Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back (3 page)

These techniques aren't simple “feel good” practices, they actually have neurological benefit: they stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which is responsible for calming the muscles, slowing the heart rate, and generally keeping the body from overreacting to the stressors that surround it in everyday life. The PNS's partner, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), is a far more jittery creature, responsible for the famous “fight or flight” response, or the survival instinct that gives us the burst of energy we need to escape from dangerous situations.

Of course, you have heard many times that the fight-or-flight response was designed to help our primitive ancestors escape from predators or invaders. It was not meant to be activated when the supermarket checkout line is longer than we anticipated, when our boss asks us to redo work we've spent hours on, or when we have a quarrel with a family member. In these modern-day stress scenarios, our biology can conspire against us—if our PNS isn't there to bring the SNS into balance. As Benson discovered, and as the vast field of complementary, or integrative, medicine accepts as its premise, mind-body work is a valuable and beneficial method of achieving this balance.

Benson notes a list of conditions that, when caused or affected by conditions like stress, can be improved using self-care techniques such as meditative yoga and deep breathing. You should be encouraged to learn that back and neck pain are included on this list.
¹²

You won't likely be able to banish stress from your life altogether, but with the physical and energetic tools yoga has to offer, it is realistic to expect to be able to better manage your stress and, by extension, your pain.

H
OW
Y
OGA
C
AN
H
ELP

Benson discovered in a scientific setting what yoga practitioners have known for centuries—yoga can calm and open the body in a way that allows it to release stress and pain, including, and especially for our purposes, lower back pain.

Yoga is—together with sitting meditation and a mindfulness technique
called “body scan”—one of the three main components of the biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn's pioneering work with stress, pain, and illness.
¹³
Kabat-Zinn, working and teaching at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that is used in hospitals and pain clinics across the country. In his popular 1990 book
Full Catastrophe Living,
he calls yoga “another way in which you can learn about yourself and come to experience yourself as whole, regardless of your physical condition or level of ‘fitness.'”
¹⁴

Recent research supports what Benson, Kabat-Zinn, and many others have introduced to the mainstream. Study after study hypothesizes that your nervous system is directly affected by yoga practice.

I'll mention just one such study, a randomized controlled trial conducted in Boston and published in 2009. The study gave a twelve-week yoga course, including deep relaxation, yoga postures, and breathing techniques, to a group of people who were suffering from chronic lower back pain. At the end of the program, nearly three quarters of the participants reported a reduction of their pain; only 27 percent of the “control group,” which had not been given yoga, reported similar improvement. Additionally, and remarkably, the participants who did the yoga program decreased their use of pain medications, reporting no usage at all of opiate analgesic medications by the end of the program.
¹⁵

While all of the yoga in this book is an important part of the process of healing your lower back pain, I want to offer one more note about the ways
pranayama
, yogic breath work, can be a particularly healing practice, one that can soothe both your hurting body and your stressed mind. As you practice pranayama, please keep in mind everything you've learned about your PNS and SNS, and the power those systems have over your body's experience of stress and pain.

How does pranayama work on your nervous system? I'll give two quick examples. First, Three-Part Breath, or Dirgha Pranayama, which we'll practice in
chapter 2
, brings long, deep breaths into your pelvic area, abdomen, and chest. This sequential, mindful flow of breath not only releases muscle tightness in those areas, it also encourages the vagus nerve, which is responsible for stimulating the PNS, to send your heart relaxing messages through your long, deep exhalations. Second, in Ocean Breath (
Ujjayi Pranayama
), even, elongated inhalations and exhalations are used to balance the SNS, which controls your body's fight-or-flight response to stress, and the PNS. When you make your exhalations longer than your inhalations in Ocean Breath, you stimulate the PNS even more deeply, eliciting the relaxation response.
¹⁶

Finally, as you embark on your new yoga practice, let me share something that has been meaningful to me in my own yogic journey and that I will be using often in the yoga practice sections of this book. It's these three words: any amount possible!

“Any amount possible,” said with quiet, focused gusto, is what echoes through my mind every time I practice yoga, especially when I am trying a challenging pose or working with a part of my body that is tight, stiff, or dull. It is an oft-used phrase from the Iyengar yoga tradition, the well-known alignment-based method of yoga founded by the living yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar.

These simple words were especially encouraging to me when I first started practicing yoga, because my body, and my lower back in particular, was very tight from years of hunching over a desk as an architect. Today, when I ask my students to stretch, reach, or open their bodies “any amount possible,” I mean to remind them not to push their bodies beyond what they can comfortably and safely do at a given moment. Instead, I like to encourage them to create a dialogue with their bodies in order to understand how
far they can move into a pose, and how much stronger and more flexible—even incrementally so!—they are becoming each time they are returning to a pose they have practiced before.

The words continue to inspire both my yoga practice and teaching today as I continually find more spaciousness and comfort in my own body and as I see those qualities develop in my students. On the physical level, the ability to meet your body where it is and ask it to open up any amount possible is one of the true gifts of yoga. I hope it can inspire you to practice so that you too will find renewed openness and strength in your own body.

