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Keys to Regulating Health with Yoga: Curbing Chronic Inflammation with Dr. Baxter Bell

The role of chronic inflammation in the development of disease is receiving increasing attention from the medical community.

Not unlike high blood pressure, it is increasingly looked to as the one factor we might be able to influence, which in turn could help us avoid a wide range of ailments ranging from cancer and heart disease to Alzheimer’s, diabetes, thyroid issues, arthritis, and so on.

In this free download, Dr. Baxter Bell discusses why inflammation plays such an important role in the development of disease and the role yoga can play in preventing or reducing chronic inflammation.

Age itself is a risk factor for developing chronic inflammation, Baxter notes. And, while we can’t change the fact that we’re getting older, we can influence other factors that trigger chronic inflammation.

Baxter further talks about some of the mechanics of how chronic inflammation causes the systems of the body to go haywire and trigger chronic diseases. Inflammation also appears to impact the gene expression, affecting which genes turn on and off, which again can accelerate the aging process or trigger a disease process.

Baxter goes into which factors increase and decrease inflammation in our body, and how our yoga practices can support choices that can help impact the levels of bodily inflammation.

Many people live low chronic inflammation without being aware of it, Baxter notes. It really requires a savvy health practitioner that you work with to become more aware of the presence of chronic inflammation and to do the necessary tests.

Working to reduce inflammation, he notes, is in many ways similar to Dean Ornish’s approach to reducing heart disease. You are not using drugs or surgical intervention, you’re learning how to use life-style options to self-regulate your health.

Yoga teachers, he notes, have a great repertoire that they can use to empower others. So, the hope is that this spreads not only from those of us that have the information we’re sharing, but also more evenly throughout the community.

Baxter further touches on research that shows that yoga appears to be a good tool to help lower systemic inflammation on a chronic basis. One study, for example, found that experienced yoga practitioners had much lower levels of inflammatory markers than novice practitioners. In fact, studies indicate that yoga asana practice, Pranayama, and meditation all offer useful tools that can be consistently used when studying yoga’s effect on inflammation.

 

Yoga for Back Pain Prevention: Focus on Pelvic Asymmetry with Lillah Schwartz

Does one of your legs appear to be shorter than the other? Or, is your pelvis tilted, so one hip bone appears higher than the other? Or is one of your hip bones rotated slightly forward compared to the other?

 These could be signs of pelvic asymmetry. Structural asymmetries in the pelvis have long been linked to low back pain or joint problems. Asymmetry of the pelvis can set up a kinetic chain of compensations in the body, creating a negative effect on your hip joints, knees and feet, and in the upper body, affecting the vertebral discs and trunk balance.

 In this free download, certified yoga therapist and back care specialist Lillah Schwartz explains why asymmetry in the pelvis can be the hidden source of chronic pain and structural imbalance throughout the body.

 Understanding the mechanics of pelvic asymmetry is particularly important for yoga practitioners, Lillah notes.  Yoga practitioners with a tilted or rotated pelvis may be unknowingly stretching too deeply into asymmetrical poses in Power Yoga and Vinyasa Yoga classes, and this could result in pain and even long-term damage.

 It’s easy to misunderstand the signals our bodies are sending.

 Lillah explains that when one side of the body is more stable and the other side feels like it’s more “stretchy” it’s easy to interpret the signal that the looser side has more flexibility and capacity to lengthen, when in fact the muscles are actually weaker. 

 “You may be thinking that being looser on one side means you can stretch much further,” she explains. “So you take a pattern that is already out of balance and make it even more out of balance by taking the stretch too far. When there’s pain involved you may think stretching more is the answer, but in fact the painful muscle is always the weaker muscle. Rather than stretching, addressing that foundational imbalance is where you should begin. You may actually need to ease back on that side and stretch the other side.”

 The first step in achieving balance, says LIllah, is to study the “map” of the pelvis, observing balance in simple movements and even looking at the wear pattern of your shoes. She offers some simple assessment tools, including using the imagery of a clock face to study the position of the hip points. That way you can begin to understand where misalignment lies, which muscles are actually tight and which may be overstretched.

