It's a Stretch But It Sounds Good To Me

The Yoga Conference and Show rolled into the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from Thursday March 26 to Sunday March 28. The more serious 6-hour workshops took place Thursday and Friday. I thought about attending but they sounded very intensive. As well, the total price was getting expensive.

I ended up taking two 2-hour workshops. The first one was with Sadie Nardini. She is a reasonably well-known Yoga teacher who has her own style of yoga called "Core Strength Vinyasa Yoga". In fact, I was taking the workshop because I wanted to meet someone I've been watching on youtube for about 2 years.

Vinyasa Yoga is also known as flow yoga where you take a series of postures in a flowing manner. Sadie emphasizes "Core Strength" in her postures. In yoga, your core involves engaging your Mula Bandha (or root lock), containment of your abdomen, and usage of your psoas. Superficially, you can feel your Mula Bandha if you squeeze the muscle at your perineum to stop yourself from peeing. Officially, it is a little deeper inside your body. The psoas are muscles that are attached to the front, inner thighs, which wrap around your pelvis, and attaches to the back of your lower ribs.

The workshop was about engaging your core when doing inversions such as headstand, shoulderstand, handstand and arm balances.

For example, the woman in the yellow top and black-striped shorts is not engaging her core here and so her Bakasana (or crow pose) is low and flat. Furthermore, she is resting her knees on her arms/elbows.

This woman is engaging her core including her psoas, allowing her to round her back, pulling her legs tighter to her body, and straightening her arms. Her legs are not being supported and, in fact, are being used to squeeze her arms together.


Engaging your core allows you to lift your legs into headstand without kicking up, which is a dangerous action and may damage the small bones in your neck. It means that your back doesn't sway in or your belly explode out, leading to greater stability. The same is true for handstand.

Of course, I knew all this before. The hard part is practicing it. It's easy, and tempting to just propel your legs up the wall, especially in handstand or just balance your legs on your triceps in crow. Using your core is hard and exhausting, even if your legs are still on the ground. And since it's likely your legs will stay on the ground, it's frustrating and feels like a step backward too.

Sadie is a great instructor, and strong in her poses. I liked that she admitted that in her own history, she was quite advanced in her other yoga postures and yet, was still a beginner in inversions because of her fears. This, combined with pride/ego, meant that she wasn't willing to go to the "beginner" classes to learn inversions but wasn't proficient enough for the "advanced" classes. Eventually, she overcame her fears. But because she came late to inversions in her practice, she can empathize with our apprehensions and her instructions do not assume that we were all natural gymnasts and circus folks.

This workshop, like many yoga events, was mainly female. In fact, I was only 1 of 2 men in a group of about 50. There was a high percentage of young, attractive women. I'm not sure how many were teachers and how many were just interested students.

In contrast, the second workshop, although still predominantly women, had a larger age range with most in their 40s or 50s. I guess treatment for lower back pain isn't high on your list when you're young. At first, I was unsure about the instructor, Tias Little. He currently has a Crispin Glover look that was a bit disturbing, and kept saying "mmmkay" like Mr. Garrison from South Park. But he was a fount of knowledge and I thought the workshop was very useful.

There are a number of potential causes for lower back (or lumbar) pain. Firstly in most people, the vertebrate column is typically not perfectly aligned or the sacrum, the bone that the vertebrates end at, is not even or balanced. So there is unnecessary pressure on the lumbar causing discomfort. Misalignment also strains the anterior longitudinal ligament, which runs from the sacrum along the spine to the skull, which may induce headaches. Tightness in the muscles, ligaments, and fascia that attach the sacrum to the pelvis and other organs restrict blood flow to the lower organs (potentially leading to some medical conditions), squeeze the large colon (causing constipation or difficult bowel movement), and put pressure on all the nerves that pass through the 8 openings in the sacrum (leading to chronic pain or discomfort in the lower body and legs). Shortened psoas muscle (which attaches to the lower ribs and run through the pelvis) from activities such as sitting also put undue pressure on the lumbar.

We engaged in a series of very simple, gentle non-force exercises. They are meant to loosen and stretch the areas of lumbar, sacrum, pelvis, and hip, and to even out any misalignment. Non-force means that most were done on our back or stomach, so we do not have to use our muscles to resist gravity. The movements were small and subtle so that one, there is no strain on the muscles and joints, and two, so that we train our senses to detect the positioning of these bones and any misalignment or unevenness.

It may be placebo or coincidental but I noticed several improvements immediately. First, my lower back felt great and free of soreness. Second, my walking gait, which tends to be splayed out with my toes turned outward, straightened. Finally, for several yoga classes in the following days, I had no problems at all with one-legged balancing postures. Usually there's a wobble here and there but I was straight as a rod and perfectly immobile.

These exercises are so simple and gentle that I think I will be doing them daily from now on either in the morning or before bedtime, as recommended by Tias.