can't get the arms above the head. Other people can easily do it, but these people who can't do it and they're thinking there's something wrong with me, they don't realize it's simply a proportion. You just happen to have short humorous humorize. So that's the the fifth volume of the book. It's just looking at proportions and symmetries and asymmetries.

Todd McLaughlin: 19:11

Nice. Now the

Unknown: 19:11

left side isn't the right side. We're asymmetric.

Todd McLaughlin: 19:15

In in relation to symmetry, how much of yoga and this idea that we have that I'm going to attempt to achieve perfect symmetry, and I know the word "perfect" is a loaded term, but it's a word that I think kind of encapsulates like this idea of like I'm going to get completely balanced on both sides to match up. How realistic or unrealistic is that, in your opinion?

Unknown: 19:40

I don't think it's realistic at all, and I think it's a false goal to have to make your left side versus your right side. Just think of it in real life. You're probably right-handed or left-handed. If you're right-handed, your right arm is stronger than your left arm. Does that make you only work your left arm when you're working it with the weights? I'm never going to use my right arm because I want my left arm to be equally strong. Think of a tennis player. He's always serving with his dominant arm. A pitcher is always throwing with his dominant arm. Should he always also work the other arm? Should you spend just as much time serving with your left arm as with your right arm? No. We we master one thing because we can become really good with it. But it doesn't mean we're unbalanced. I think the word you really want is not symmetry but balance. I am asymmetric. One arm is always a little bit bigger, a little bit longer than the other arm. One leg is always a little bit shorter or longer. Now sometimes it's dramatically longer, and you'll have to accommodate that, but maybe with some orthotics or whatever. But just these little asymmetries, they don't really matter in life, except you just try to balance yourself.

Todd McLaughlin: 20:43

Yeah, yeah.

Unknown: 20:44

I was once told that if you can't do the eagle arms, or sorry, the clasping the hands behind the back in Gomukhasana, if you can clasp with your right side, but you can't with your left side, you shouldn't do it on your right side. You should only do on your left side until they get balanced. Well, to me, that's flawed thinking. One arm is always stronger and less mobile than the other arm, but that's life, and you just learn how to deal with it.

Todd McLaughlin: 21:10

Yeah.

Unknown: 21:10

Why would I penalize my right side just because my left side can't do something? I want both sides to be kind of optimal. I work to what I can do on both sides, even if they're not the same.

Todd McLaughlin: 21:21

Great point. When people are coming into your room with questions about pain, and they and I know these are difficult questions for me to ask you because every single situation is going to have a a unique set of circumstances to build up to a situation. But in general, if someone's coming in with pain with the idea that that bringing symmetry in will be the answer to fixing the pain, what has been a care? What is a common thread that you find with that way of thinking, and is there a way to approach or change that way of thinking to potentially help improve the pain.

Unknown: 22:04

Well, you're right. Pain is a very complicated topic because it could be caused by some physiological problem in the body, but often we'll have people with physical damage in the body and have no pain, and people who have pain that have no physical damage in the body. So the correlation between a physical cause and pain is not clear cut. Just because somebody's in pain doesn't mean oh there's a physical we got to do something different in the body. It may be related, but it may not be related. So the biggest question with pain is what do you think is causing it, and how often have you had it? When does it show up? Is it chronic or is it just acute? Most acute cases will probably cure themselves in three or six months. So whatever you've done, you might think, well, that must have cured it. Just as an anecdote, I had a woman who had been coming to my Sunday night Yin yoga classes for about a year, and after a year, she came up to and asked if I could, I could give her a hug. And so yeah, we hugged, and she said,"You know, I'm so happy. When I first started coming to your classes, I had such bad back pain, and now after a year of coming to your Yin Yoga classes, I'm completely pain free. I'm just so grateful. And she hugged me again, and she walked away. And I thought, "Oh, great! I'm such a good teacher. But then my scientific brain said, "Wait a minute, time out here. I have no idea what cured that woman. Maybe it was just doing shavasana once a week, or maybe it was doing the breath work, maybe it was just slowing down, maybe it was getting out of the house and away from her husband and kids. I have no idea what cured her. Now she's cured, but had she not come to Yin Yoga, she might have been cured anyway, because these things tend to resolve over three or six months, so we have to be very careful of what we assign cause and effect to these things.

Todd McLaughlin: 23:46

Yeah, great. I just

Unknown: 23:47

had to admit, I'm happy she's pain free. I have no idea why she's pain free. I can speculate. My ego can speculate and say, "Oh, it's my great teaching, but honestly, I don't know.