 Once imbalances have been identified, the job is to cultivate fluidity and ease, connect to breath, and open and release restricted connective tissue. Only then does Lillah advise beginning to work on toning what’s weak. Weakness can come from a variety of sources, including the deep hip flexors, the core or gluteal muscles, or the pelvic floor.

Creating Optimum Alignment in Yoga Poses: A Helpful Tool Kit For Yoga Teachers with Shy Sayar

Ever wished you had an easy shortcut to analyze and teach each yoga pose to students at any level?

Yoga teachers constantly strive to create practices for that are safe, sustainable, and appropriate for every body in every class. But as any yoga teacher knows, it’s not always easy to know how to achieve that goal.

In this free download, yoga therapist Shy Sayer, founder and director of the Tantravaya School of Yoga and Ayurveda, shares Eight Universal Principles of Alignment. He maintains that using them will provide yoga teachers with all the tools they need to observe where students are at and teach effectively to students at any level.

In the talk, Shy shares the philosophy behind his methodology, as well as the evolution in his thinking. Starting initially with thirteen actions, he simplified and refined his ideas over time.

“Little by little, I was beginning to see them in a more three-dimensional way. I understood that they could all be defined as eight actions,” He explains. “Those eight opposite actions were then organized into four pairs of oppositional productively antagonistic actions. Ultimately, I was even able to see that the two pairs in the lower body are mirrored perfectly by the two pairs in the upper body. As above so below, as it were.”

Shy realized that his ideas could be helpful to others. “I wanted to give practitioners a reliable, consistent, easy-to-remember and understand pair of principles, a pair of oppositional actions. If we just keep those in mind, no matter what we’re doing in asana or any physical gesture we move with safety. We have a direction in which to apply right effort that’s proved to be tremendously helpful, not only for my yoga students but also for the teachers that I’m training,” he says.

The result is a concise set of underlying principles based on harmonious alignment in every sense of the word. Regardless of the pose, Shy says, the principles can bring every body safely and effectively to every physical gesture, while at the same time honoring individual differences.

Shy starts with the basics in teacher trainings: “We spend five or six days learning how to stand,” he explains. “By the next day, we’ve done Standing Backbends, Standing Forward Bends, Chair Pose, Twisting Chair, Chaturanga, Cobra, Up Dog, Down Dog, Kneeling Lunge, High Lunge, Warrior I, Warrior II and all their variations. It’s an accelerating system. Because everything that’s in these four pairs of principles–two pairs of lower body and two pairs of upper body that mirror each other–is in Tadasana.”

Curious as to what the principles look like in action? Here’s Shy’s description of Tadasana:

“Stand with your feet parallel under the sit bones. Press into the roots of the big toes while lifting the inner thighs up and away from each other.

Draw the upper thighs back and reach the sit bones down. Lift the lower belly and from that lift, follow and lift all the way through the back of the head or the bones behind the ears while keeping the floating ribs in the back body.

“With the palms facing the sides of the body, press as though into a resistance so that without actually changing the wrist, when you spiral the upper arms out, the chest opens and blossoms. This happens without the actual heart leaning forward. The heart rests in the back and the ribs rest in the back body, creating a free and peaceful flow of energy with strength and stability in the body.”

The work is strongly grounded in the yogic Kosha model, starting with the physical or flesh body, the Annamaya Kosha.  Getting a sense of how the pose feels in the other Koshas, Shy says, grows from this starting point and is a useful way to tune into the innate wisdom of each practitioner’s body.

 “When you do something in your physical body, then check what it did to your breath, how deep in your body is your breath, how even between right and left, how even between front and back. Then Pranamaya Kosha will reveal to you a gesture or an action that’s taking you in a right direction for yoga.”

 

Common Causes of Sacroiliac Joint Issues in Yoga: How to Build a Lifelong, Healthy Practice

Sacroiliac joint pain is extremely common in yoga practitioners, notes renowned yoga teacher and author Donna Farhi in this free download. One of the most common issues she sees when teaching workshops worldwide is people complaining of pain radiating from the sacroiliac joints.

