There were complains that I only focus on the trendy athletic fitness type of yoga, and rightfully so, yoga acts prior to that as medicine, the Sanskrit name of the primary series of ashtanga vinyasa yoga is yoga cikitsā (योग चिकित्सा ), which means yoga therapy and is meant to purify and heal the body.

And as Simon Borg-Olivier( whom I also saw criticized) beautifully stated in one of his workshop DVD's, you don't do Yoga when you feel great and healthy, you go out and party then, you do Yoga when you feel sick and weak.

So today I will use the powerful computational engine of WolframAlpha to construct which asanas you should avoid with one or more certain ailments.

Scope

You consulted your client and she or he has elevated eye pressure, so naturally some obvious poses like handstands should be avoided, but we will go a step further and eliminate all the poses which could cause problems for the eyes.
Another unpleasant booboo the client has is whith her or his hips, so we will avoid all poses that strain the hips, for example the yogi dandasana pose, which is performed as part of the fourth series of the ashtanga vinyasa method, not that it is in the database anyways.

licence: Daniel Lacerda (aka Mr. Yoga) performing yoga dandasana

Do you think there will be nothing more left to practice after excluding all those poses ? Lets ask the data and see.

There are almost 100,000 entries in the anatomical structure entity type:

For our case we need only two of them, the hip joint and the eye.
The easiest way to find the names is through a free form input via ctrl=.

In this tutorial I will use the manul entries with the canonical names.

Next we need a list with all the yoga poses.

The interesting property for our use case is the "sites of recent surgery, injury, or inflammation". Potential candidates for cases like high blood pressure, osteoporosis and problems with specific joints are joint motion, precautions, inverted and contraindications.

So lets put our chosen property into a variable.

Next we save a list of all the poses which you should avoid if you have problems with your eyes.



Roughly 1/3 of the poses, sill plenty left, now for the hips:



Wow that's a lot, but no worries, there will be a couple of overlaps. A new command I show today is Complement, it returns all entities not present in the second or third parameter:




Now that's a whole regime of poses you can practice with eye and hip problems, a whopping quantity of 38, that's a plenty more than the Bikram twenty-six a lot of people spent their lifetime with. Lets plot the poses out along with the name property and Sanskrit transliteration. Four poses don't have a name in Sanskrit, it is your homework to find them out :)

Of course use your own judgement and skip the problematic postures for you as data will never represent a human being.
You can download my notebook here: hips and eyes.nb
I hope some of you start to see some valid use cases of this tool and a little spark of the yoke of yoga. Those addressed, know who they are :)

Until next time,
Miron