|
|
| Hello, I'm new to yoga. At my chiropractor's adamant suggestion I took a beginner Bikram class on Wednesday and took a regular class on Friday. The odd thing is that on Friday, my hands and feet started tingling...kind of like they were going to explode. I had absolutely no pain but I noticed that the sesation started right at my wrists and down to my fingertips and from my ankle bone down to the tips of my toes. The sensation didn't radiate it was concentrated to just those four places. I stopped and drank water and told the instructor. She said it was ENERGY!!! WHAT????? So, then after class one of the students pulled me aside and said it was stored emotion from me releasing my HEART CHAKRA!!! Again, WHAT???? Is this normal...has this happened to any of you???
Anyone care to enlighten a newbie???
Namaste |
|
| |
|
| hi maremaid-
welcome to bikram! i've been doing it for 7 months and absolutely love it. heading to class soon, actually! one thing you should know is that you will feel sensations in your body unlike you have ever felt. Your instructor is right. Call it what you will, but yoga works on all levels, physical, mental, emotional. It releases a lot of emotions that we store in our bodies (this may be a new concept to you, but it is not a concept unique to bikram.) It also turns up your innate life energy (chi). This flows thru you, many people believe that we have chakras (energy centers) along our spine, and this is essentially the energy 'highway', if you will.
No matter! do not be afraid! if you have never done any bodywork (massage, reiki, etc), you may be unfamiliar with the feeling of chi (energy) flowing thru your body. i think it is one of the greatest highs! Don't worry abt what anyone else calls it, your yoga is about you and how you feel! In the end, it is about freeing your mind, in a sense, it is a moving meditation.
If you can stick with it, you will see and feel amazing benefits. Just remember not to push yourself too hard until you feel strong enough to.
have fun! |
|
| |
|
| I'm with you Allison--energy?? Chakra??? WTFO rude militaty expression: What the ^*$( over)?
I don't hold alot of credence in that kind of thig myself but that's because I suppose I'm fairly new at just the physical aspects of Bikram. Don't get me wrong, I don't dismiss it--just don't understand it. Through practice though we're doing a lot of things to our ole western bodies and minds that we're not used to so Lord knows what kind of sensations can arise--I figure though if it doesn't hurt, march on!
maremaid - 2004-05-29 1:03 PM
Hello, I'm new to yoga. At my chiropractor's adamant suggestion I took a beginner Bikram class on Wednesday and took a regular class on Friday. The odd thing is that on Friday, my hands and feet started tingling...kind of like they were going to explode. I had absolutely no pain but I noticed that the sesation started right at my wrists and down to my fingertips and from my ankle bone down to the tips of my toes. The sensation didn't radiate it was concentrated to just those four places. I stopped and drank water and told the instructor. She said it was ENERGY!!! WHAT????? So, then after class one of the students pulled me aside and said it was stored emotion from me releasing my HEART CHAKRA!!! Again, WHAT???? Is this normal...has this happened to any of you???
Anyone care to enlighten a newbie???
Namaste |
|
| |
|
| @ Amy: Chi??? Is bikram so much apart from traditional yoga? I guess we use the sanskrit word and call it prana, don't we?
@ Bruce: I have difficulties with the concept of all that "new age" stuff as well. But recent yoga experiences showed me there must be something about it. Not too long ago one of my teachers held a class that concentrated on the chakras and it was ... yah, how was it? Strange ... but something definately happened. I felt very good after that and during the relaxation phase for the first time I could see and feel a few of my chakras.
Or maybe it was just my weak little mind, tricked by itself.
|
|
| |
|
| @ mermaid: Your chiropractor must be a very cruel man! Read through this forum, especially what Christine (Yoga Dancer) has to say about bikram and you'll see that it's:
1. not for beginners
2. not good for your back and your stature
So, if your chiropractor would be a wise man he would've suggested you to take up iyengar or other forms of more traditional yoga.
