SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 3/28/07, updated 4/26/12
Not everyone’s cup of tea, actually. Just sayin’.
This article is an expert from my enormous low back pain tutorial.
Meditation and yoga are appealing activities for a lot of people (and a lot of reasons ), and they do have many possible benefits for anyone who chooses to “get serious” about them. However, the reputation and popularity of yoga and meditation is immense, almost oppressive, eclipsing other options in many people’s minds. People feel that they “should” try them in order to reduce stress and contribute to a healing process, and have trouble thinking of any other way of responding to pain and stress. They actually feel guilty for not trying them or for not liking them. Tyranny! Yoga and meditation have their uses, but no one should be feeling guilty about passing on them, and there are other options.
As popular as yoga and meditation are in North America today, they are still not mainstream. (Indeed, they are part of the “popularity myth” of alternative health care.1) Most of my massage clients over the years had only dabbled in them, at best. Nor did they ever report any success more significant than “taking the edge off” their stress or their aches and pains.
If you’ve never been interested in yoga or meditation before, or never really tried it, it may not be a great idea to try to take them up just because you’ve got a new pain problem. Someone with low back pain who has already got some experience with yoga and/or meditating might find it more useful.
Many productive, energetic people find it difficult — almost alien — to invest in subtle or indirect methods of self-improvement, and find the quiet challenges of meditation particularly exasperating. They may like the idea, but still have a sort of personality conflict with it. If so, the learning curve will feel especially steep. It will take anyone some time and dedication to make real progress. The reputation of yoga and meditation is immense, almost oppressive, eclipsing other options in people’s minds. Trying to climb that curve quickly when you’re not sure it’s even a good fit for you, while also coping with a pain problem or overwhelmed by an acute episode of life stress — the very times when people are most likely to “try yoga” — is usually not a practical solution.
Another large group of people who aren’t suited to yoga and meditation: the ones who never liked the idea to begin with! You know who you are, and you’re not alone. Plenty of you suspect that all “that flaky stuff” is a cure that’s worse than the disease. You are more likely to be successful reducing stress the standard “Western” way, by “blowing off steam” with exercise! Which can be a great idea, except that blowing off steam is often not an option if you are struggling with a healing process. In fact, one the biggest stresses in your life may be the loss of exercise, which was the only stress-management strategy you took seriously.
When I was a massage therapist, many of my clients clearly identified this exasperating catch-twenty-two: they noticed that stress aggravated their pain (or perhaps even triggered it in the first place) … yet they had to solve the problem before they could exercise again to reduce the stress!
That’s frustrating. Stressful, even!
Please do consider the option of studying yoga and/or meditation. They are worthwhile pursuits, and they definitely have some potential to reduce stress, back pain, and other pain, and offer you a host of other personal development benefits. But rest assured that it’s just not that big a deal. They are hardly slam dunk cures.2 They are not the only options or the best options. Indeed, as of some new research in 20053 and 2011,4 it is now more less proven that yoga is generally no better for low back pain than standard exercise and stretching classes — quite a blow to yoga pride. Yoga is either entirely ineffective for low back pain, or so unimpressive that it may be disregarded without worrying that you’re missing out on much.
In fact, they even have risks!
Not only is yoga not exactly required, people do actually get hurt in yoga classes!
I have seen and heard about a great many (mostly minor) yoga injuries in my career. And people who go into yoga classes with a problem probably get hurt more often, and may have more faith in the safety of the class than it deserves — many yoga instructors portray themselves as health professionals competent to do yoga “for” conditions like low back pain, but this is a nonsense. Safe and competent care for low back pain is simply way beyond the competence of yoga instructors.