Todd McLaughlin: 23:58

Well, that's something that I am finding that I'm really appreciating about your teaching style and the way that you've written this book, and and I'm gathering all the books is that you aren't saying to the really young, strong, athletic person that can do a very extreme, difficult pose that you should not be doing that because there's this future pain thing that's coming your way, and which I think takes a certain level of maturity. But I can see that the way that you're already explaining that right away, the ego wanted to be like,"Oh, cool, man, I'm good. But then the scientific side said,"Wait a minute, let's let's really analyze this. So I think that's really important. Do you do you feel like that's lacking in our yoga community in certain circles? That sort of, I mean, again, I know these are tough. Yeah, not

Unknown: 24:52

necessarily deliberately. I believe all the yoga teachers I've ever come across really do have their students' interest at heart. But I think some of the ways we've been taught, like I had to unlearn many of the ways that I was taught originally in my initial 200-hour teacher training. After that, I would just say things because that's what my teacher told me. It wasn't until I met Paul Grilli, like four or five years, seven years later, that I started to question a lot of these just standard cues and alignments that I was offering, like I used to love to collect alignment cues, but another thing I noticed I was doing was giving out nocebos. Now most people have heard of placebos. Placebo is if you say this medicine is going to be good for you, the body acts as if it's good. Well, there's a flip side to that: a nocebo. If you say this is going to be harmful, then often people will make some self harm out of that. So I was in the position where I'd put somebody said like in a warrior two pose, where the knee is pointing over the second toe, not the third toe has to be right over the second toe. The back foot has to be turned in exactly 75 degrees. The thigh should be horizontal. So I had all these beautiful cues, and then when someone would do something, well, it doesn't feel right for me. I want to be a little bit over here, and I would say something like, "Oh no! If you keep doing that, eventually you're going to destroy your knees. That's a nocebo. I have no evidence of that. There's been no studies of knee damage in warrior pose if the alignment's slightly out. That was just a rationalization that I would give to justify my alignment cue.

Todd McLaughlin: 26:24

Yeah,

Unknown: 26:24

and then I met Paul Grilli, and I realized some people their feet are naturally turned up because of something called tibial torsion. Every long bone has a twist, and from the base of the knee to the foot, some people their tibia rotates 45 degrees, so their foot naturally is going to point outward, and for me to bring that foot inward, I have to have them internally rotate at the hips 45 degrees. So these people naturally don't want their foot pointing outward. But I was telling them if you don't do it, you're going to hurt yourself. That's a nocebo. And now maybe that person gets a little tweak in the knee from playing football or tennis or something, and then she remembers. Oh yeah, Bernie told me that it hurt my knee if I didn't do alignment right. Now she's becoming hyper vigilant, and every time she does something, she's now blaming her alignment, which was actually the correct alignment for her. I just couldn't see it because I didn't realize human variation that she is unique, she is different, and for her, her limit might be with the foot outward in warrior pose, or down dog, or mountain pose. So I would say these things, and I might actually be causing problems. So we have to be very careful of our our cueing, our language to not imply that this is going to be bad for somebody. It might be, like you say, a very strong, flexible young person can drop back to wheel, grab their ankles, come back up again. They can do that over and over again, no problem. But if you're a six foot five linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, you're probably not going to get away with that. Maybe you could do it once, but do it 108 times every morning. You are going to destroy your spine. Just because it works for one person doesn't mean it's going to work for another person. It depends on the nature of your body and your biography, your history.

Todd McLaughlin: 28:07

Great point, Bernie. I like the way that you point that out. In relation to having a student that is striving really hard to achieve something in a posture is claiming they have pain in their body, and you, your intuition and/or years in the saddle, expertise of watching and paying attention and noticing cause and effect, and you see that maybe what they are doing is causing potentially causing that pain. How are you navigating the psychology of redirecting what the purpose of the practice is to help the student come to that own answer for themselves, so that that potentially could resolve the issue. Yeah,

Unknown: 29:05

that's a great question, Todd. Because it comes down to your intention. Why are you doing the practice? What is your goal? And people come to the mat for a lot of different reasons. But if your goal is simply unbridled flexibility, I would ask you to think. Okay, why are you seeking that? Do you think flexibility is related to health? It is to a degree, but it's kind of like a Goldilocks curve. There's an optimal amount of mobility we need, but we don't need maximum flexibility because then the health starts to go down. If you think of athletes, gymnasts, dancers-these people, their livelihood depends on getting the most they can out of their body, but that comes at a cost. Maximum flexibility comes at a cost of minimal health. You think of an N-shaped curve called the Goldilocks curve. If. Is health is on the the vertical axis, going up and down, and stress is on the horizontal axis. If you have no stress, you have no health. If you never get out of bed in the morning, your body will atrophy. If you have too much stress, your body is going to wear out. It's going to degenerate. That's called osteoarthritis. Osteoporosis is when the bones aren't growing; you need to stress the bones. Osteoarthritis is when the bones are wearing out because you're over stressing them. But in between these two extremes, we have the optimal amount, the Goldilocks-not too little, not too much. So, what are we trying to do in our yoga practice? Are we trying to get the most we can of the body? Because that comes at expense of health. I broke my knees trying to get that. You may have damaged your back trying to get that, because nobody would explain to you or to me the trade-off. If they'd said, "Let's go for the optimal amount of exercise, load, stress, not the maximal amount, let's not try to bring both feet behind the head if you can't get there, and if trying to do that, you feel a tweak in your hips. Listen to little tweaks because little tweaks become big tweaks. Big tweaks become operations, time off work. You can't go to the yoga studio. Yoga studios have to lay off teachers. It's bad to the economy to ignore little tweaks because they'll grow in you.

