Part OneBy: Jean Johnson for Back1
“I was all stooped over and looked like an old lady. So when I moved to Portland in 1998 I decided I’d do yoga just to keep it from getting worse. The remarkable thing was that I got better and better – and better!” said Kay Harrold. “After two years of practicing with Barbara and Todd, I was significantly straighter and today I no longer have any of that old chronic stuff.”
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Tips on easing into yoga:
Take it slowly
Work with an instructor who’s had good training
Understand that while the body is a marvelous thing, sensitivity, knowledge, patience, and respect are the keys when it comes to practicing yoga poses
Start with gentle styles such as Kripalu, Viniyoga, Iyengar or Integral Yoga. Bikram, Ashtanga, and Power Yoga are generally too vigorous for beginners and inflexible people.
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Barbara Fergusson has been teaching yoga for more than 25 years and began working with Todd Jackson in 1997. In 2003, the pair started the Portland Yoga Arts studio. Jackson, whom we caught up with one rainy Portland afternoon for this story, studied with Fergusson back in 1994. Two and a half years later, after Fergusson watched his progression and commitment to the art grow, she approached Jackson about joining her to spread the word about yoga. Today they team as co-directors. Both are trained in the Iyengar form of yoga and have graduated from the Advanced Studies Teacher Training Program at the Yoga Room in Berkeley, California.The Studio: Portland Yoga Arts
The cream-colored walls of the studio are studded with bolts which hold so many loops of softly woven rope in place that one might not initially believe the loops have anything to do with yoga. But once the full house of 15 students collects their mats, blocks, blankets, bolsters, and wide, webbed purple belts from the room’s corner storage, it becomes clear that the roping is not, as it may strike newcomers, used for some sort of Procrustean bed torture.
Each student has two sets draping above them as they arrange their gear in tidy fashion on the floor – one pair of ropes for lower back and hip stretches and the other ones higher up for working the kinks out of the upper back and shoulders.
It’s a pleasant scene where savvy Portlanders who seek the best go for classes. A mature plant high on a shelf winds its long tendrils across the top of the wall on the end of the room where the teacher leans out on his mat, hands grasping the ropes above him.
Teachers and Students
Todd Jackson has his head shaved. His large, muscular frame rises a good six feet from the light wooden flooring on which he stands. He’s a pleasant man but keeps his face relaxed and emotionless as he leans out into various isometric holds designed to limber up. To his right is the very petite student Kay Harrold, half Jackson’s size, but like him, all muscle and sinew.
Harrold picks up her story about being a bent over little old lady. “For me, yoga has been life changing. I was in an auto accident in my early twenties when I was in graduate school and had a compression fracture in my spine.” She has studied at Portland Yoga Arts for seven years and has recently been invited to teach a few classes of her own. Not at all a paltry achievement at age 61.
“The treatment back then in the 1960s was pretty primitive. They had fabulous orthopedic training, but once they completed the surgery, they said goodbye to you,” Harrold remembered. “So I had chronic severe back pain for 30 plus years that no one could do anything about.”
The Back
“The vast majority of people I’ve encountered develop pain from being seated too long,” said Jackson. “No matter whether we’re in the office at the desk or computer, driving in the car, or sitting in front of a television, the body gets accommodated to that forward bend at the hips and the pelvis. Most people don’t sit erect and so they are using their back muscles very minimally. So the back tends to go into lumbar flexion. What we need to do is spend time opening up the front of the hip joint and the front of the spine – in other words, gently back-bending.”
Gently is the key word here, so before you decide to get up and snap your back into an arch, perhaps a few more words are in order. Words that explain why yoga works the way it does to restore the spine and relieve all manner of needless suffering.
Awareness
“With yoga,” Jackson said in a soft voice that has a quiet, contemplative quality to it, “we first teach students how to determine if they are positioning their back in a way that is beneficial for them over the long term.”
He smiles ever so slightly and his blue eyes crinkle with clear good will, not to mention underlying humor that surfaces every so often. “So we start with awareness in space and time.”
Cosmic sounding for sure, but the way Fergusson, Jackson and their students like Harrold go about locating their places in space and time is pretty straight forward.
“One way we might introduce students to this concept is to have them, while they are seated on their mats, bring their thumb to the point on their spine directly across from their naval,” said Jackson. “If their bones are rounding there, they have lost the natural supportive curve in the low back.”
He continues. “So we would first help the students to feel with the hand where they are, and then with a variety of poses and partner activities, help them work on regaining the natural curvature.”
One partner activity uses yet another of the endless supply of yoga props the studio’s cupboards contain. “We have the student form a right angle to the wall by putting their hands on the wall at waist height and then walking the feet backward into the room so that the spine is parallel to the floor and they are bent forward at the hips,” said Jackson. “Then their partner puts a wooden dowel in place over their spine so the student can feel where they are touching and where they are not.”
Knowledge is power so they say. And once students realize where they are sagging a bit more in the middle than they wish, they can join with their teachers in a proactive manner and take responsibility for bringing renewed vigor to their health. At least that’s how Kay Harrold did it.
“Pre-yoga I couldn’t lie flat on my back. It was extremely painful,” she said. “And I certainly couldn’t lie on my back and raise my arms straight overhead. They would have been a foot off the floor since everything I did back then was with this sort of cinderblock of pain. It was like carrying around a brick all the time.”
She’s not all ossified like that any more, however, as Harrold’s image in the dancer’s pose accompanying this article demonstrates.
It wasn’t only awareness that restored vigor to Harrold’s body, however. And in the second half of Back1.com’s yoga coverage, we’ll hear more from Jackson about the other elements of yoga – strength, flexibility and most importantly, balance.
Continued in Part Two
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