Just my 0,00$
|
|
| |
|
| Afroyogi...Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify, my chiropractor didn't suggest any specific form of yoga. I chose Bikram specifically for the heat aspect. Since I have a lot of muscle I know that, for me at least, the heat enables me to work my muscles much better. I really enjoy Bikram...although I can't wait to try Iyengar as well. |
|
| |
|
| I've experienced similar feelings as well. I felt most of it in the feet - almost like the feeling when your feet start to fall asleep - and most of the time this occured during the meditation portions of class. Also, one of my teachers has been working on chakras with us lately, and there is definitely some kind of connection. For example, I chose one night to focus on my communication chakra at the base of the throat. For several days later I felt more at ease communicating difficult information and emotions. Now, this could definitely be considered self-fulfilling prophecy - I thought it would happen so it did. If you feel comfortable with these ideas, explore them more. If you don't, don't. That's the nice thing about yoga - you can kind of pick and choose depending on what feels right for you. That may change. You may not feel comfortable with them now but in six months sing a different tune. Or the other way around. There are tons of books on the subject, though, so check it out and see what you think. Welcome to yoga! |
|
| |
|
| Maremaid, don't get me wrong, I tried bikram and loved it (was just too expensive), especially the flow of energy during class and the "yoga high" afterwards. BUT there is a lot of justified criticism on this board.
Iyengar may be boring but it's perfect for beginners, coz the teachers will tell you a lot about good alignment and they will correct you once you have a "unhealthy" posture. Bikram teachers, so I heard, mostly lack the knowledge about the human body and the backgrounds of the asanas.
|
|
| |
|
|
Edited by peggy lucas 2004-06-01 2:49 AM
|
|
| |
|
| Afroyogi-
Chi....prana....potato....poTAHto. It's all the same energy. Japanese call it Ki (as in Reiki) - universal life force energy. It's all around us, but generally only acknowledged by eastern belief systems. Whatever. Like I said, the thing that's great is that it doesn't matter if you 'believe' in it or not. It just is, and everyone is going to feel the effect after a bikram class! OR anything else you do that gets your energy flowing. Yoga has the added benefit of centering you as well.
As an aside, I do think that you can do this yoga even if you are a 'beginner'. I was very out of shape when I started. I just did what I could do and worked within my limits. I still do. If I need to sit down or leave the room or drink water, I do. Anyone with a heart condition should check with their doctor to see if it's right for them and use common sense. People very well may have died doing this yoga, but perfectly healthy people have also dropped dead from running and a variety of other activities. Don't blame the yoga! |
|
| |
|
| Maremaid and LoraB ---
These sensations have nothing to do with "energy". Tingling and numbness are
signs of *nerve compression*. That's also what causes limbs to "fall asleep"
when you sit for too long or sleep on your arm wrong. Lack of blood flow to the
nerves is the simple culprit, but the more dangerous one ***especially if you are
stretching beyond your usual limits*** is strain on the nerve fiber. Nerves don't
stretch very easily. For the most part, they are somewhat coiled, so they straighten
when you pull things out. But if you pull beyond that, you risk injuring the nerve.
This can be something minor (like tingling that lasts from a few minutes to a
day or two) or in can be VERY major, such as a tear in a motor nerve. Let me
tell you, a torn motor nerve means that a muscle can no longer be activated.
Until the nerve grows back (at a rate of ~1 mm/day), the affected muscle will
not work. And not all nerves grow back.
PLEASE do not listen to some idiot who tells you that tingling in your extremities is
happy new-agey energy. It is not. When your brain stops receiving a signal
from a nerve, it replaces it with that tingling feeling. I hope I never hear another
yoga teacher talking about "energy" when the issue is anatomy! 
Over time, nerves, like muscles, will elongate; but they are slower to do so
and you have to respect those limits. David Coulter has some discussion of this
in his book "Anatomy of Hatha Yoga". If you'd like to read about nerve injuries,
try Googling the phrase "nerve compression" or "nerve traction injury" and reading
the articles that appear on Medline, NIH pages, or medical school web sites.
I have been through a lot of nerve tingling and one torn nerve (I am very flexible
and therefore extremely vulnerable to these kinds of injuries). The nerve that I
tore was the lower branch of the suprascapular nerve, resulting in paralysis of
my infraspinatus muscle (that's one that sits on the back of the scapula). It took
nine months for the nerve to grow back. And I was just lucky, since that particular
nerve only recovers in 60% of injuries. The injury was my own fault --- pushing too
far --- and it taught me to be a whole lot more careful.
Most of the time, tingling is harmless. We all know this from the experience of
having a foot fall asleep. But if you get tingles everytime you do, say, Padahastasana,
you are probably pulling too hard. Back off a little, and give your body the time to
enlongate at its own pace. When you are first starting yoga, this is especially important,
since your body has to develop in new ways. I got that injury I mentioned during
my first six months of yoga. |
|
| |
|
| Hey Bay Guy --
What do you know about shaking in the legs? This hasn't happened in a while, but I have had some serious shaking during separate leg stretching. Sometimes if I completely relax all the muscles (including quads) it stops, but not always. Hard when you're trying to keep the quads a little active while stretching the hamstrings.