Todd McLaughlin: 31:20

Yes.

Unknown: 31:20

One of the worst sayings we have in the West is"no pain, no gain. I like to joke and say, if you translate that into Sanskrit, the liturgical language of yoga, "no pain, no gain" is translated as"bullshit tihi. Bullshitti. Instead, we should have a saying"no pain, no pain.

Todd McLaughlin: 31:41

Yeah, we don't

Unknown: 31:42

need pain now. If you're in physical therapy and you've got a lot of scar tissue, the physical therapist is licensed to hurt you because they they might have to do stuff to break through that that may reestablish your mobility again. But yoga teachers, our goal should be no pain, no pain, and if there is pain, inquire why does this hurt? It shouldn't hurt, and if it does hurt, is there another way to get my goal here? We have 1000s of poses in yoga, so if one pose doesn't work and it hurts, there's another way to target those tissues. So what is your intention? And this leads to something Paul really called a functional approach to yoga, as opposed to an esthetic approach. An esthetic approach says knee over the second toe, back foot turned in 45 degrees, and this is the way a lot of early teacher trainings really mass produce the teachers. If you can get everyone in the class to look exactly the same in Down Dog, feet parallel, hip width apart, toes pointing forward, hands back of the wrist pointing forward, hands shoulder apart. You're a good teacher. Just get everyone to look the same. That's esthetics.

Todd McLaughlin: 32:48

Yeah. A

Unknown: 32:48

functional approach is what's the point of down dog? Why are you putting your students in down dog? What do you want them to get? Maybe some lower body lengthening, some upper body strengthening. Well, if that's the goal, do you care where the feet are? Do you care where the hands are? Instead, why not ask the students, "What are you feeling? Now, usually, when I ask a student that, they'll say, "Fine, and that's answering a different question. I'll say, "I'm glad you're feeling fine. I didn't ask how you're feeling. I asked, "What are you feeling? So we have a targeted area. If you want, you can look at yoga as intention. So, if you put somebody in, say, I don't know, Gomukhasana, we're targeting the hips. The hips are externally rotated, adducted, adducted, and flexed. So, we're doing these three movements of the hips to try and mobilize the hips. Then we can ask the student, "What are you feeling? If they say I feel really stuck in the hips here, so okay, good. No, this the area the area we're targeting is the hips. So what exactly are you feeling there? Is it burning, stabbing, electrical, tingly? We don't want those. Those are signs that the tissues are on the verge of being harmed. But if it's just a tugging, well, maybe there's something in the back of the gluteus maximus that's getting pulled because you know you're doing this adduction with flexion, and that's a great way to stretch out the piriformis or some of these other tissues. And if that's our intention, the pose is working. But if you're saying I'm really feeling this in my knees, well, the knee is not a targeted area for this pose. So let's modify this pose. Maybe we'll come into a square pose or a butterfly pose. Now see if you're feeling it in the target area. So this is the functional approach. Forget what it looks like. Who cares what it looks like? What does it feel like? What's your intention? And then you pay attention. So it's intention and attention. Those are the two keys to a functional approach to the practice.

Todd McLaughlin: 34:42

Yes. Well, great answer. I agree. Do you feel like the esthetic approach seems to work a little easier in the large classes, and the functional approach is a little easier to? Implement in a one-on-one session, and if that's true, are you mastering and working to master the ability to take a more functional approach in a larger group setting? How are you structuring the way that you're disseminating, sharing information with your students? Are you how has your sizes of classes, because now I mean you have lots of people really appreciate your work and they want to come study and practice. And if you walk into a room with 100 people and you're going to teach a class, how are you able to work that functional component into your teaching?

