Yoga Therapy for Back Pain
Who Can Benefit From Yoga Therapy for Back Pain Sessions?
This is the session for you if you suffer from continued pain in any region of the back (not just lower back). You might find that the pain moves from one region of the back to another, or that you have generalised back pain that can be due to any cause.
The session will help you to relax your body and mind, reduce stiffness and improve overall mobility. We will work with simple, gentle movement and breathing to activate the relaxation response and settle the nervous system. Yoga poses will help to improve your body awareness and posture, so that you know where you are holding tension and you can strengthen your muscles. We will also work with sounds, visualisation and meditation to calm and focus the mind and increase positivity.
We will also share information with you about diet and lifestyle practices that will help with wellbeing and self-management of your pain.
Small Group Approach
During the sessions, your Yoga Therapist will use standard yoga therapy techniques and also add in some more general brain retraining and mindfulness techniques. For example, sessions could include the following:
Each session will have a theme which could be focussed on a chapter in a beneficial book. You could have the book to read and discuss, or your Yoga Therapist could cover the relevant chapter for you. The theme would help to focus the session but also to allow group members to interact and get to know each other, thus building a supportive community. This can be introduced once the class is established rather than overloading at the beginning.
The session would start with a few full yogic breaths to help grounding and then a gentle warm up of the body.
Yoga asanas would be done slowly and with the breath, allowing everyone time to adapt the posture to their needs (props such as blocks, blankets or bolsters and chairs would be used as available and when required). Asanas would be focussed around helping with back pain:
A focus on the posture when sitting, or standing
Strengthening the abdominal muscles to take the strain off the back
Including full body stretches to relieve compression and twists to help with body alignment
Together with your Yoga Therapist you will explore the 5-Kosha model to help understanding of the bigger picture of our experience:
Physical – asanas, body scan, awareness
Energy – breathwork, prana, nature
Emotional – mindfulness, self-enquiry, affirmations
Wisdom – meditation, intuition, creativity
Bliss – meditation, joy, gratitude
You will also explore some of the brain retraining general principles e.g., the concept of Neuroplastic pain, somatic tracking, corrective experiences, dialling down high alert, the power of positive experiences etc.
Each session would end with a long relaxation that would include a relevant poem, visualisation or meditation that links to the class theme.
A Yoga Nidra would be included in at least one session out of the 6-week programme.
These sessions are taught by Julia Woodham.