In her own practice, Donna notes, she began developing SI joint problems early on when she began practicing yoga many hours a day. It took her years to learn how to create greater stability and ease in her own sacroiliac joint. This in turn laid the foundation for her work helping yoga students avoid SI joint issues or resolving issues that have already developed.

SI joint problems are increasingly common in modern day yoga practices, because the repertoire of movements generally used is not functionally balanced, Donna notes. Flow practices can be a particular problem, because they combine a lot asymmetrical movement done very quickly and often by relatively inexperienced practitioners, who do not have understanding of alignment or correct transitioning from pose to pose. With this, you have a situation where people are flinging themselves around in extreme ranges of motion without proper alignment, which in turn erodes the stability of the SI joint

Donna further talks about the other major contributor to SI joint problems, i.e. a misunderstanding of how the pelvis and the hip joints function in relationship to each other and how that manifests in standing poses and in supine work. One of the most potentially harmful instructions, she notes, is to tell students to square the hips to the front in wide-legged asymmetrical standing postures. She explains just how this creates problems, not just for the SI joint, but for knees and for hip joint as well.

She further notes that one of the things that we tend to not be conscious about in the yoga community is the origin of yoga postures. Many yoga styles were developed for a specific group of people with specific physical characteristics, e.g. young teenage boys in the case of Ashtanga Yoga. But in today’s yoga environment, we often forget that there are anatomical differences and that you can't teach yoga the same way to every person.

If people are given the tools to feel proper alignment in a posture, they're quite capable of adjusting their postures for themselves, says Donna. Once people get a felt sense of that, they just have to be encouraged to trust it.

She also discusses the importance of core strengthening, not just isolated core work but as global body integrated core strength. Most yogis need to do a great deal more strengthening work and focus less on flexibility, Donna explains.

The good news is that there are millions of people worldwide who are looking for competent yoga teachers who emphasize accessibility and practical relevance for the everyday person in their teaching. There's no shortage of students for teachers who learn how to teach in a way that works for every body.

Yoga for Back Pain & Scoliosis: How Yoga Can Help Address Spinal Imbalances

Do you or someone you know live with back pain? No matter the cause of your condition, a yoga practice that helps restore balance to your spine may help bring relief!

In this free download, Certified Yoga Therapist Deborah Wolk, founder of the Samamkaya Yoga Back Care & Scoliosis Collective in New York City, shares her first-hand experience with how yoga helped her to improve her muscular balance, bring her spine into a more neutral state, and reduce her chronic back pain. She now helps her students achieve similar results.

 In 17+ years of teaching, Deborah has helped people with back pain conditions of every stripe find relief through yoga via a strong focus on functional alignment. In this free download, she talks about how yoga can help with pretty much any musculoskeletal issue, by finding space in the joints throughout the body.

 Deborah discusses the characteristics of a healthy spine, as well as her own experiences using yoga to help balance a scoliotic curve in her own spine. We all have asymmetrical patterns in our body, she notes, and a key to relieving back issues is to learn how to develop a healthy balance between the spinal curves, and to elongate and neutralize the areas that are overly curved.

She further talks about the principles for working with back issues with a special focus on working with scoliosis. She discusses why it’s important to create length and balance before moving on to strengthening.

Yoga is a wonderful tool to address spinal imbalances, she notes, but you have to learn how to address them. The goal of practice is to look for that. Not to correct it, necessarily, but to sense the imbalance and move into a more centered place.

 

How Can Yoga Help Relieve Low Back Pain? Key Principles for Practice with Lillah Schwartz

Low back pain is the single leading cause of disability worldwide and the second most common reason for doctors’ visits in the US.

Numerous studies now indicate that yoga can be a powerful tool in the treatment and ongoing management of low back pain.

But how exactly can yoga help relieve back pain? In this free download, yoga therapist Lillah Schwartz, author of Healing Our Backs with Yoga, talks about the various musculoskeletal factors that contribute to back pain and how and why yoga often can help.