Unknown: 36:21

Well, I think for a beginning teacher who's just newly minted out their 200-hour certificate, what you said is true. It's probably easier to teach esthetically 20 people than to functionally teach each one. But as you become a little bit more experienced, it's actually very easy to teach 2, 100 people because I no longer take the responsibility for them. I've kind of got two anecdotes that I share in my own teacher trainings. In my Yin Yoga teacher trainings, we spend a lot of time on exactly this point. How can you teach many people in a functional approach? The first is imagine you go to a doctor. You've got a really bad migraine, and you arrive in the doctor's office, and the doctor's running late, and there's 19 other patients waiting there, and the doctor finally comes in and says,"Okay, today everyone we're doing aspirin, aspirin, aspirin, aspirin, aspirin, aspirin. And beside you is a woman who's six months pregnant, and she thinks,"Aspirin is that safe for my baby? I just don't know. Beside her is another woman with asthma, and they're thinking,"Aspirin is not going to do anything for my asthma. Besides, you on the other side is a guy with an ulcer, and aspirin is going to kill my stomach. The doctor says, "No, no, we're all doing aspirin today. Now, chances are you wouldn't go back to that doctor. You want a doctor who'll sit down with you, get to know your situation, your background, your biology, your biography, and then come up with a understand what your issue is, what is your intention, why you're here today, and then come up with a way that will work for you. But now imagine you go to your yoga studio. You go into a class. There's 19 other students. Teacher's running a bit late. Finally, she comes in and says, "Okay, class, today we're doing sun salutation, and you're thinking, "Good. I've just been doing a week of Yin Yoga, I really need to move. But beside you is another woman, six months pregnant, thinking,"Well, is up to going to be good for my baby? And somebody else has got carpal tunnel syndrome with a wrist. Oh, that's going to kill my wrist. And the teacher says, "No, no, we're all doing sun salutations. Now you wouldn't go back to that doctor, but you're probably going to come back to this class again because we don't expect the teacher to actually tailor the class for you individually, you're supposed to tailor your practice to the teacher, and that's completely backwards. The teacher, the student is not there for the teacher's benefit. The teacher is there for the student's benefit. So I like to call my teaching flying lessons. This is my second anecdote, and I heard this once by a wonderful guy named Bruce Lipton, who wrote a book called Biology of Belief. He's a dynamic scientist by training, and he once asked me a rhetorical question. He said, "What's the difference between an airplane pilot and a doctor? And immediately I thought about 1000 differences, but it was a rhetorical question. So before I could answer, he said, "You know, by law, before a pilot can start up the plane and taxi away from the terminal, she has to go through a whole checklist of material. It used to be in a book, mounts on an iPad, sort of thing. But there's hundreds of things they have to check before they'll start to fly. And also by the American Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association, there's a checklist that doctors are supposed to go through every time a patient comes in to see them, but the doctors only got 10 minutes, so they throw away the book and say, "Okay, why are you here? They don't do all the background checking. The difference between a doctor and a pilot is the pilot is on the plane with you. Think about that for a moment. It's in the pilot's best interest to make sure that plane is going to safely take off and land.

Todd McLaughlin: 39:50

Yes, the

Unknown: 39:51

doctor is not on the plane with you. Now, I don't mean this to cast any aspersions on the the intentions of the doctor. All my doctors that I've had throughout my life, I really felt had my best interest at heart, but I'm the one on the plane. I have to take responsibility for landing the plane safely. Doctors, accountants, lawyers, yoga teachers-they're ground control. They may know more about your body than you do, but you're the one on the plane. You have to decide what's right for you. So I give flying lessons. I'm trying to explain to my students how their planes work, how to read the dashboards. What are you feeling? Is a question of how much fuel have you got? What's your airspeed? What's your communication setting? How are your ailerons set? What's the rudder like? You have to figure that out. I can't tell you. I can't tell. By looking at you, whether you'll ever be able to do lotus or not, but I can give you some instructions so that you can pay attention to what your knees are doing, how your hips doing. So when I teach 20 people, it can be just the same as teaching one person. I will start with an intention. Okay, so in this pose, we're going to look at hips, or in this pose, we're going to look at the shoulders. So if I do Down Dog, first time I got a whole bunch of people, I don't know them at all, I don't know what conditions they've got. I'll have them do a number of different Down Dogs. So we'll do some sun salutations. First time we pause in Down Dog. Let's do it with our feet parallel, feet pointing ahead. Notice how that feels. How does it feel in the feet, in the hips, in your shoulders? Is it a struggle? Do you feel loose, safe, supported? Then we'll do another sentence. So this time, let's have the feet wide apart, toes pointing outward. How does that feel? Third time through, let's have the feet together. Maybe the toes pointing inward. So we can do all these variations: feet in, feet out, feet narrow, feet wide, and you decide what feels appropriate and safe for you. Next time we'll do the same with the hands. Where should the hands be? I don't know. Some people love the hands shoulder apart. Some people need the hands wide apart. Some people like the fingers pointing inward, outward. It depends on the twist of the bones, the shape of the the sockets. Everyone is different. So if I just go through all this and I give everyone these variations and have them decide what feels appropriate for them, they're learning what their plane can do, and a 747 is not going to do what a Cessna 150 can do. Two very different planes. If somebody's got a fighter jet, okay, let them do the high-speed knock stalls and loop the loops, but the 747 is not going to do that. The Cessna is not going to do that. So my job is just to help them discover what their body can do. So I don't use esthetics. I don't say everyone looked like this. Instead, we do this. We play with it. We experiment. Try this. Try that. What's your intention? What are you feeling?

