Healing Our Backs with Yoga: An Essential Guide to Back Pain Relief
BOOK REVIEW: Healing Our Backs with Yoga: An Essential Guide to Back Pain Relief, by Lillah A. Schwartz
Review by Steven Weiss
In her comprehensive book, Lillah Schwartz explores back pain and its many causes. She provides sequences of asana (postures) that address back pain issues including long/short musculature, arthritis, osteoporosis, scoliosis, sacroiliac problems, and spinal disc concerns. The book is well-formatted, with easy-to-review asana presentations and extensive instructions for each. The author generously shares her vast experience studying and teaching yoga, apparently strongly influenced by B. K. S. Iyengar.
Schwartz discusses basic postures with reminders that back pain relief may best be attained by remaining at these simpler levels and progressing only when possible to do so safely. Abundant photographs represent the book’s poses, and yoga nerds will find the use and translation of Sanskrit pose names satisfying.
Readers can use this book to create a regimen of yoga postures that will effectively and logically address common issues related to back pain. The book’s final sections supply a helpful chart of muscle/asana relationships and photos of asana sequences intended to address specific back pain conditions.
In short, this book is a valuable resource for yoga asana and its applications to back pain. It is available for purchase here.
Steven Weiss, DC, MS, C-IAYT, is a holistic chiropractor and nutritionist. He teaches for yoga teacher trainings internationally and has authored several books, including The Injury-Free Yoga Practice and the forthcoming Yoga Alignment, Principles and Practice.
A version of this review first appeared in Yoga Therapy Today.
Thank you for putting this guide together. In 15 years of teaching yoga, the main complaint of students is about their back pain and how yoga has been the most effective “treatment”. Having a well-designed, research based book with sequences is a wonderful tool for designing healing “back” classes.
I have got to give yoga a try. I have heard a lot of people talking about how it really works and been thinking of trying it.
Useful article tho. Thanks for sharing