One key is to help people with low back pain harmonize the structures in their bodies and come to a place of greater functioning, Lillah notes.

“The beauty of yoga is that it connects one part of the body to another,” she states. “You can discover in your practice, not only is your big toe mound connected to your inner groin, but it’s also connected to the origin of the psoas muscle at T12. Now when you expand your arms, they also connect at the psoas. It’s the beauty of how yoga can lead us to those connections in our body. The fluidity can be brought back in to how we move through our life.”

Over 30 plus years of practice, teaching and working with hundreds of clients, Lillah has merged her strong Iyengar background with a thorough grounding in anatomy, kinesiology, and functional movement.

Her greatest teacher, however, was her own experience with chronic pain after a horseback riding accident, which caused asymmetry in her pelvis and SI joint, and dysfunctional movement.

After years of experimenting with yoga postures geared to restore alignment in her body, Lillah developed a method for relieving her own back pain. This, in turn, became the basis of her life’s work: Helping people suffering from low back pain.

A well-crafted yoga practice can be the mechanism for increasing spinal strength and stability, and cultivating length and space in the spine, Lillah notes.

But you have to know what you’re doing: “If I perform my yoga this way, I can be really strong and pain free,” Lillah notes. “But I have to be careful not to do it that way.’”

Lillah further discusses the methods she has developed for facilitating increased functioning and reduced pain. A key is to start from the ground up:

“If someone doesn’t know their body and how it works, you start with baby steps. You start with basic alignment, basic connections. You teach them how to use the breath, a simple sequence of poses that is anatomically balanced. And once they have the fundamentals you can lead people to the broader, bigger connections.”

 

Are You Trauma-Aware? What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Creating Safe Space in Yoga

What Every Yoga Teacher Should Know About Trauma

 According to the most recent CDC data, as much as 23.5% of the general population has experienced at least one form of traumatic experience in their lives.

 Also known as Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), traumatic experiences are defined as stressful or traumatic events, which include not just physical events but emotional abuse and neglect. ACEs may also include household dysfunction or growing up with family members with substance use disorders.

 Research has found that ACEs are strongly related to the development of numerous health problems throughout a person’s lifespan, including those associated with substance misuse.

 The ramification of this statistic is that in a drop-in yoga class with 15 students, as many as 3-4 participants could have some degree of trauma etched into their tissues, notes IAYT-certified yoga therapist Celeste Mendelsohn in this free download.

 As a consequence, she notes, it’s important for yoga teachers to understand the effects of trauma on body and mind. Celeste discusses the importance of building safety and trauma awareness into every yoga class and for all students, not just the ones who inform teachers of past troubles.

 A specialist in working with people recovering from trauma and substance use disorder, Celeste points out that students don’t always share their histories.

 “Generally, I would ask a new student coming to my yoga class if they had any issues that I needed to be aware of. I may get an answer about a sore rotator cuff or a lower back injury. But they’re not likely to tell me, ‘Yes, I witnessed my mother being beaten when I was five.’ We won’t always get the whole story–even with our regular students who walk into our class weekly or multiple times a week,” she says.

 Celeste further discusses how yoga can help address the long-term effects of having lived through a traumatic event or childhood, provided teachers cultivate an extra level of sensitivity. She shares useful tools for teaching a trauma aware class. These include developing mindfulness of the cues we use, the intonations in our voices, and how we stand and move about the room to avoid disconcerting students with trauma issues. Sometimes something as innocuous as creative imagery or flowery language can cause students who are already doing their best to stay present to zone out.

 “When you start talking about the beautiful energy that’s flowing up the spine and blossoming in your head, it sounds lovely,” says Celeste. “But if I have PTSD or I’m a trauma survivor and you said that to me in a class, dissociation is likely. My mind is gone and I’m going to miss the next several instructions.” This can elicit in that student shame and a feeling of being an outsider who can’t keep up with other class members.

 Although we don’t always get the whole story, there are some clues to watch for when working with new students. These include gravitating to the back of the room, avoiding eye contact, or looking down when spoken to directly. But feelings of discomfort aside, the very act of making it into the room and onto the mat is a feat of heroic proportions for some. Yoga teachers can encourage them by developing the sensitivity to meet all of their students where they are.