Todd McLaughlin: 43:12

Amazing, Bernie. Yeah, great answer. It's so true, and that that thank you so much. That's really good insight. in In relation to what I picked up from mr. McGill, and sorry, Stewart, mr. McGill, if I get this wrong, but what blew my mind at first because of this hypermobility component, bend and bend and bend and twist and turn in every which way and as deep as you possibly can, and his instruction was that I picked up on was imagine that you just had a lumbar fusion surgery, or if the pain is anywhere in the spine, imagine and stiffen it up, and don't don't move it around a whole bunch. Try to hold it relatively in one place for a little while, just to let the inflammation possibly tone down a little bit. And I was kind of like, "What? That's just an interesting idea. Like, and then mobility

Unknown: 44:13

before mobility,

Todd McLaughlin: 44:14

and to start to play with that in the poses, like I don't know, going for something like Ardhamatsindrasana or the half floor of the fish spine twist, and being like, "Well, yeah, my spine can do that, but what if I don't do that, and I just focus on keeping my lumbar like holding right there and just moving a little bit my cervical and thoracic spine and and that was really fun for me and enlightening you know just to start to kind of play with that idea. I would like to hear your thoughts on that particular idea and how do do agree with this, disagree, and different maybe some different ideas that I could play with to to start to come to a deeper understanding of the spine.

Unknown: 44:59

Yeah, totally. When I first met Stuart, he was giving a presentation, a weekend workshop, and he was using pictures from Paul Grilli, and that's where kind of linked. That's awesome. He's showing he's showing the variations in the hip socket, and he mentioned Paul Grilly, and so during the break I went up and introduced myself because I was a student of Paul Grilli, and that started our kind of friendship together. Stewart says first you have to have stability, and that will create mobility, especially in athletics. He calls it proximal stability. So proximal means kind of in your core, stiffen your core to build distal mobility. He likes to use Bruce Lee as an example, the kung fu enter the dragon guy.

Todd McLaughlin: 45:43

Yes, he

Unknown: 45:43

would do his one-inch punch, but for that one-inch punch, he had to have a really firm, stable core, and that then can translate everything into the distal, the furthest point away, so you have to first start with your proximal stability or distal mobility. And in yoga, we get that completely backwards. We prize mobility over everything else, and that leads to a whole bunch of problems. But we combine that with Paul Gurley's understanding. Human variation, as Stewart points out, there are people who are like oak trees and people who are like willow trees, and even the spines. Some spines, the discs between the vertebra have different shapes. They're either ovoid or he called it like a lima bean, lima bean shape. If a lima bean shape, it's very thick. This is for like a linebacker or a power weightlifter. There's a big surface area which helps to maintain a lot of stresses along the spine. But if you're a golfer, chances are you want to have more of an ovoid disc, and that allows for a lot of rotational movement. You can whip it around like a very flexible rod, but if you happen to be the guy with the very thick oak type type thing, you're not going to get that flexibility. And to try to get it, it's just going to delaminate your disc. But if you've got that really wispy, easy to turn, that's great. You got a lot of mobility, but don't try and deadlift 1000 pounds. You just don't have the structural stability to do that. So we've got these predispositions to one way or the other, to internal rotation or external rotation, to flexion or extension. We are kind of predisposed by the nature of our bones and our bodies to being good at something. Some people are very good at strength. Some people are very good at length and mobility. So in yoga, to prioritize mobility over stability is risky. Now again, if you're a five foot, 100 pound dancer and you can do all these wonderfully fluid movements, you probably don't have to worry about it, but again, you're not going to deadlift 1000 pounds. But if you're a linebacker and you weigh 300 pounds, there's no way you're going to do a drop back to wheel, and there's no way you should be trying to. So, want to start with first safety, build the stability, and then work for mobility. And this leads to a little observation. There's kind of two ways to work your joints. If you want to put a big load on your joint, you want to bring it to neutral and stiffen it. So if you just use a finger example, just shake out your left hand, point your forefinger forward, and with your right hand hold the finger. If I'm going to really pull, you can feel that separation in the joint. You're distracting the joint. Now stiffen it really tight, and now you've protected the joint. So if you're going to put a big load on the joint, stiffen it. But if you shake it out, if I want to work on mobility, relax the joint. Now I can maybe bend the finger back 90 degrees. I couldn't do that if I was stiffening it. So if you want to work on mobility, relax the joint. If you want to work on stability, stiffen the joint. Now, if the joint is bearing a load, say you're doing a drop back to wheel, you have a huge lever happening in the lower back because your upper back is being two or three feet out here. You got all your upper body weight here. That's a huge lever, putting a lot of weight into the lumbar, the L4, L5. If you're going to do that, you want to stiffen this. But if you stiffen it, you're not going to have that range of motion. Now, again, if you're only five foot tall and you're very light, then doing this may not be a problem. But if you're six foot six and you're very heavy. That's putting a huge strain here. So if you're bearing a load, bring the spine to neutral, stiffen it. If you want to work on mobility, take the load off. Come onto your stomach, do a back bend like Cobra or Sphinx pose, because then there's not a big load on the back. So you have to be careful of when you're working for which, mobility is okay, but don't do it under load.