For a while in early 2012, the New York Times most-shared article was a “yoga bashing” article by William Broad, How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body5 — an excerpt from a forthcoming book, describing potentially serious yoga hazards, such as stroke. Broad raises a legitimate concern about a gap between a popular belief (“most yoga is safe and beneficial”) and the more likely reality: some fairly common postures and practices are almost certainly a little dangerous, and there may well not be enough yoga-specific benefits to justify even small risks. (Plus, the rationale for quite a lot of more extreme yoga is just total bollocks, and certainly deserves to be challenged on general principles.)
I don’t think Broad’s piece is particularly “sensationalistic” (as many yoga apologists6 have asserted, of course), although I do acknowledge a couple serious flaws. It’s a given that any athletic activity has both rewards and risks. The problem is that any risks are a really rotten price to pay for many of the the more ridiculous motives for bothering with yoga in the first place.
If you’re not too sure you even like the idea of yoga, the mild but real safety issues are well worth considering.
Okay, admittedly meditation is much safer than playing in traffic or — shudder — running with scissors. It’s probably safer than taking a shower. However, even meditation is not without its hazards. Some meditators will succumb to an unpleasant psychological experience known as a “dark night,” which is like a bad drug trip: an emotional, existential crisis brought on by the mental rigours of seeking an altered state of consciousness. Blogger Gianna Kali explains that this “can be misconstrued as psychiatric issues,” which can lead to some tragic outcomes.
It’s an unlikely fate for the dabbler, of course, and I do not wish to sensationalize a trivial risk. Tord Helsingeng, a Norwegian massage therapist, points out that
‘dark nights’ are relatively rare even for practitioners who are ambitious with their practice, going to silent retreats with 8+ hours of meditation every day for many days or even months etc. If someone has come to such a stage that this would occur — which is essentially an integration problem with the no-self — they would have already managed a whole tool-box of techniques to deal with chronic pain.
“This sort of thing generally happens with more serious pursuit,” Kali concedes, “but the fact is one often doesn't know who might become serious.” Her article on the risks of meditation is worth a look. It makes for an interesting contrast with the widespread belief that meditation is totally safe and the only real option for trying to learn to cope with stress.
I think it is important for people to realize that movement and a bit of quiet time are what everyone needs to feel their best. Often yoga and meditation dogma gets in the way of just basic healthy lifestyle concepts.
— Byron Selorme, Shavasana Yoga Centre, Ontario
Motion is lotion. “Mobilizations” are a nice alternative to yoga for many people. And they certainly don’t come with all the philosophical, spiritual and cultural baggage of yoga. See Mobilize!
For some people, Stretching for Trigger Points gets some of the benefits of yoga, without having to bother with that whole “cult of yoga” atmosphere.
And some people find that strong breathing exercises like bioenergetic breathing are a great way to more literally and directly “blow off steam”: see The Art of Bioenergetic Breathing. There are some excellent methods of reducing anxiety: see Help for Anxiety.
Curing insomnia is one of the most obvious methods of reducing stress: see Save Yourself from Insomnia! There is also a lot to be said for pursuing personal growth: see The Art of Healing by Growing Up. If you have low back pain, there are many other options to consider. In fact, I wrote a whole book about them. There’s also quite a lot more information in the book about the science of yoga as a treatment for low back pain. See:
This straight-talking, heavily referenced tutorial debunks junky low back pain theories in detail. There are no miracle cures here, but about a hundred pounds of science and good sense. Add it to your shopping cart now ($19.95) or read the first few sections for free!
Comments: The bottom line: “This meta-analysis suggests that yoga is a useful supplementary approach with moderate effect sizes on pain and associated disability.” BACK TO TEXT Comments: From the abstract: “Yoga was more effective than a self-care book for improving function and reducing chronic low back pain, and the benefits persisted for at least several months.” However, it was not more effective than a “conventional therapeutic exercise class.”
Comments: This experiment compared the effects of yoga, a normal stretching class, and an educational booklet on chronic low back pain. The primary findings were that both yoga and stretching seemed to be modestly effective, but neither was better than the other. Back in 2005, the same authors got similar results comparing yoga to conventional therapeutic exercise.
