HEALTH & WELLNESS
yoga
THERAPY
Using yoga as therapy to restore function.
Awareness goes beyond feeling where your body is in space. It also involves becoming present in the moment. This means allowing all your senses to become as awake and aware as they’re intended to be.
by Suzette O'Byrne
O
ver time we develop movement and posture habits and patterns. We see them in others - the way they always tilt their head to the side in a picture, the way they stand or walk when you see them from a distance. Often, there is some form of compensation (because of an injury, for example) at play. We can become aware of these moves and positions in ourselves - the way we talk on the phone, the way we sit at the computer, the way we tend to start exercises on one side. Often, instead of helping, these compensations worsen pain and injury and promote fatigue. By discovering strength imbalances and weaknesses in your body and how they translate into Suzette O'Byrne Recreation Manager habits, we can learn to restore function 403-287-4180 and move freely again with ease. sobyrne@glencoe.org Personal training techniques can go a long way to helping people identify function issues. Yoga therapy can sometimes go even further, identifying patterns beyond the physical body. By understanding subtle compensation causes, cultivating awareness and utilizing the breath to unlock from within, we can find clues and hidden messages that lie beneath the movement. Some causes of compensations include prior injuries, structural changes and/or misalignments but sometimes compensations come simply from disconnections. Often people get so good
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at blocking out the messages their muscles give them that they become completely disconnected from the body and where it is in space. The placement of the shoulder blades on the rib cage is a common example of this disconnection. When people are asked to do a push up keeping their shoulder blades flat on the ribcage as opposed to pinching them together, very few are able to do so. Even when the knees are on the ground and moved closer towards the hands (table position), keeping the shoulder blades neutral becomes more an issue of the ability to feel the shoulder blades on the ribcage than stabilizer strength (although this is usually the next issue). The simple act of feeling the centre of the foot in standing or tilting the pelvis can go a long way to re-connecting people to their bodies. The increased spacial awareness provided by Yoga can cause compensations to fade. Awareness goes beyond feeling where your body is in space. It also involves becoming present in the moment. This means allowing all your senses to become as awake and aware as they’re intended to be. Listen and hear the breath in your body. Feel textures of fabrics against your skin. See the position of your legs, arms and torso. Let your mind find its focus and learn to move with awareness. Once you’re more aware and present, you can then develop a keen sense of what’s happening throughout your body with movement. One common compensation to watch for tends to be rooted in the inner core activations. Can you activate your pelvic floor or inner core without any tension developing in the shoulder girdle? While laying on your back with knees bent, hands by the side, either become aware of or ask someone to put their hands on your trapezius muscles or shoulder girdle. Activate the pelvic floor, keep the pelvis level and still and lift one foot off the
