Bringing these asana columns and feature articles out of the archives has not been without its cringe worthy moments as my older, and hopefully wiser self, reviews my perspective as a relatively young practitioner, teacher and writer. If you really want to do Lotus Pose (Padmasana), then everything I’ve written here should stand you in good stead. That is, if you have compelling reasons to practice Padmasana or simply are intrigued with the challenge, then the series I’ve shared here is one of the safer approaches towards Lotus. It took me 10 years to get into Padmasana and I practiced it regularly for at least another ten years, sometimes drawing my legs into Lotus without the assistance of my arms while in Headstand in preparation for Crane Pose (cringe-worthy). I can honestly say I never hurt my knees during this time, and a recent MRI shows that both knees are healthy with smooth intact cartilage. But I always had to do long preparatory sequences before attempting Lotus. It was not innate: practice time in those days was 2-3 hours per day. While my knees remained intact, unfortunately, my sacroiliac joints and by proxy my lower back, really suffered from practicing Lotus and other forceful ‘hip opening’ practices. I have quite limited external rotation in both hips, which I’ve concluded is due to my skeletal structure not limitations in muscular flexibility. And while arduous daily practice with a focus on flexibility allowed me to draw my legs into the full Lotus pose, I’m convinced this was accomplished through prying open my sacroiliac joints. During this period of practice, my sacroiliac joints were at their worst. There are enough Yoga teachers of my generation facing hip replacement surgery at relatively young ages for me to be concerned about practices such as Padmasana and how these extreme end-range movements might contribute over time to degeneration of the knees and hips.

Unfortunately, many of the practitioners who continue to use images of themselves in postures like Padmasana  , and other variant poses that include some aspect of Lotus, are not transparent about the effect these practices have had on their own bodies.

Many are walking wounded, but that is not the story you will see in the marketing material. Recently, while teaching in another country, my host seemed to be moving very gingerly, and when I enquired about him, he related that he’d just had prolotherapy in his knees and sacroiliac joints. He described the treatment as feeling like someone had hit his back and knees with a baseball bat, but he expressed confidence that things would improve. Prolotherapy, by the way, is characterized as an alternative medicine practice where substances such as dextrose or glucose are injected into joints to help regenerate damaged ligaments and tendons, and it is far from being proven as legitimate therapy. Whether you subscribe or not to the efficacy of prolotherapy, what caught my attention was my colleague’s comment that he had learned about the therapy from one of the leading senior proponents of Ashtanga Yoga, who himself also required it for his knees and sacroiliac joints. Both of these men are long time Ashtanga Yoga practitioners, a practice that is known for taking the knees and hips into extreme end-range positions. Here’s where things get sticky: if you are doing a practice that has obviously damaged your body, what are the ethics of teaching these same practices to your students? What are the ethics of sharing the medical treatments that might allow you and your students to continue to do the same practices that invoked the need for those treatments in the first place? And sadly, I suspect there are many ‘advanced’ practitioners who are walking cripples as a result of their practice, who continue to enthusiastically share practices with their students that led to their own demise.

When I began riding horses in earnest to prepare for competitions, my hip muscles became incredibly strong, my previously non-existent hamstrings became more competent, and my abdominal and back muscles became more robust. To my surprise, this tightening and strengthening of my hips and gluteal muscles radically decreased my sacroiliac instability and both the frequency and severity of my SIJ episodes. About this time, I stopped being able to get into Padmasana with the ease that had been afforded me during my pre-riding days. With the knowledge that I have now, I would say that Padmasana has little or no utility, and even though it is touted as THE meditation position, I think that’s a load of hogwash. I’ve heard enough stories of hard-core meditators blowing out their knees by insisting on stoically sitting in Lotus, to believe that kneeling on a bolster or bench, or sitting in a simple crossed-legged position of some persuasion, would be a far more sustainable proposition for meditation practice than Padmasana.

Kneeling on a bolster can be just as nice, with the added advantage that you can add a folded blanket to raise the height even further if required (Fig. 13). Just make sure that the bolster is narrow enough that it is not pushing your knees apart and placing the weight more on the inside of the patella (knee cap).

This article supplements the original post released two days ago. It was first published between 1988 and 2003 when Donna was writing full-length feature articles for Yoga Journal and Yoga International USA. 

The re-curated originals are followed by New Insights such as this post, where Donna shares what's changed after more than three decades of teaching internationally. This material is being offered for free for the first time as a service during Donna's sabbatical. All material © 2023 Donna Farhi.

Thanks to our model Julieanne Moore for her patience. 

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