Todd McLaughlin: 49:57

Yes, if

Unknown: 49:58

you're under load, stability is what you need first.

Todd McLaughlin: 50:01

Oh man, great answer, Bernie. Thank you so much. Where do you where do you think this fascination with mobility Comes from when you investigate your own experience with entering into the yoga world, Ashtanga Yoga, pushing from first to second, trying for this for that. I mean, is it just something very innocent? Like I just want to be like I look at somebody and I'm in admiration of them, and I think if I could copy what they could do, I would be I would be good too. Where do you? I mean, I know this gets part of it. There's

Unknown: 50:43

a competitive on this. Like I'm a Type A personality, so I'm very competitive. When I went to a Stein, I saw these people doing second and third series. I want to be able to do that. I want to be like them, but also I point to the 1960s when mr. Yanga came up with his book Led on Yoga. There's some like 250 poses in there. Some are very advanced poses. All the previous books had simple things like Ardha Mandrasana, just easy little twists and forward fold, Paschimottanasana, Janusha. Sasana, and these older books they may have had 4050, poses, but there wasn't dropping back to wheel and grabbing ankles and all these amazing things that Yanga can do. So I think that created desire in people to be like mr. Yangar. Let's start to work towards that. And so again, we got into this esthetic. We got away from what was the point of yoga. If you look at in the earlier text, asana was always a very small part of the yoga journey. Think of the yamas and yamas; just one phase is asana. You got seven other steps. But as time go on in the 20th century, asana became yoga, and we forgot about all this other stuff. And so asana became an end in itself, and the esthetics of the asana became a goal. And what people don't realize is, mr. Yangar was hurt for months and months after doing all the photographs from Light and Yoga.

Todd McLaughlin: 52:05

Oh wow! And looking

Unknown: 52:06

back decades later, he said, "I now see, looking at that book, where all my injuries came from.

Todd McLaughlin: 52:11

Wow!

Unknown: 52:12

All his lifelong injuries, because he was forcing himself in these extreme poses that just wasn't appropriate even for his body.

Todd McLaughlin: 52:19

Yeah.

Unknown: 52:20

So I think that just came through this whole. I want to be like that person, and mr. Yanger's book started to valorize all these advanced asanas, which really is not the point of yoga.

Todd McLaughlin: 52:31

That's so interesting too because I feel like there's this sense of wanting to somehow beat death, and if we see an older person doing a headstand in a black and white photo, we think, well, if I could be like that yoga person, I I'll I'll just be strong and flexible and super healthy and have no problems in life and I'm going to live to 100 plus and and it's so fascinating to me that that's kind of where I came from. I remember seeing a picture of him thinking I want to be able to be old and and like that guy, but then you tell me the backstory of like he was injured for months after that after doing all this. That's fascinating, right? Like that's so. I guess you just we just have to look a little deeper, or maybe that's how we start. We start superficial and we start going in a little deeper.

Unknown: 53:19

Yeah, and we learn from our mistakes hopefully.