 How to begin? Celeste suggests finding a middle path vocally, speaking in a clear voice that allows a teacher to be heard without strain. She also advises, “Keep your voice level and be compassionate; Speak to them in front of them, never walk up beside them or from behind. Be in their vision when you come up to talk to them.”

 Cueing should be concrete, using language that facilitates body awareness: “If you’re bringing your students into a Warrior II pose, instead of something flowery, say something like, “Press down through the back heel. Notice the sensations in your foot, in your leg. Press down through the ball of your right foot and find your body’s balance in the middle between the two.”

Anita Boser: Facilitating Spinal Fluidity—A Yogic Fountain of Youth

As children, we love to wiggle, dance and move with unselfconscious abandon. Sadly, once we hit school age our movements become much more repetitive and our bodies lose flexibility and become gradually more and more rigid as a result. So says Anita Boser, Hellerwork Practitioner and Yoga teacher, whose clients include people who live with a variety of chronic pain conditions such as Fibromyalgia, Scoliosis, and Arthritis.

In this interview, Anita describes how making space in our lives for subtle, fluid, and less structured movements can increase flexibility and release tension in a way that stretching doesn’t. The idea is to reintroduce fluid, untethered movement to regain freedom and body awareness.

Within the body resides a wealth of knowledge and wisdom if we learn to pay attention to it, she explains. Allowing the body to move in intuitive and non-linear ways is one way to access that wisdom. This technique, which Anita refers to as undulation, helped her to overcome chronic pain in her own body. She now shares it with her clients and students as a way to relieve pain, break habitual patterns, and tap into their own healing potential.

“One of the things about subtle movement is that learning to pay attention to slow and small-subtle movement helps us gain that wisdom where if we’re just living in our heads, we don’t even know it’s happening,” she says. “Our upbringing, unfortunately, teaches us to ignore our bodies, starting when we’re in kindergarten. You go to school and you want to run around and wiggle and the teacher says, “Sit still, we all need to be doing this together. The older we get, the less variety we have on our movement, the more we tend to get stuck in a rut.”

Eventually, we adopt habitual patterns for everything from sitting at the computer to driving the car, to reading the kids a story. Our bodies settle into physical routines and adopt to stillness. Even when we do eke out time to exercise, we tend toward the same repetitive patterns. Connective tissue starts to adapt itself to how we use the body and repetition tends to encourage more repetition.

While yoga practice is an effective way to open up the movements of the body, we can also fall into a rut in the way we move into and out of poses. Making space for fluid, non-repetitive movement, both on and off the mat, refreshes the body and counters the repetition. Movements can be big and flowy or small and subtle, but the bottom line is that by breaking patterns, we unleash movement potential and allow the body’s wisdom to flourish.

To get a taste of how this fluid movement can feel. Anita takes us through one exercise we can do sitting at our desks. And she reminds us again of those carefree movements of childhood.

“If you think about when you were four years old, you could do anything you wanted. You didn’t complain. You just had a good time, and your spine was very flexible. You didn’t get caught up or have stiffness or rigidity. You were very fluid and supple. And then as we get older… Do we get older just because of age?  Or are we getting older because of that rigidity we build into our lives?”

Dr. Ginger Garner: From Hip Opening to Hip Preservation- Why Yoga Can Predispose You to Hip Injuries & How to Avoid Them

Our knowledge of the hip joint has progressed tremendously over the past ten years, notes yoga therapist and physical therapist Dr. Ginger Garner in this free download.

This progress is particularly great news for the numerous people whose hips are structurally “unique,” who until now had little recourse other than a hip replacement as the joint wore out. We now know that in many cases, hip replacement can be avoided through early intervention, including physical therapy.

However, what has not changed, notes Ginger, is the way we use movement for fitness, including yoga. People with different hip structure or other congenital or developmental changes require a different approach to movement and fitness.

