Doctors who treat Fibromyalgia and who want to offer their patients something other than pharmaceuticals often agree that Yoga, specifically the kindler, gentler approach of Restorative Yoga, offers several benefits:

*Restores healthy blood circulation

*Builds healthy muscle tissue

*Reduces stress & anxiety

A Yoga practice that combines bodywork (asana or postures), breathwork and meditation, along with healthy changes to diet and perhaps other forms of bodywork such as chiropractic and/or rolfing, can produce much sought-after relief from symptoms and can in many cases replace traditional pharmaceutical remedies (which often mask the root causes of muscle dysfunction and can lead to unhealthy addiction).

Always check with your doctor or other health care provider before beginning a Yoga practice. Special precautions should be taken if you are pregnant or have specific blood-related disorders. Some poses are contra-indicated for conditions such as high blood pressure and glaucoma. Always maintain a slow, even breath cycle throughout your posture work. If the breath becomes labored or short, stop and rest or modify your posture to a level that lets you correct your breath.

Restorative Yoga is meant to help quiet the mind while also gently opening space in the body. Feel free to stay in these poses for as long as you feel comfortable and can focus the mind inwardly. Here are some Restorative or gentle Yoga postures recommended to treat the symptoms of Fibromyalgia:

Balasana or Child’s Pose – From a seated position on the knees, take your knees wide and bring your toes together behind you. Fold your torso to the floor, letting your arms fold back over your thighs. This pose stretches the back and hips, and releases tension in the neck and shoulders.

Viparita Karani or Legs Up The Wall Pose – A supported “inversion”, where the heart is below the head. Sit close to a wall on a couple of narrowly folded yoga blankets or thick towels. Turn your torso first to face the wall, then leaning over and back towards the floor, bring the base of your pelvis to the wall, and take your legs up to rest against the wall. The entire back of your torso, arms and head then rests on the floor. This pose reverses blood flow, improving circulation, and gently stretches the backs of the legs.

Halasana or Plow Pose – Lying on your back, kick your legs up and over your head, bringing your toes to or toward the floor behind you. Bring your hands up to support your back, letting weight fall firmly into your elbows, upper arms and shoulders. This is a good stretch for the back and neck.

Savasana or Corpse Pose – Lie in a full resting pose on your back. Use blankets or towels to support your head and knees (which releases the hips and lower back). Close your eyes, relax your entire body from your feet to your head, then let your mind focus gently on the cycle of your breath.

Standing poses simultaneously strengthen the legs, back and shoulders while also opening space in the hips and joints of the legs. Hold each pose for 8-10 breaths each. Specific strength building Yoga postures that are recommended include but are not limited to:

Adho Mukha Svanasana or Downward Facing Dog Pose – Come to your hands and knees, aligning your wrists under your shoulders and your knees under your hips. Spread your fingers wide and fully press your palms into the floor. Turn your toes under and gently lift your knees up, pressing into your palms to lengthen your arms as you brings your heels toward the floor and your legs to straight. Keep a micro bend in your knees to allow your hips to lift and spread. Feel your back stretch as you reach your tailbone to the sky. This pose stretches and strengthens the entire body.

Trikonasana or Triangle Pose – Step your feet wide and turn your right toes forward and your left toes in to about 45 degrees. Keep both legs straight as you engage the leg muscles. Take a strong breath in as you lengthen your torso and extend your arms out in both directions. On your exhalation, reach the right arm forward, angling your torso in the same direction. Once you feel a strong (not painful) stretch in your right inner thigh, bring your right hand down to rest on your shin or an upturned block. Your left arm extends skyward, and your gaze turns to your left fingers. Hold for several breaths then repeat after switching your legs.

Parsvakonasana or Extended Side Angle Pose - Step your feet wide and turn your right toes forward and your left toes in to about 45 degrees. Bend your front knee, keeping it aligned over your heel and bring your right elbow to rest on the top of your right thigh. Press strongly into your left foot, lengthening and firming the entire leg. Lift your left arm first to the sky, then to an angle over your left ear. The right hand can also be lowered onto the floor or to a block. Hold for several breaths then repeat after switching your legs.

These two poses in particular strengthen not only the legs, but the muscles of the back. Try to keep the chest stretching open in these poses by pulling the shoulder blades together towards the spine. This action also reduces strain in the shoulders by consciously lowering or “de-hunching” them away from the ears.

