Yoga Therapy to Ease Your Back

If this is your back

You wake up and check, before you move, whether it’s a good day or a bad one. You’ve had the massages, maybe the physio, or an MRI that showed “nothing much.” You’ve strengthened your core, you’ve stretched, you’re staying active and you’ve tried it all, but your back still doesn’t agree with you.

It could also be more subtle: a low ache that’s just there, a stiffness in the morning or a pelvis that never quite feels level. It’s not an emergency, but you don’t fully trust your body anymore.

Back pain rarely comes from where it hurts. Most of the time it’s a compensation: your hips, your ribcage, your feet or your breath doing something they’ve been doing for years to protect a part that doesn’t need protecting anymore and now your back pays the price. You also can’t stretch a compensation away, because stretching pulls on the same pattern harder.

What we do instead

In this course we don’t diagnose, but you’ll feel, because the place that hurts is rarely where the problem is. We’ll be moving: making small movements, slower than you’d think, with attention. As we go, your body shows you where you grip, when it hurts and where you’re involving other body parts. I will be your second pair of eyes, seeing what you might not yet be able to see or feel. That’s your map, and it gets drawn week by week, by you, with my help, in your own body. You don’t need to be strong or flexible, you’ll work within your capacity. Most of what we’ll do happens lying down.

Week one, getting an idea. We start with what you feel now, your back, your hip, your shoulder, and begin movements that will show you whether that’s the source or the messenger.
Week two, lower body. The legs and pelvis, the part that carries your weight every day and influences everything above it.
Week three, upper body. The shoulders, neck and head, the area that tends to take the lead in a life full of thinking, and shapes the tension patterns through the rest of your body.
Week four, spine and breath. Exploring the center of your being, exploring the spaciousness of your breath and and feeling how the body moves as one.
Week five, keeping it. We go back to where you started, look at what was difficult, what changed, and where your focus lies for when your body is showing signs.

What you can expect after five weeks

Your back discomfort will ease. It might not be gone completely, but change has happened. Movement gets easier, and you know why, because you’ve felt where the tension was actually coming from and worked with it. You have a handful of movements that work for your specific back, that don’t take much time and that you’ll actually do. And you trust your body a little more, because it showed you it can change.