Common Ground: Off The Mat

May 2007 | Healthy Living

Off The Mat

Yoga as Prescription

By Todd Spencer

People love doing yoga. When you ask, they say they do it for all kinds of reasons. Because it makes them feel centered or it’s great low-impact exercise or it gives them sexy muscle tone or added grace on the ultimate Frisbee field.

Often these answers can be distilled down to this simple notion: it makes them feel good in their bodies and about themselves.

But what a lot us, me included, likely won’t include in our answer to that question is the “why” underneath how it makes us feel good. This is because even if we somehow, deep down, know that good ancient stuff is happening underneath our skin, we don’t think about it too much.

And I didn’t either, until I got in a car accident.

I ended up settling the hit-and-run claim with the driver’s insurance company. It was a collision I walked away from, but the Folsom Street smashup left me with a crick in the neck, pain in the hip, headaches and a general tightening up of the fascia. One morning I couldn’t rotate my head for a while. I was neither seriously injured or unscathed. Uninsured, I devised my own budget recovery: sessions from an excellent rolfer and about eight Bikram yoga sessions. I normally would not have gone to that many classes in that short of time, but I knew that yoga offered me medicine. It felt like the natural thing to do. Like an uncoiling.

I was always a healthy person who took yoga for reasons like the ones listed at the top of this piece. But when I got hurt, I somehow knew that my body needed yoga — the breathing, the stretching, the balancing, the quieting — to heal up and get right again. And it was for that purpose exclusively that I showed up at the studio and forked out the cash.

When the employee of the at-fault driver’s insurance company got back with me about my claim, he said that no court in the state of California would allow me to claim yoga as a medical expense. I was at once surprised and not surprised. But disappointed completely. Even if car insurance companies don’t think yoga is an acceptable form of therapy, and even if it’s true (maybe it isn’t) that a California jury wouldn’t agree that yoga is medicine, the fact is that a lot of healthcare professionals and yoga insiders do consider it medicine.

Enter the 2nd Annual Yoga for Health International Yoga Therapy Conference in San Rafael, spanning three days this month at the Peacock Country Club, to “celebrate the connection between yoga and healing.”

Twenty-seven presenters ranging from medical researchers and academics to yoga practitioners will deliver talks including, “Yoga for Grief Relief,” “Understanding Pain and Managing Chronic Pain,” “Yoga for Dementia,” “Yoga Therapy for Neck Pain,” and “Yoga for People with Breast Cancer.”

The conference hopes that yoga teachers will come by and add a new dimension to their instruction, that holistic healers will learn more about what yoga can offer their patients and that even absolute beginners will find out first-hand what yoga can offer them medically.

Bay Area doctor Garrett Smith, guest speaker of this year’s conference, believes the therapeutic benefits of yoga for cancer patients both during and after radiation and chemotherapy enable them to successfully “work through anxiety and feelings of isolation.” Yoga’s potential as a complementary medicine — already embraced by orthopedic surgeons and sports medicine specialists throughout Stanford and UC-San Francisco medical centers — will be discussed at the conference, along with its benefits to aging seniors, sufferers of chronic illness and psychological disorders, along with anyone open to the idea of incorporating it into their treatment plan.

Personally, I vastly prefer the $15, 90-minute prescription of yoga to Vicodin. Maybe the health insurance companies one day will accept that. Perhaps with the help of efforts like the one behind the Yoga Therapy Conference, one day they will.

WHAT “Yoga for Health” — the 2nd Annual International Yoga Therapy Conference
WHEN May 18-20, 2007, San Rafael
WHERE Peacock Gap Country Club

Open for the general public, healthcare professionals, yoga therapists & practitioners. To register: yogatherapyconference.com or call at 415.258.2830.

Todd Spencer is the editor in chief of Common Ground.

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