For more poses and pose sequences that are helpful in treating Fibromyalgia or other specific ailments, please feel free to email me.

The 3D Pose Viewer shows the muscle model in several different asana:

The animation here is beautiful. I wish I could stop each pose though and enlarge! Guess I’ll have to break down and purchase the 2-Volume set, which was a highly recommended anatomy reference during my yoga teacher training.

The texts do an excellent job of explaining and illustrating the relationship between the muscle groups that work and those that receive the benefits of that work in several different poses. I think my students will love being able to see what I’m constantly talking about in class but can only show them by pointing to my or a student’s anatomy. Go visit, have fun with all the tools and resources and let me know what you think!

Just like school teachers, yoga teachers get to have “staff development” days, too. Termed “Continuing Education Units” or “CEU’s”, these hours for yoga teachers are required in order to keep the teaching cert. For a 200-hour Certification for example, you get to complete 30 hours of CEUs over two years.

Since receiving my 200-hour cert, I’ve been teaching quite a lot of hours, but have tallied far too few CEUs. I suspect this is the case for many teachers. Your teaching hours far outweigh your hours as a student attending classes, while simultaneously, your income takes a pretty serious dip. An expensive weekend workshop seems out of the question.

I bit the bullet (a very nicely priced bullet) last weekend and returned to Tsada Yoga in Dallas (the studio I still consider my “Yoga Home”) for four classes with Kelly Haas. Kelly has been teaching workshops at Tsada a couple of times a year for going on five years now. This was my first experience as a student with Kelly and I want to share some of the amazing things I learned and re-learned over the weekend.

First things first: Kelly teaches from the Anusara Yoga tradition which emphasizes healthy, safe alignment and with that alignment a focus on balance and movement from the heart. Kelly welcomed us with an infectious smile and laughing and an invitation to think about our practice in terms of the four elements – the lower body as “earthy”, the upper body as “sky”, “movement,” or an “airy lightness” and of bringing those elements into balance in every pose. In the first ten minutes I learned a new Sanskrit word: mudya or, “center line” and when we drew our palms together to open or close our practice it was always “to the center line” of our hearts. She reminded us to think of the line that separates yin from yang, earth from sky, upper body/lower body, work and rest, soft and hard, and what it symbolizes: again, that place of balance, the place between two forces where peace and calm reside.

That first evening we worked on “Opening the Lotus Flower of the Hips” and focused on the lower body with lunges, warrior twos, and pigeon pose with strong assists. Kelly reinforced the instruction I see more and more often to allow the natural curve of the lower back to remain soft, not to sharply tuck the pelvis under because that movement hardens the fronts of the hips and the groins. In order for the hips to broaden, to stretch the groins need to remain soft, pliable. The leg muscles do the work, not the groin muscles.

The second day worked the upper body with a lot of emphasis on lengthening the side body. How did Kelly instruct us to do this? “Lift your shoulders up towards your ears.” Really?! Don’t I always and everyday instruct my students to lower their shoulders away from their ears?! Yes, I do. And softening the shoulders away from the ears has the effect of lengthening the spine up through the neck and reducing as much tension as possible in the trapezius muscles on the tops of the shoulders. But following the instruction to lift our shoulders was the instruction to lengthen through the side ribs. That really worked. Then, Kelly instructed us to take our shoulder bones back and press the shoulder blades in toward our spines, engaging the infraspinatus muscles between the spine and the scapulae. We applied this movement to downward facing dog (adho mukha svanasana), mountain pose (tadasana), high plank to chattaranga dandasana, crescent lunge (ajanyasana) and frankly, every other pose for the rest of the weekend.

Another important alignment principle affecting me personally recently is the placement and flexion happening in the hand and forearm muscles. Teaching Sun Salutations (surya namaskar) involves a lot of weight on the hands, wrists and forearms. When we’re moving quickly through a sequence it’s often easy to sacrifice alignment for consistency and a consistent pace in the flow without our even realizing it (until our wrist aches or we have to ice the shoulder a few days later).

Such was the case with my right wrist and shoulder at the beginning of the workshop weekend. By Sunday I felt healed. Strong muscles working in the hands (palms and fingers) and the forearms (the soft-skinned underside of the forearm, not the top) take pressure off the wrist joint.