Todd McLaughlin: 53:21

Yeah,

Unknown: 53:22

and we say, well, that doesn't work for me because everyone's different. You're not a younger. And he called in his book Headstand the king of the postures and shoulder stand the queen of the postures. I don't know if you finished reading my book, Your Spine, Your Yoga, but I have sections on both those, and I call them high-risk, low-reward poses. I include in there lotus pose. You can get the same benefits with legs up the wall. Now I used to do a lot of headstands too because it was part of Ashtanga, but now when I get MRIs or X-rays of my my neck, I find I've got degenerating discs between the vertebrae because of those those poses, and that causes nerve damage and so forth. So really, it wasn't worth the pain and suffering that I'm getting now from doing those when I was younger. You might think you got perfect alignment, but again, everyone's alignment is different. The various facet joints are a little bit different than the average one, so it may look esthetically like I've got my student perfectly aligned, but I don't have X-ray vision. I can't see how much pressure is putting on this one lateral facet joint, and there's c3, and that is pushing on the nerves, which goes unradiates their jaw or whatever, just you know, there's no point doing shoulder stand or headstand. Now it looks cool, and if you are convinced there's absolutely no problem for you, great. But I would suggest by the time you're 50, you might want to phase those out because there's no health benefit to those poses. Anything better than just legs off the wall?

Todd McLaughlin: 54:55

So interesting because as you say that, I can think of a particular situation where someone so badly just wants to keep doing the most extreme things the older they get, and I guess I'm curious. It sounds like to me like you're just pretty much eliminating teaching shoulder stand and headstand, or you're teaching shoulder stand, but you're having them put their legs up the wall. This is shoulder stand. Am I? I'm starting

Unknown: 55:19

with what's the intention of shoulder stand?

Todd McLaughlin: 55:20

Yeah,

Unknown: 55:21

and I bet you I can find another way to get those intentions without actually doing the full shoulder stand.

Todd McLaughlin: 55:25

Great point.

Unknown: 55:26

Again, always is always wrong. Never is never right. There are many people where shoulder stand is never going to be an issue. There's a wonderful, famous yoga teacher, Vanda Scaravelli, who was a Yangar trained for a while. She eventually went away from his teaching, but she was doing dropbacks to wheels in her 90s. But she had the spine for it. There's no way somebody with kissing spinous processes are ever going to do that? And some people they're missing the spinous process. It's a variation of ignition called spinous bifida, spina bifida, where this spinous process, if you reach back and feel the bumps in your back there, that's the tip of the spinous process. Some people don't have them; they're missing one, and they can. Their spine right like 90 degrees in that one spot because that bone is missing. They can do it, and maybe they'll always be able to do it, but that doesn't mean they should do it. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. Again, back off. What is your intention here? If you always rely just on one joint, Stuart McGill calls this a hinge. If you look at people, and then over time, as you become more used to looking at students, you'll notice that the spine is not nice, smoothly curved. You might notice there's a discontinuity in that student, and like they got the lumbar is like this, and then the thoracics like this at the right angle, right in that one spot, maybe L1 and T12, maybe it's just the nature of their spinous process. It's it's short, or there's big space there, or it's missing, and they get all their back bends just in that one spot, and that could put a big load into that one spot as well. So, yeah, it's it always comes back to what's your intention? Why are you doing this?

Todd McLaughlin: 57:13

Yeah,

Unknown: 57:14

and if it's just esthetic, great. A dancer, a gymnast, how they look is very important, and it's a very competitive field. So you're going to have to get the most you can of your body. But some of the most broken bodies you'll ever find are retired dancers, retired gymnasts, retired athletes, because they asked so much of their body through their short career that they basically destroyed those joints for for the rest of their life.

Todd McLaughlin: 57:42

Can can I ask you, Bernie, what is your intention in your yoga practice today?

Unknown: 57:50

Basically, for me, it is to maintain. To me, health has got three axes, three orthogonal axes. There's strength, and for that, I'll use resistance training. Swing kettlebells, do bodyweight push-ups and pull-ups. There's endurance. How how good your cardiovascular system? So running up and down stairs, playing pickleball, doing some sort of sports, and there's mobility. So I got three orthogonal axes from my mobility, and I should say mobility to me is a combination of flexibility. Flexibility is your range of motion. Mobility is your ease of motion. And like a simple test, can you sit cross-legged on the floor and get up. How easy is that? That's a measure of your mobility, which comprises your flexibility, but also your coordination and your strength. So I try to maximize all three of these, or sorry, optimize all three of these. Now yoga is not what we do. Yoga is how we do what we do. So I can lift weights and make that yoga. I can run up and down stairs and make that yoga. I can work on enhanced flexibility and make that yoga. So for my flexibility practice, that's my yin yoga. For my strength and endurance, I can do sun salutations and things like that. But I plateau. I found with Ashtanga, you may have gone through a similar cycle todd. When I first did it, I couldn't believe how hard it was. After a year or so, it wasn't kicking my butt so much. I plateaued. Well, if you want to get further, you're going to have to use weights. You're going to have to do more because I found just doing ashtanga, I didn't get any stronger or improve my cardiovascular conditioning after a year, so you have to do some of these other things. So now all that to me is part of my yoga. So from a health perspective, I can do weights, I can do endurance training, I can do mobility training. But why I do yoga is for mindfulness practice. It's to be able to live in the moment to enjoy this moment. I think to me, it's because I'm in my 70s now. I can see the end coming. Every moment's precious, so I want to enjoy the time I have. When you're younger, you you think you got all the time in the world, you can ignore things. But now, time's passing more quickly. It's amazing, and to me, it's like Christmas was just yesterday, six months ago, time starts to speed up. So my yoga practice helped slow me down.