W
HAT
I
S
Y
OGA?

What are we to make of that fact that one person might practice yoga at a commercial gym in New York City, while another will travel to India to practice it with a renowned spiritual master? Or of the way one student might meditatively chant “
OM
” with her hands pressed prayerfully together at the beginning of a yoga class, while another only looks forward to the physical rewards of a good, deep stretch?

Are both of these students—plus the estimated fifteen million Americans who practice yoga,
¹⁷
engaging in the same practice? In other words, what is “yoga”?

The answer is—like your body, like your life—not easy to simply or fully describe in a few paragraphs. It is, however, worthy of a few moments of contemplation; a fascinating amalgam of spirituality, physical fitness, and the intersection of ancient and contemporary culture.

Let's start with the meaning of the word itself. In Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, a prevalent meaning of
yoga
is “discipline,” and the term can be used similarly to how we would describe broad academic categories—imagine “math yoga,” “reading yoga,” or “science yoga.”

In the complex Indian religious tradition called Hinduism, which some scholars date as far back as 1500
B.C.E
.,
¹⁸
there are at least five major “yogas,” each of which is said to correspond to an aspect of the human personality: jnana yoga (discipline of knowledge), bhakti yoga (discipline of devotion), karma yoga (discipline of selfless action), raja yoga (royal discipline), and hatha yoga (discipline of physical exertion).
¹⁹

It is this last yoga—hatha
—
that is most familiar to most of us as the disciplined use of bodily postures called asanas and breath work called pranayama.
The term
yogi
or
yogini
, incidentally, is translated as “a man or woman of discipline.”

There is a second, often-cited definition of the Sanskrit word
yoga
—“union.” The word is related to the English word
yoke,
as in “to join.”

Traditionally, the union yogis are pursuing is a spiritual one, between the Atman, which is loosely equivalent to the Western notion of the “soul” or “Self,” takes toward Brahman, which can be defined as Absolute Being.

“Brahman” is an abstract idea in Hindu theology. The same Sanskrit root also forms the name Brahma, who is the divine creator and one of the three major deities, collectively referred to as the Trimurti, that make up the faith's core for some modern-day Hindus. (Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer, are the other two.) In the most traditional sense of hatha yoga, its practitioners are calming, balancing, and strengthening their bodies for a purpose far beyond health or physical improvement—they are preparing their deepest selves for meditative union with the highest mystical consciousness.

In case you're starting to worry that this all sounds too “spiritual” or “out there” for you—or contrary to the teachings of your own faith—fear not. You do not have to practice Hinduism to practice yoga, and although the Westernization and secularization of yoga can be controversial in some circles, the fact remains that yoga shows up at practically every conceivable point along the spectrum of modern American life.
Yoga Journal's
2008 “Yoga in America” study found, for example, that nearly half of Americans practice yoga for overall health, and nearly fourteen million Americans have had yoga recommended to them by doctors.
²⁰

So you can be assured that whatever your approach to your personal practice, the “discipline” and “union” of yoga can be as secular or as spiritual as is meaningful to you. It can simply be about releasing tension, pain, and imbalance in your body. It can be about quieting the chatter and fear in your mind so that your body can open up to greater health and wellness. You can imagine your practice as a way to bring into balance the multiple layers of yogic “bodies”—energetic, and mental or emotional among them—that are layered within your outermost, physical body.
²¹
Or you can envision your practice as a path toward what Patanjali, the compiler of the ancient treatise known as the Yoga Sutras, calls “meditative absorption” into a higher state of being.
²²

But one thing is certain, those two kinds of practitioners—one in a
gym-based yoga class, the other at the feet of a master in India—are, in fact, both practicing yoga. And in your journey through this book, you will discover your own path, your own discipline, your own yoga.

Of course, I haven't lost sight of the fact that you picked up this book because you are interested in how yoga can help you bring health, strength, and balance to your lower back. In yoga, everything is done with mindfulness and purpose, even the most basic, universal human actions. We'll start our journey by exploring yogic insights on four of these: breathing, standing, sitting, and resting.

H
OW TO
B
REATHE

“Just breathe.” It's what you might say to a friend who is talking a mile a minute to bring you up to speed on a personal crisis. It's what you might have been told to do when the stresses of your life have put you off your game. And it's what you often likely murmur to yourself when you're experiencing back pain, whether chronic or acute.

Breath, as you know, is the life-giver and sustainer, one of the most powerful symbols of our constant connection to the basic, miraculous fact that we are alive. Yet most of us go through each day without paying close attention to it at all. If we did, we would quickly realize that the quality, pace, and rhythm of our breath can be deciding factors in how smoothly any given day goes, and in how much more quickly we can move toward lower back health.

You'll encounter references to your breath often in this book, sometimes using the Sanskrit term
pranayama,
which means “breath control.”
²³

The reason for that is that breath work is a partner—many would say an equal partner—with physical postures in the practice of yoga. Your breath is a tool, to be used just as respectfully and mindfully as you would use your muscles, your bones, or your brain. But like all tools, you must learn
how
to use it if you are going to experience its full power.