How back pains transformed me into yoga teacher.
My yoga journey started in 2015 when the first back pains appeared. Although “manageable” at first, they turned into terrible episodes, which prevented me from running my normal life. Medically, I did not find any cause. So I put everything on sitting too much hours in the office, more than eight per day.
For who has not been through this, a back pain puts you to the ground, from all points of view. And physically and mentally you are controlled by their intensity, which makes you completely helpless. This was the biggest challenge: managing my pains and my attitude towards them, a process that took me a few years.
So I have to rethink my way of moving. I could not do the fitness exercises involving weights, jumping, running, which I loved, and I was ”forced” to do the ones I considered soft back then like Yoga.
I had to swallow every hour of yoga as a pill, like when I was little.
I remember that at the first yoga practice, it seemed to me the most boring activity! Two years have passed since that time when I returned all by myself to the yoga mat, but in pain. I felt “weak” every time I was on the mat because I associated the practice with a medical act, with a downgrade from my sports activity, and so hard to accept the moment I was going through.
I had always wondered: “Why me?”. Why all these unbearable pains?
With Yoga I could go further, literally
I returned to the yoga mat in 2018, a year full of changes on all plans, when I do not know how, but I remembered about Yoga. This time I came with another pain: an emotional one. That’s how I started to taste the first “unseen” effects of Yoga. Acceptance, physical and emotional liberation, peace and a well-being I haven’t experienced till then. During the practice of Yoga, I have developed new senses, I have learned to be careful with my own body and stay in the present moment.
Slowly and without realising, I came to the practice almost daily. Choosing yoga classes from pleasure and without forcing myself. After a few years with back pains and tried all sorts of therapies and exercises I have come to create my own set of movements. And yes, there are yoga postures that release my back tensions and pains, improving my flexibility and mobility.
Yoga postures that have worked for me
If I look back, there are a few steps that, for me, have worked. First, it was accepting the back pain. I understood that they did not come from nowhere. But that they are an accumulation of the stress through which I have been in the last years, the wrong posture when I was in the office, the excess I was doing by sitting too long the physical and mental pressure that I putting on my back, all that I did not express, but only accumulated. I was putting too much pressure on my back without wanting, and I was expecting in return flexibility, freedom of movement and openness.
The second step was to heal these back pains, because they were clearly a somatisation. To change my attitude towards them and take it as an alarm that my body is giving me because something at a deeper level does not work. I reconsidered the fitness exercises in order to maintain my long-term fitness. This is how Yoga appeared, as a last step I did and that completely changed my perspective.
The journey I decided I want more: to be a yoga teacher
In December 2019-January 2020, I went in a sort of self-discovery travel and, visiting the Greenwich Village neighbourhood in Manhattan, New York, I walked by Integral Yoga Institute, and decided to practice Yoga for a month. Since then, I was opening a Pandora box! I had practiced with teachers of all nationalities and various types of yoga that I did not even know they exist. Then I realised I wanted to know more and learn not just practically, but also theoretically.
When I was returning in Romania, I took a 200-hours Teacher Training course at YogNova Sudio, accredited by Yoga Alliance International, where I consolidated my daily practice, I learned about Yoga’s history and philosophy, anatomy applied to the Yoga postures.
Who would have thought that, in fact, the back pains were driving me to another road, both personal and professional? That thanks to them, I am a yoga teacher and I can share my experience, and I can also guide other how to prevent and manage back pains easier.
Unlike other types of movements, Yoga practice brings us emotional balance, anchoring us more in the present, and therefore eliminates the noise caused by our thoughts and stress, which in the end helps releasing the tensions of the back.