Todd McLaughlin: 1:00:17

Nice. Oh man, great answer, Bernie. Thank you so much. You know, I I know we scheduled an hour together, so I really want to be respectful of your time. And but I'm. Can you talk a little bit about? I mean, to me, listening to you, it just seems that it's imperative as yoga practitioners and teachers, especially that we study anatomy. Can you tell us a little bit about if we want to study with you what some of the options are beyond reading your books? Your books are absolutely incredible, and there's so much to be gained from that. But can what are other ways that we can study and practice with you?

Unknown: 1:00:52

Well, you're right. The books are kind of an intro to it, but I mean, you're kind of unique, Todd, that you're actually reading the book cover to cover. To me, it's a bit like a textbook or a reference book. I tried to make it easy, but there's a lot of hardcore anatomy in there, so I can imagine most people picking up and the eyes start to glaze over. Don't don't think that you have to. Read the whole thing cover to cover, unless maybe you're having trouble falling asleep at night and you need something just to to set you away. So the books are an intro and basically just flip to the chapter or the section that you want to. I really want to look at the sacrum today. What is mutation? I want to look at that. I want to look at the scapula. So you can just use that as a resource.

Todd McLaughlin: 1:01:30

Yes.

Unknown: 1:01:31

And then on my website yinyoga.com, I have links to trainings that I offer. I'm currently on a sabbatical for this year. I'm not offering any live trainings, but I do have on-demand on online trainings. I have the 50-hour Yin Yoga teacher training in which we cover a lot of this how to teach functional yoga, but I also have a specific 40-hour course called Functional Anatomy for Yoga Teachers, where I get into real nitty-gritty detail. So I basically walk through the three books in detail, showing you with a class of 20 people, showing you how people vary from side to side, and using things like this is called a goniometer. If you can't see it, it's a protractor with two arms on it, and it measures your angles and how much tibial rotation you might have, or antivenion of your hip socket you might have, and why some people they can lie down in shavasana and their feet are straight out to the side, other people's feet are pointing straight up. Why are these variations happening, and what does that mean for the yoga practice? So, functional anatomy for Yoga Teachers is another very detailed course that I have, and then I have weekly online classes as well, where I kind of talk to some of these things during the actual Yin Yoga practice.

Todd McLaughlin: 1:02:43

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I mean, I didn't realize you were on a sabbatical, so thank you for taking time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. This has been an honor. I've been looking forward to this for when I know we scheduled this a little while ago. So I've been really excited about this moment and to get a chance to meet you. And I really appreciate you sharing all this information in such a kind of fun way and relaxed way and keeping it you know lighthearted. And but yet yes, your books do go into some the the nitty gritty details, which are just absolutely amazing. So I'm so grateful for you taking the time to do that. I can't imagine the amount of work. I mean, I do believe eight years. You're not kidding around. Like that was like a serious amount of effort. Just a real kind of slightly funny story. I was excited about this interview, so I was teaching class the other day, and so in the room I said, you know, everybody, I I'm reading this book, and and I'm getting ready to interview Bernie Sanders, and I and I didn't realize that I said Sanders, and everyone started kind of look at me, kind of like, and I'm like, oh no, I mean Bernie Clark. I'm like, no, you guys, and everyone started cracking up. So you know you're not the first

Unknown: 1:03:55

to have called me Bernie Sanders. All

Todd McLaughlin: 1:03:56

right, it just slipped. It just slipped there. But mr. Clark, thank you so much for taking time with me today, and I I really appreciate it.

Unknown: 1:04:08

Well, thanks for inviting me, Todd, and good luck with your practice, with your studio, and hopefully the weather down in Florida is treating you nice.

Todd McLaughlin: 1:04:15

Thank you so much. Thank you. Native Yoga Toddcast is produced by myself. The theme music is "Dreamed Up" by Bryce Allen. If you like this show, let me know. If there's room for improvement, I want to hear that too. We are curious to know what you think and what you want more of, what I can improve, and if you have ideas for future guests or topics, please send us your thoughts to info at Native Yoga Center. You can find us@nativeyogascenter.com. And hey, if you did like this episode, share it with your friends, rate it, and review, and join us next time.

Unknown: 1:05:13

For you, I know you.