About putting all one’s weight on the head:
While Light on Yoga indicates that all the weight should be borne on the head, I believe (can’t find my copy right now) that the photo also showed his back arched, vs. the straightened form popular today. LOY also says that in padmasana: “At the start they will feel excruciating pain around the knees. By perseverance and continued practice the pain will gradually subside…” It seems to me that Mr. Iyengar modified/developed his ideas about alignment over the decades since 1966, and that LOY might not be the final word.
Certainly, having perfect alignment will minimize damage to the cervical vertebrae. And some of us can tolerate more abuse than others: I once heard of a Chinese acrobatic who could not only balance completely on the crown of his head without his hands touching, but then hop up a short flight of stairs in that position, like a pogo stick. So, it can be done. But how many acrobats were crippled before they found the guy who could pull it off?
It seems to me there is no getting around the anatomy. The cervical vertebrae are designed to carry the weight of the head - about 8% of the body’s weight. Asking it to carry 92% (11 1/2 times as much) seems rather extreme, especially as the neck is very mobile, and consequently fairly unstable. By comparison, massive football linebackers slamming into each other generate a force of only about 7 times body weight on their low back, and 50% of them have low back spinal defects. An article in Yoga Journal years ago quoted a doctor as observing that while many yogis were in a general state of health that belied their actual age, their necks often had more degeneration than their age would suggest.
So, anyway, if you want to do headstands, and like me, you prefer not to sustain all the weight on your head/neck, here a couple of points on alignment that I rarely see mentioned (this is referring to the headstand I form, where the forearms are on the floor, forming a wedge/triangle).
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How much weight goes into your neck depends on a combination of your strength and your body proportions.
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Check the proportion of your upper arm to neck/head length by putting your arms overhead in the headstand position - hands clasped, forearms parallel to the ceiling. With the shoulders relaxed, and the head in middle of the forearms (half-way between the wrists and elbows) some people’s head will stick up over the edge of the arms, while others will not.
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If yours sticks up, you’re going to have to deal with more compression on your neck, when in headstand. You can compensate in a couple of ways. The most common is to press harder with your arms, which lifts your shoulders up toward your neck, as though lifting into a forearm stand. I don’t love this, but it works, if you are strong enough.
The other way is to change your head position. The closer you place your head toward the elbows, the greater vertical distance you will have between the shoulder and elbow/forearm. This gives more space for a long neck and/or short forearms. The trade off is that you need more open shoulders to do this. The closer you place your head toward your hands, the less space there is. This can be appropriate for a short neck/long upper arm proportion. It’s also easier for a lot of people because the shoulder does not extend so much when you are up in the handstand.
The shoulder limitation seems to be why some people who struggle getting into headstand I find headstand II (hands on the floor, forming a triangle with the head) so much easier. They can also “cheat” by putting more weight into the hands and don’t fear tumbling over so much. Unfortunately, in this pose, if the body is aligned vertically, pretty much all of the weight is in the neck again.