Yoga practitioners with a different hip structure are at higher risk for permanent damage to the hip if their yoga practice does not modify activities according to their unique structure. This applies not just to yoga, but to any type of exercise that is repetitive or emphasizes end range of motion.

Most yoga postures are biased toward hip flexion, abduction, and external rotation. This means yoga postures, as they historically stand and are currently taught, are inherently imbalanced. Unless this changes and modifications are made to accommodate all types of hip joints, yoga injuries of the hip will inevitably be on the rise, Ginger notes.

Ginger points to the need to take more steps to protect the hip in our yoga practice and teaching. “Many of my patients and colleagues have suffered from unnecessary hip injuries, from labral tears, all types of impingement, and compounding secondary diagnoses such as torn hamstrings, sports hernias, gluteal tendinopathy, to pelvic pain, all due to yoga practice,” she notes.

She goes on to discuss some of the steps we can take to introduce greater safety in our yoga practice, including learning observational skills that will enable yoga teachers to spot students who may be at risk.

It is also important, she notes, to modify our language to avoid phrases like “hip opening,” which implicitly encourages pushing against the end range of the hip joint. Hip safety in yoga is entirely possible, she notes, but more education is needed in light of the increased understanding we now have of the hip joints and the mechanics of injury.

Donna Brooks: Creating Fluidity in Movement: The Healing Power of Somatic Yoga

For people living with the chronic pain, strain, or even experiencing stressful times, it can be easy to lose sight of the world beyond tension and physical discomfort.

Stress and strain can have a narrowing effect on our focus, notes Donna Brooks, a Yoga Therapist and ISMETA registered Somatic Movement Educator and therapist. In this free download, Donna talks about how Somatic Yoga can offer a powerful path to healing by restoring fluidity and freedom in the extended mind-body.

We all have some degree of tension and restriction in the body. Wilhelm Reich, one of the founding psychologists, referred to it as our ‘body armor,’ i.e. that which holds us back from a full, free expression in mind and body, and hence in life.

What somatics can help us do is peel away layers of chronic strain and tension to allow the natural intelligence of the body to emerge and flourish, notes Donna.

Having a sense of fluidity in the body can make a difference for everyone.  Particularly for people with chronic pain, Donna notes, it can make a world of difference. People in chronic pain often engage in protective movement patterns and may even be inhibited in their breath.

Finding fluidity creates a place of support for movement, as well as an allowance to move intuitively in a fully embodied way. When you find a freedom of expression of movement in your body, such as the flow of reaching out and moving back in, feeling the flow of it happening guides you into where you need to be in asana. This is what Brooks calls, “The delight of your body.”

Donna also describes her work with clients who live with serious conditions like chronic pain, MS, Parkinson’s and other pain-related conditions. To help them create a bigger picture, Brooks employs the practice of Somatic Yoga. “In some cases, it’s not that we can erase pain,” she says. “In some cases, it’s about really being able to have a broader experience of your body than just the pain.”

To understand the difference in approach between a traditional yoga class and a somatic approach, it’s helpful to consider somatics pioneer Thomas Hanna’s distinction between the experience body vs. the objectified body, Donna notes. An objective approach to a yoga pose might be to rotate the right foot at a 45-degree angle and the left at 90 degrees, toward a very directive and specific shape. A somatic approach instead encourages an exploration of the experience of moving into and out of the range of the pose, promoting an internal, interoceptive awareness of your body.

But giving up one kind of structural approach does not diminish the importance of structures in the body. Rather, it recognizes the multiple layers of structure in a three-dimensional body, another key component of the study of somatics. “In my experience, people often think of free and fluid as having no structure,” says Brooks. “And what my experience of that is instead is that there are a lot of different structures in our body. There are developmental movement patterns, there are flows of fluid, there are ways of organizing through the nerves. They all have a kind of rationale to them. There’s a truth of their experience.”

Looking at the different layers and levels can reveal habits and patterns that control us–an important aspect of helping to free the body and releasing tension patterns at the root of chronic pain. Says Brooks, “We have all these habits. … And when we can unwind these habits there’s a richer palette of movement potential. And as that movement potential arises, you just feel freer. And you find support from more places.”