Scientific Ink

Dunrie Greiling Ph.D., Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Yoga

New Yoga for Scoliosis Book

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You might think a curved and twisted spine may make yoga impossible. It’s the opposite: yoga makes living and breathing with scoliosis better. And Elise and DL’s new Yoga for Scoliosis book will help you do yoga better.

Through working on my posture and breath in yoga, I have learned how to reduce my thoracic curve, de-rotate my spine, and breathe into areas which are compressed. When I don’t practice, I know it. My back aches more with twinges and tightness. When I practice, I feel more integrated, graceful, and free.

Yoga for Scoliosis book

Yoga for Scoliosis book cover
Yoga for Scoliosis book

Elise Browning Miller and nancy DL heraty, two great yoga teachers, just released Yoga for Scoliosis: A Path for Students and Teachers. It is a wonderful book, clearly written with beautiful photographs and illustrations. It’s also quite practical: its spiral-bound pages lay open perfectly so I can consult it in the middle of my sequence.

This Yoga for Scoliosis book describes scoliosis, its four main patterns, and the benefits of yoga for scoliosis. The authors include instructions for beginning your own home practice (including advice about props) and then go into asanas and pranayama.

Covered asanas include:

  • standing poses
  • seated poses
  • back poses, backbends, and back strengtheners,
  • twisting poses,
  • supine and side-bending poses,
  • core strength poses,
  • inversion poses, and
  • breath awareness for scoliosis.

Each asana is well-described with at least one photograph, instructive text, variations, and specific adjustments for each pattern of scoliosis.

The book concludes with seven yoga for scoliosis practice sequences. These sequences are easy to skim and each refers back to the full instructions for each asana in the sequence.

About the Authors

Over the years, I have taken several workshops and classes from Iyengar yoga teacher Elise Browning Miller. Elise is based in Palo Alto, and she teaches all over the US and even internationally. I have followed her to Cleveland, Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Sonoma. Working with Elise has taught me how to use yoga to be stronger, more joyful, and work with my scoliosis rather than suffer with it. With her help, I have less pain and am lighter in my own body. Who wouldn’t want that?

When I have attended Elise’s workshops in Chicago, I met and worked with DL as well. DL co-authored the book with Elise and is a gentle and nurturing presence in workshops.

Get the Book!

If you teach yoga or do yoga and have scoliosis, get the book! You won’t be disappointed. You can purchase the book from Elise’s website.

Yoga retreat in Sonoma – hip relief for my Scoliosis

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I have been a “distant student” of Elise Browning Miller’s for years. She teaches Iyengar yoga, with a keen sense of how to adjust to accommodate for and unwind scoliosis.

She is based in the Bay Area, and Elise travels the continent teaching yoga for back care and yoga for scoliosis. I have traveled to Kalamazoo, Chicago, Cleveland, and California to learn from Elise. Every year, she hosts a retreat in northern California.

Her retreat in California is my favorite by far. For the other locations, she’s teaching at a local yoga studio, and the class is made up of local students, local teachers, and a few travelers. So, when I have traveled in the midwest, it has been yoga class and then solo meals and a basic hotel. At Westerbeke, everyone travels and stays over (even from the Bay Area). So there’s a community outside the classes, and the location and the food is wonderful.

It was as if my back gave up 50-weeks since I last saw Elise. It was as if it said “I got you most of the way, now get me to the teacher who can help you do better by me!” I had strong, debilitating pain in my left hip/lower back. I couldn’t sit at the computer. I preferred to stand or to lie back in a mild backbend on all of my yoga bolsters. I could get some relief by digging my fist into my back and glutes. I dreaded sitting on the plane, but I knew I’d get better in class.

As usual, the classes completely erased my pain. I appreciated the sequencing of the poses and the hands-on help – pulling me this way or that way. I learned I still need to pay attention to derotating my spine – particularly lifting my concave left side in certain poses.

What I learned

At one point, I spoke with Elise about my lingering lower back/hip issues. The hip/SI joint that has been really bothering me is the one opposite my scoliosis. I have right-thoracic curve, and it is my left hip that is problematic. She suggested I consider including the following five asanas in my practice.

These five asanas have helped me maintain the pain-free and happy state I attained during the retreat.

Quick sketch of four of the five poses for relief of hip pain in scoliosis.

