Can You Be Too Flexible?

 

I've been asking this question to classes throughout the week, "Can you be too flexible?" It’s been interesting to see some people nodding “yes” and some “no”, when actually it’s posed as a rhetorical question, a provocative way of engaging deeper thought.

Over the years, I’ve heard people say that they’re “too inflexible” to do yoga, or they want to become more flexible, so perhaps yoga is something to try. Some people comment on the hypermobility in others saying they must do yoga, or if someone exhibits big ranges of motion that they must be “good” at yoga. This makes me think that flexibility is something to be attained and is a coveted prize. Ever since I was a young kid, I’ve been flexible. I could do the splits without trying and backbend easily. Friends and family members would comment on this special prowess that I possessed as though it were a rare and prized quality. With this inherent range of motion, I gravitated toward dance and gymnastics, other realms that praised the flexible beings walking the earth.

If I think about the more extreme examples of flexibility, rhythmic gymnastics, dance, artistic gymnastics, and yoga all come to mind. They train beyond normal and functional ranges of motion to achieve a particular aesthetic, one unreachable by many.

I gained from the gift of being flexible until I didn’t…leading to an unstable lumbar spine, with increasing pain as I have aged. Health practitioners I’ve been working with have said to me, “You’re too flexible…we need to stiffen you up!” It was a blow to the ego as I have been praised for my “ease” in larger ranges of motion for most of my life. It’s also been a humbling re-calibration of what serves me and what will continue to do so. My focus has changed to creating greater stability and less mobility.  Moreover, it’s been teaching me to honor and respect my physical body as it changes over time. It’s a tough lesson.

We all have something called a tipping point. In relationship to our physical selves, it’s our tissues managing a certain load or stress, undergoing something called viscal elasticity, which is when a load is applied to tissues, it slowly elongates and deforms to the applied stress. All of our tissues have a limit to this stress before injury happens. For bones, it’s about 2% with more than that resulting in the bone breaking. The stress can come in the form of a heavy load, time, or fatigue. So, as an example, if we hold a plank pose for a relatively long period of time we begin to quiver and shake as our body tries to recruit more muscle fibers until eventually, we not only lose form and the integrity of the shape of the pose, but we begin to lose the benefit of doing the pose. More does not equal better.

This week’s thought has been about not only managing our physical load, optimizing the balance between stability and mobility, but looking at the other stressors in our life that may be related to our mental health and our emotional state. These past seven months of the global pandemic have been tough…an extra load added to what is often a challenging life to begin with. People’s mental health has been affected, our emotional steadiness challenged, and a calling to our deeper spirit for support. Know that all of us have a point at which we break, physically or otherwise. With awareness, we can become wiser to what we cannot only tolerate but to what supports us in thriving rather than just getting by. I’ve been pointing to this theme over the past several weeks with the encouragement to do less, take rest (the refractory period), create boundaries, get outside, and honor the many forms that our yoga practice can take.

We all know the metaphor of the camel and the straw. Perhaps we can say “no” to adding more into our lives and accept the nature of our inherently divine selves, perfect just as we are.