Scoliosis and Yoga: My journey in healing

Over the years I have developed my own way of doing yoga for scoliosis... It's called:

"Pretend you don't have scoliosis, focus on your breathing and practice, practice, practice!"

Just because you can see that someone is crooked doesn't mean making it look straight is going to fix anything.

A very high level of body and core awareness is needed to refine postures in this way, rare in teachers, let alone students.

Fixing someone with scoliosis from the outside can also confuse their understanding of basic foundations, and throw them off course. Plus, we tend to overemphasize limited aspects of technique in Yoga classes as being really important, many of which I've found unnecessary or counterproductive.

At intermediate stages of practice, you can start to refine things. For instance, just because my right leg goes behind my head easier than my left leg doesn't mean I should exploit that asymmetry. It's often best to work more with what doesn't come as easily, or just don't do that extreme range of motion at all.

Another thing we have to look out for is excessive internal rotation in hamstring stretches, especially seated forward folds (such as triang mukai eka pada). Letting the leg be slightly turned out (external rotation) might be the proper condition of the posture to protect the hip joint. Keeping your back straight as possible in these postures is good advice when you're stiff, but gradually hurts the hip joint once you're flexible... Work with slower and fuller exhalations and abdominal power to round the lowback when your hamstrings are flexible (this is technique for handstand press as well).

And of course, if you do Lotus posture, alternate which leg is on top from day to day. Left leg up first with the left sit bone elevated on a towel, in my case, directs the expansion of the breath into restricted areas on my right side. Pretty cool stuff.

Let the hips move with you in all postures, and leave wiggle room between techniques. Be fluid in your postures and transitions. For me, this has been key to stop stressing the SI joint, which can over-mobilize by "keeping the hips fixed."

I owe my practice and understanding to the first teacher who stopped trying to fix me from outside and taught me to pay more attention to my breath. In essence she understood her role was to encourage and support a love for the practice. When it comes to posture and movement, a great teacher leads you to your own inner-teacher.