Down Dog with crossed ropes or straps

Here is a video of Elise teaching Downward Facing Dog with crossed ropes from a doorknob. I use ropes attached to eye hook sunk into the wall by a professional carpenter.

Prasarita Padottanasana – Wide-legged pose

Prasarita Padottanasana video and instructions available at Yoga Journal website.

Urdhva Dandasana

The head and arms are not touching the floor, so gravity is giving me a gentle pull downwards to stretch my back.

I’m also getting a nice pull upwards on my thighs from the swing.

photo of down dog yoga pose variation, hanging from yoga swing.
A down-dog-like pose hanging from a yoga swing.

Salamba Adho Mukha Vajrasana

I get a good stretch of the back (note – neither my head or arms are touching the floor, so gravity is giving me a nice and gentle pull downwards). I feel a lot more of the swing’s pull on my tricky hip, making me think it is a little out of alignment. So, the swing is helping there too.

photo of yoga pose Virasana, hanging from yoga swing.
Hanging from a yoga swing in a version of Hero’s Pose – Virasana

Supta Padangustasana I – with double belts

Here’s a video of Elise teaching how to use the second belt to really get good traction in this pose. This setup helps me to lengthen rather than bunch up the hip of my “up” leg. If I only had time to do one asana, this is the one I would do.

Note: Elise’s voice is faint during this video, turn your volume up and then don’t forget to turn it back down at the end.

Since adding these yoga asanas to my routine, I have felt increasing well-being in my lower back and quietness in my body. My scoliosis affects me, but if it helps me keep up with my yoga, well then it helps me be healthy.

Learn More from Elise

Elise’s DVD has been a huge help in my learning and adjusting for my scoliosis. Edited 3/2017 – and now Elise has published a spiral bound book on Yoga for Scoliosis, which gave me better names for some of the poses above. Check it out!

Yoga for Scoliosis in Michigan 4/20/2012

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The Iyengar yoga teacher I have mentioned several times, Elise Browning Miller, is coming back to Michigan. I cannot wait!

Her classes will be hosted by the Michigan Yoga Association in Kalamazoo. The workshop details are in a PDF on their website. I thought I’d republish them here in HTML to make them easier to share.

Workshop Dates & Descriptions

Friday April 20, 2012 6-8PM – Yoga for Scoliosis

Saturday April 21, 2012 10AM-12:30PM, 2PM-5PM Yoga for Back Care – Saturday
This session will address different back issues and injuries resulting in poor posture, lower back pain, chronic neck and shoulder pain, scoliosis and other back conditions. Elise will address how to adapt certain yoga poses for a wide variety of back conditions including scoliosis and give a series of therapeutic yoga poses for those back conditions. Appropriate for those dealing with their own back related issues as well as yoga teachers and those who treat these conditions in others.

Sunday April 22, 2012 9AM-noon Heart Opening through Backbends
Elise will lead students through standing poses to prepare for an uplifting backbend practice. Elise will pace the class so that students will feel secure enough to work with a variety of backbend poses. Students should be familiar with standing poses and beginning backbends.

Sunday April 22, 2012 1PM-3PM Forward Bends and Twists: Freedom or Frustration?
Many students with spinal and hip joint challenges struggle with forward bends and twists. Elise will cover how to practice and teach these important categories of poses safely and effectively.

Costs & Registration

Friday Yoga for Scoliosis class $65 separately

Saturday and Sunday classes $150

Location: Transformations Center, 3427 Gull Road, Kalamazoo, MI

A heavy sleeper wakes up for daily morning yoga, really

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I didn’t do a New Year’s Resolution this year, but one got me anyway.
Elise Browning Miller, an Iyengar yoga teacher who specializes in Yoga for Scoliosis, conducted a weekend yoga workshop in Chicago in early January. Egged on by a friend who was also interested, I attended.

I have been to two of Elise’s workshops before, the last one in 2007 in Cleveland. I have used her DVDs (especially her Yoga for Scoliosis DVD (Amazon affiliate link)) and books in my home practice. The Chicago event, at the lovely Yoga Circle, was a teacher training as well as a “Part II” class.