The same principle applies in the hip joint, where Kelly reminded us again and again to soften our groins and make the leg muscles work more. I went deeper in my standing poses guided by this fundamental re-alignment.

Kelly’s workshop really took me back to my “yoga home,” in more ways than one. From my early days practicing Iyengar Yoga I recall being firmly grounded in a strong emphasis on alignment, and breaking down a pose into its minute, constituent parts so that in every pose I felt the work. From the first pose of Kelly’s workshop, I felt at once like a brand new student, and like I was deepening what I know with new tools and new ways of looking at yoga poses. It was the infusion of yoga heart and soul I needed!

You begin your class by asking your students to “come to sitting.” I suspect that, more often than not many of us leave that calling at sukhasana (easy pose). If that sounds like you, I’d like to encourage you to spend a few minutes exploring “the art of sitting” in your next class.

Teaching a lot of Beginning Yoga classes gives me the opportunity to talk a lot about sitting and to explore the many classical seated postures with my students. If you teach a lot of Vinyasa or “flow”-style classes you may sense that your students just want to get on with their workout. But just those few minutes at the beginning of a practice are plenty to explore a few of the things that happen in the body while seated. The benefits are multiple.

Seated poses will teach students some of the basic anatomy of the hips and legs while in a more comfortable, receptive posture. Letting them sit will also alert you to differing abilities in your students. You can spot tight hips in an unsupported sukhasana: the knees lift up and the back rounds. Students are sitting on the backs of the sitting bones. Forearms might even be resting on the knees. Externally rotating the thighs in the hip sockets is going to be a challenge for this student. If this is as comfortable as your student can be in sukhasana and you don’t have the benefit of working with blankets, have your student try a modified virasana or hero’s pose, sitting on (or between) the heels and feet with the knees hips-width apart. In virasana the thighs want to rotate internally, so go with natural inclination of your student’s thighs to find a comfortable seated posture for him.

If you do have blankets, fold two or three and stack with smooth edges facing in and have students sit with the pelvis lifted up on to the blankets. This support should allow the thighs to more easily begin to rotate out, so the knees can descend toward the floor. Cross deeply at the shins and stretch out through the heels. Instruct the student to feel weight in and sit slightly forward on the sitting bones so the back doesn’t round, and feel the torso lift up on the inhale. The support should stabilize the student’s posture. The spine should feel neutral but lifted.

Allowing five minutes at the beginning of your class for your students to find their way to sitting comfortably and to engage the breath will also help to better direct their attention inward during the more dynamic segments of your class. Setting the foundation for a long, smooth, regulated breath cycle at the beginning of class, when students can focus exclusively on the breath without distraction develops that awareness, that single-pointed attention to the breath as they begin to move into their asana and more vigorous vinyasa work. The breath then becomes a tool that helps to regulate vinyasa and alerts the student to instances where they may be over-exerting, causing the breath to become labored. A deep, full breath is also important for the student’s ability to move deeper in asana, as they use the breath to find space in the body.

A comfortable seated posture also is fundamental for your students to begin exploring the more contemplative aspects of their practice, such as pranayama and meditation. When sitting comfortably in a seated posture, we can more easily focus on and deeply engage the breath. Our attention isn’t constantly pulled back to the tight hip or the compressed rib cage and lungs. If your students are seated comfortably, that comfort, that balance between grounding and releasing the lower body, and breathing through and extending the upper body should allow them to sit for at least five minutes and as their practice grows and deepens, for much longer periods.

Introduce these concepts by way of a truly comfortable seated posture for a few minutes at the beginning of your classes and begin to explore some of the other seated postures such as siddhasana (seer’s or sage’s pose) and padmasana (lotus pose) towards the end, after the hips have had a chance to open. Add an optional 10 or 15 minutes to your class (if time permits) to have your students discover what is required to begin sitting for longer periods of time in a short, guided meditation and then talk about what that felt like; what the challenges were in the body that may have prevented the student from just being with the breath.

Ironically, learning to sit, like learning to lie truly still in savasana, can be one of the most challenging aspects of asana practice. In yoga we strive to harness not only the physical body, but also the mind and the breath together with the body. In the short time so many of our students have for a yoga class, honoring the practice of sitting lets them remember to see and embrace the discipline necessary to bring all three into union.