Just wondered what your opinion is. |
|
| |
|
| Hi My Cat's Mom,
I'm sure that there's a good neurological explanation for that kind of
tremor, but I don't remember it without looking it up. I sometimes get the
same thing in the second part of Awkward Pose. Tremor is normal (that's why
you need a tripod for "long" exposures on a camera), and it seems to be
amplified when a muscle is pulled near its maximum force and held there.
I don't think that there's any risk in it (other than looking pretty silly doing
a pose while your legs shake), and, as you noted, the tremors can be stopped
by relaxing the muscle a bit. |
|
| |
|
| Bay Guy,
I appreciate what you're saying, but if you read my post you'll note that my feelings occured almost exclusively during the meditation portions of the class - before and after asana. I am confident that I have not sustained any type of injury before class (or during) that would cause this. I am constantly checking my alignment in poses, and going in and out, for the purpose of avoiding such an injury. Whether or not you believe in "the happy new-agey energy" it is rather bold to call those that do idiots. I feel more alive for days afterwards when this happens in my practices. This being said, there certainly are teachers who may be quicker than others to blithely call a possible nerve injury energy and let it be at that to cover up a lack of knowledge or a misguided belief that one cannot injure the body during yoga. One teacher I'ved studied with told us in a certain posture that it is impossible to injure yourself - I personally don't believe that. There's a level of responsibility that a lot of students don't care to take for their own practice. But this is getting into the old argument about where the line between the responsibilty of the teacher and the student should be drawn. |
|
| |
|
| Hi LoraB,
I think we are miscommunicating. I didn't say that people who "believe in
happy new-agey energy are idiots". I said that people who attribute tingling
in the extremities to happy new-agey energy are idiots. I personally get all
the mental after-effects of mediation and asana that you mentioned, and I
don't dismiss them. What I think is idiotic is to ignore physiology just
because "it's yoga".
But back to the question, when you sit still for long periods of time, as in mediation,
you can certainly wind up with compressed nerves --- that, after all, is why a foot
"falls asleep" when you sit for a long time. They recover when you shift around a little.
You'll have to decide for yourself whether this is the case --- I'm only suggesting
a physical explanation for the sensations that you have had.
One other possibility to think about is your respiration, since blood oxygen levels can
change during shallow breathing, producing a variety of weird sensations. |
|
| |
|
| Sounds like a miscommunication to me.
However, while not discounting physiology at all (yes, that would be rather blind), I maintain that it may be more than meets the eye. After all, the tingling (for lack of a better word) only happens for me during my practices, and I sit/lay much of the time I also try to sit on the floor a lot to help keep the joints loose and usually end up in some asana or another for comfort. But it's only when I'm actually practicing and "in the zone" that it happens...
Who knows?  |
|
| |
|
| << I do think that you can do this yoga even if you are a 'beginner'. >>
One would like to think so, Amy. My first yoga experience was also bikram and I thought I was doing quite well and that it was good for me and my body. Only when I took up iyengar I learned what's really important in yoga and how many things I did wrong (uncorrigated by any teacher) during the bikram sessions. I didn't get hurt but I'm quite fit for a man in my age. I guess that many people are in danger during bikram and nobody is educating them about the risks. So I came to the conclusion that a little experience and knowledge about 'proper' yoga is mandatory before throwing yourself into bikram.
|
|
| |
|
| Bay Guy -
What did you do for those 9 months while your nerve was healing? Were you still practicing Bikram or yoga and if so were you modifying at all? Just curious. |
|
| |
|
| Hi Deelited,
Well, I kept practicing while the nerve healed. The muscle involved
(the infraspinatus) controls the external rotation of the arm. Imagine
standing in a door way, with your upper arm by your side and your
lower arm flexed so that it's parallel to the floor. If you then try to push
the back of hand against the jamb, as if to move yourself away from it,
it's the infraspinatus that gives the force. You notice an infraspinatus
injury in various extensions of the arm where you are trying to maintain
the position of the hand.
In yoga, I noticed the infraspinatus problem most acutely when reaching
over my shoulder. The elbow would flop outward, instead of staying
in line. This showed up in Full Camel (aka Kapotasana), among other
things. I just compensated for the lack of control by pulling back in
from another direction.