Elise taught some familiar poses and I learned some good tweaks and some advanced poses not in the DVD. We also enjoyed a wonderful teacher:student ratio as Elise instructed the instructors who helped us students. Three items came to be my most important learnings:

  1. Elise emphasizes lengthening and derotation for scoliosis, and from the corrections she gave me throughout the workshop, I seem to have been better at lengthening and needed coaching on the derotation. My current theme in my home practice is derotation.
  2. The workshop helped me notice I was not breathing equally into my lungs and ribs. With coaching I brought attention to the lower left of my back, and I expanded my intercostal muscles where my scoliosis compresses my ribcage. Doing so, I could take deeper breaths and experience greater well-being in each breath.
  3. The biggest take-home lesson for me was how I felt each day of the workshop. My lingering lower back twinges and aches were simply gone. I wanted that feeling to last.

I wanted to learn how to make myself feel that good, that whole, that comfortable in my body on my own. Of course, I already knew exactly what to do – what I had been doing in her previous workshops and with her DVD. Nothing secret or mysterious, just requires the actual doing rather than mental understanding. The answer was obvious: commit to a daily home practice.

I had long wanted to do this and then felt guilty about not doing this….and also resistant, all at the same time. I groused that too many things wanted my daily attention including meditation and other exercise.

I knew from  my experience commiting to a daily meditation practice that I had to commit to adding daily yoga in the morning. If I let myself plan for it to be later, I’d stress about it and/or worm out of it somehow. Putting meditation first thing in the morning short-circuited my avoidance mechanisms.

Cool clock (not accurate) - cropped
Clock in the Basement of the First National Building

But, I did not think I could wake early enough to do both yoga and meditation each morning before work. So I decided to make an experiment: move my established meditation practice to the evening and start each day with yoga.

I told two friends, one of whom shared her experience that confirmed mine, the other just egged me on (and I knew if I told more people, I’d be committed).

I worried about the earlier alarm in the morning (even with moving the meditation, I still needed to get up earlier). And I’ve never been a happy-wakey person. I’m grumpy and slow and resistant in the morning.

Yet, four days in, I’ve had no trouble whatsoever. I even wake up more easily than before (so far) and I’m finding I have more energy throughout the day.

I look forward to Elise’s return to Michigan April 21-22, to teach Yoga for Back Care, Heart Opening Through Backbends, Forward bends and Twists. Her visit will be hosted by the Michigan Yoga Association. Location and details TBD at this writing.

Music and breath heals

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A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi
A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi

I tweaked my back two weekends in a row. I have some history of back pain, largely stemming from a jaunty twist in my spine (scoliosis). And, because I bend towards my knitting, bend towards my computer monitor, and otherwise stress out my upper back and neck, my upper back gets cranky now and then.

Once I’ve tweaked it, it is a long process of hot baths, ibuprophen, bodywork, arnica gel, and mostly just rest and time to undo whatever kink or constriction I’ve triggered.

Boring.

My interesting stories are the divergences from this pattern: I have had two experiences of spontaneous improvement in my neck/back pain: through pranayama breath, and at a music concert the other night.

Pranayama heals

The first spontaneous release I’ve experienced was in a yoga workshop taught in Ann Arbor by Navtej Johar at Sun-Moon Yoga. During the session, the pranayama breath work (shown in the photo above) released the kink that had stuck my neck for days. I have used pranayama breathing some since then, not enough considering its powerful effect that day….To encourage my practice, I recently picked up the Pranayama iPhone app by Saagara from itunes. I used it recently to relax during a bout of insomnia, and last night to further relax my back and neck. It helped!

Music heals

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Sunday night was the only other time I’ve experienced seemingly “spontaneous” healing. I think I whacked out my upper back on Saturday by trying to move some largish rocks we have in our garden. I woke up Sunday morning kind of sprung behind my right shoulder blade. Later that day, I attended a concert at Rackham Auditorium. It was a reading by Alex Ross of his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, accompanied by Ethan Iverson on the piano. While I enjoyed the crisp and funny writing, I found the turbulent 20th Century history revealed in the lives and concerns of its composers daunting.

I was excited about the concert because I wanted to hear the music of the composers I’d read about. I also sometimes lose track of time, and so I was late for the performance and stressed out when I arrived. They wouldn’t seat us because the piece had started, so I waited, fretting, in the hall for the a slight break to be seated. Well, Rackham has very comfortable seats, and once I settled into our row, the soothing notes of the piano, even playing intellectual 12 tone music, which I’d expected to be annoying, had a physical effect on my body.

