Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

My old teacher, the late Roger Eischens, was often credited with defining the category of enigmatic yogi . For those of you who are not familiar with Roger, one of his best known maxims was blessed are the stiff . Biblical references aside, this phrase often catches yoga practitioners off guard. We tend to associate yogic prowess with Gumby-like flexibility… how could the stiff be in any way blessed in their yogic endeavors? Isn’t flexibility the grail of yoga? Why would BKS Iyengar insist that stiffer students had the advantage in learning yoga? With his decades of practice and teaching, along with a mastery of the most difficult asanas, certainly a yoga master like BKS Iyengar would recognize the important of flexibility in yoga. Or would he? I often find yoga students get distracted with the flexibility. Potential students put off taking their first class because they’re too stiff, beginning students often think I can never do this , and continuing students tend to push themselves t

I first encountered the idea of frame of reference while an undergrad studying Physics. To the man walking down the aisle of the airplane, he’s walking a few miles per hour. From the frame of reference of someone on the ground, he’s walking several hundred miles per hour. Frame of reference refers to the myriad ways we can see the same activity. In Hatha Yoga, there are relatively few positions, though each position may relate to gravity in many different ways. Sometimes the best way to learn a given posture is to study that form in a different context. When I first began my studies of Yoga, I was taught to lift the chest and pull the shoulders back when standing in Mountain Pose. In observing the epidemic of poor posture, this was a logical instruction. What was interesting to note, however, was how rarely this instruction led to any degree of comfort in the body. Yes, it momentarily corrected poor posture, though the benefits were often short-lived and the practitioner usually looke