I was lucky that the nerve injury hit only that muscle, which is responsible for
fairly subtle arm alignments. If that same nerve had torn slighty higher
up, it would have taken out the superspinatus, making lifting my arm
out to the side impossible (no trikonasana, no standing separate leg stretching,
etc).
Apart from the control issues, the muscle's inactivity gave me a lot of soreness
throughout the rotator cuff, especially in the AC joint. |
|
| |
|
| Thanks Bay Guy -
I appreciate you sharing your story with me. I've done something to one of my semispinalis thoracis muscles which hits you right in between your shoulder blades - thus impacting a bunch of postures - standing bow, head-to-knee, rabbit (hitting in both directions with the extension and flexion). It's also manifested itself in my lumbar with a band of extreme aches wrapped around my hips and tightening of the hamstrings. But I'm still practicing just modifying the series by repeating the cobra series a few times and standing against the wall on down time. Seems to be helping slowly - obviously the hardest part is the mental adjustment with having to take a step back. 9 months is a long time though - I hope I have that amount of patience if it takes that long. ;O) |
|
| |
|
| Hello everyone! I am not only new to this site, but also new to yoga. I have been practicing w/ some friends, mostly trying to increase flexibility. I have no idea about the style of yoga we are practicing. (yes, I'm that new!)
I appear to have sustained this sort of nerve injury myself. As far as I can tell, it was during a leg stretch. The girl leading us was attempting to get me to stretch more and pushed on my back. It didn't hurt, and I felt only muscular stretching but not to the point of "Oh jeez, I wish you'd not done that". Well, a few days later, I noticed numbness on the surface of my left leg. It is just as BayGuy stated - it feels as if the leg has fallen asleep. I can feel pressure, but no light touch. It varies from my ankle to my groin area, but is mostly limited to the front of the leg. I have fine motor control, it is just the sensory nerve that seems to be affected.
I am almost relieved to read that this isn't an uncommon complication of yoga, although I certainly wouldn't wish this on anyone.
I have not practiced since then - about two weeks. When I do, I will be sure to go extra slow. I'm quite pleased to have found this site, and definitely will use it as a resource in my yoga journey. |
|
| |
|
Expert Yogi
Posts: 2479
  
Location: A Blue State |
Wow, this old thread is back!
What you describe sounds very much like a nerve injury. Sometimes I get these
in a minor way, that heals up 5 to 10 days, and I mentioned the extremely serious
one that took about 9 months to recover.
Lots of nerves pass through the region of the lower back, and they are susceptible to
being pulled in forward bends. What happened to you sounds like an "adjustment"
gone too far for your body. We had some discussion of this in other threads about
David Williams (the Ashtanga teacher). He won't do any forcible adjustments because,
as he put it, you need X-ray vision to see what's actually going on in someone else's
body; otherwise you are just taking chances with their health.
For your situation, with numbness running from groin to ankle and persisting for two weeks,
the problem could be more than minor. Since you didn't notice it until a couple of days after
the yoga, why are you certain that it was that forward stretch? Has it shown any improvement in that time? |
|
| |
|
| I can understand how Mr. Williams wouldn't want to do those adjustments. In retrospect, I shouldn't have let our leader do that to me. Live and learn I suppose!
I am not certain it was that particular forward stretch, but it seems to be the only thing that makes sense. Of course, it could have been any of the others also - I don't really know for sure. I have not added anything new to my normal routine except yoga in the past month. The doctor seems to think it is a viable explanation also. I did ask, also, about the delayed reaction. The explanation was that with the nerve swelling, it may take some time to swell and occupy its entire space and to begin exhibiting symptoms of compression. It seems analagous to the median nerve in the hand swelling and developing scar tissue in the carpal tunnel before symptoms start.
It does seem to have improved more on the lower part of my leg which was the numbest initially. Now it seems to be mid-shin to mid-thigh area.
Well, thanks for listening!
 |
|
| |
|
Expert Yogi
Posts: 2479
Location: A Blue State | That actually sounds good. Inflammation should subside, and you can
take anti-inflammatories to manage it (presumably, your doc told you that).
If you had actually torn the nerve, it wouldn't show improvements that
quickly (nerves grow at 1 mm/day, if they grow at all).
I hope your recovery continues smoothly. |
|
| |
|
| Bay Guy,
Thanks so much for your input today! I already feel much less anxious about the whole thing!
Kate |
|
| |
Odd sensation during first class!!