I don’t know what Ethan Iverson was playing in that particular moment, but in the middle of the performance that included Babbitt, Bartok, Gershwin, Ives, Ligeti, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Webern, I felt a muscle next to my shoulder blade go into a release that felt like an inverse spasm. It was a kind of drumming pattern of releases and then slight recontractions, but without pain. I don’t know what it was exactly – I’m going to guess, based on my experience with pranayama, that what might have helped was a relaxation in my own breathing in time to one of the pieces. Or, perhaps my absorption in the event let some other process take its course in my back. I doubt that new age spas around the world play a selection of 20th century classical music, but maybe they should. The concert had an unexpected and salutary effect on my body!

Yoga for the tall

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I am still under the influence of Arianne Cohen’s The Tall Book. In keeping with the tall theme, I am mulling over her notes on body differences. In one section, she noted a few differences in tempo (just takes longer to sweep my hands from my sides to above my head given my hands travel farther) and strength (body is heavier, but not proportionally stronger) that gave me an a-hah moment.

Yoga would be a very different activity if yogis were six-footers. p.89 The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life on High by Arianne Cohen

Being a 6’+ tall yogi and an internet wonk, I then Googled variants of several phrases including “yoga” and “tall”, and I found nothing helpful. I did see lots of advertisements for longer yoga clothes and a rant by a shorter-stature yoga teacher about talls infringing on the airspace and viewspace of the shorter folk. (Note I would go to the back of the classroom, but it’s really crowded back there and there’s a lot more wingspan space at the front because people avoid it…sorry to be blocking the view).

Arianne’s words finally helped me solidify my positions on certain styles of yoga, given the dearth of info, I thought I’d write it up. In the past, I have found Vinyasa and Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga classes quite challenging in terms of pacing. Now, I feel justified in this, but I suppose it isn’t a critique of the style itself that they are less than tall-friendly, more like a note to self that I would either need to do these on my own in a more stately tempo or else not mind falling farther and farther behind the class (a good exercise in disregarding externalities and working on my competitive nature, I suppose…).

  • Vinyasa yoga, in which sequences flow from one position to another, is lovely and dance-like, but I’ve often struggled with its tempo. Essentially, when doing a sun salutation, I’ve often felt like I was rushing to get from one position to another. I barely get into plank and I have to rush headlong into Chaturanga Dandasana and oops, just getting there, and the whole class is already enjoying upward dog. Essentially, I am running behind, challenged by my extra length to maintain the pace of the class and actually spend a moment in each pose. I’ve taken Vinyasa classes at Sun Moon Yoga (where Sondra is beautifully tall and lithe and fleet of yoga pose and disproves my argument a bit, but I’m sticking to it anyway) and A2Yoga. At least now I have a physical excuse for the rushed feeling.
  • Ashtanga yoga, in which folks repeat a series each class is wonderful for marking growth because, well, you can mark your progress because you’re doing the same thing over again. I found the sequence quite challenging in terms of strength (lifting myself up in places). Perhaps it was no accident that my old Ashtanga teacher was a powerfully built shorter statured guy. He could do anything at all, floating high while balancing on a finger or two, and I was flailing along, quite grounded as he soared. I am not sure on the naming, but I sometimes see it as Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, and yes it does flow from pose to pose. I have taken Ashtanga classes at A2Yoga.

So, I am brought back to the idea of Iyengar yoga, of which Ann Arbor is a historical bastion, and the Russayog or rope yoga, that I’m currently practicing. They both have a more stately, thoughtful pacing.

  • Iyengar yoga is all about alignment, which is good because of my crooked back (scoliosis) and not so much about speed. I have taken Iyengar classes at the Ann Arbor YMCA and Inward Bound. I routinely work with Elise Browning Miller’s Yoga for Scoliosis DVD. Elise is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher.
  • Russayog or rope yoga has nice repetition in the classes, so it is both stillness-inducing (I yawn my way through the class, and that’s a compliment), and I can see progress as I go. Some portion of the classes change each time, so there’s also something to keep things fresh. I really like working with the ropes – they are both challenging and forgiving – they can help stabilize me. And, they stretch my back like nothing else. My massage therapist notices if I don’t go! So it must be doing something good for me. I wonder if it also helps that Jasprit is tall, so his classes have a nice tall-friendly pacing.

All of this is a good reminder to be gentle with myself, to not rush in my yoga classes (sometimes during the bal-lila in russayog I do feel rushed, and I just have to claim my own speed and stick to it) and respect who I am and where I am, which is of course, a big part of practicing yoga in the first place.