Yoga for Back Pain & Scoliosis: How Yoga Can Help Address Spinal Imbalances

Do you or someone you know live with back pain? No matter the cause of your condition, a yoga practice that helps restore balance to your spine may help bring relief!

In this free download, Certified Yoga Therapist Deborah Wolk, founder of the Samamkaya Yoga Back Care & Scoliosis Collective in New York City, shares her first-hand experience with how yoga helped her to improve her muscular balance, bring her spine into a more neutral state, and reduce her chronic back pain. She now helps her students achieve similar results.

 In 17+ years of teaching, Deborah has helped people with back pain conditions of every stripe find relief through yoga via a strong focus on functional alignment. In this free download, she talks about how yoga can help with pretty much any musculoskeletal issue, by finding space in the joints throughout the body.

 Deborah discusses the characteristics of a healthy spine, as well as her own experiences using yoga to help balance a scoliotic curve in her own spine. We all have asymmetrical patterns in our body, she notes, and a key to relieving back issues is to learn how to develop a healthy balance between the spinal curves, and to elongate and neutralize the areas that are overly curved.

She further talks about the principles for working with back issues with a special focus on working with scoliosis. She discusses why it’s important to create length and balance before moving on to strengthening.

Yoga is a wonderful tool to address spinal imbalances, she notes, but you have to learn how to address them. The goal of practice is to look for that. Not to correct it, necessarily, but to sense the imbalance and move into a more centered place.