Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back (34 page)

Because your vagus nerve is so directly connected to your abdominal organs, including the stomach, kidneys, intestines, and liver, and because yoga directly stimulates the vagus nerve, your abdominal area is affected by every yoga pose I can think of. Standing poses and backbends stretch and elongate your abdominal organs; forward bends, twists, and abdominal poses massage them, and inversions relax gravitational forces on them. As your organs are stimulated by yoga poses, so is your vagus nerve and your parasympathetic nervous system.
³

Your nervous system's relationship with your core body is also directly affected by pranayama, yogic breath practice.
Three-Part Breath
brings deep inhalations into your pelvis, abdomen, and chest to release muscle tightness, and it encourages the vagus nerve to send your heart relaxing messages through your long, deep exhalations. In
Ocean Breath
, slow, elongated inhalations and exhalations enhance PNS activity and increase indicators of healthy vagus nerve function.
⁴
When you make
your exhalations longer than your inhalations in Ocean Breath, you directly stimulate the PNS and elicit the relaxation response.
⁵

The end result of pranayama practice is that your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops, and you can move into a state of physical and mental calmness that can help you cope with, among other things, lower back pain.
⁶
But this deep sense of relaxation doesn't end on your yoga mat. Remember that you carry some of the calming effects of your practice into your daily life. With a relaxation response in your back pocket, you can be more present to all that goes on in your life—especially challenging situations—and face them with a resiliency that helps you maintain calm, balance, and equanimity.

In this chapter you'll practice yoga poses that tone your abdominal wall, massage your internal organs, and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system through the vagus nerve. By the end of the chapter, your abdomen should feel alive and toned, and I hope your mind will feel calm and relaxed!

T
HROUGH
E
ASTERN
E
YES: THE
E
NERGETIC
V
IEW

Have you ever heard of a yogi contemplating his navel? You may have heard the phrase as the punch line of a joke, but the practice actually has legitimate spiritual roots. I've talked about the third chakra—Manipura—which encompasses the area between your navel and your diaphragm, as it affects both your sacral and lumbar spines, so you know it's a place of personal power and home to the “fire in the belly” that fuels the digestive system and burns up energetic impurities. Not to confuse you, but there is actually a second name for the Manipura chakra—the
Nabhi
chakra, which translates from Sanskrit as “navel wheel.”

In yogic philosophy, the Nabhi chakra is considered one of the most sacred places in the body—even among all the revered chakras. It is the place from which many of the 72,000 nadis, or rivers of energy, originate and branch out, supplying energy to your entire body. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali tell us that a yogi who meditates on the Nabhi chakra “can develop intimate knowledge . . . and can understand everything about the inner workings of the body.”
⁷
Now do you see a new reason to “contemplate your navel”?

Granted, the claims found in the ancient yogic texts often sound farfetched and out of sync with our present-day lives—some such texts state
that if you practice a certain yoga pose, you will be free from all diseases and can safely eat poison! Such claims are not, of course, to be taken literally. But when I think “outside the text,” I become quite curious about what the ancient yogis discovered in their practices, and I want to know about my body what they knew about theirs.

Practicing yoga with mindfulness on the Nabhi chakra, the navel wheel, can especially help you gain this type of insight. You may come to understand why you stand a certain way, why you habitually collapse here or protect there, where you carry stress and tension—and most importantly, how you can undo unhealthy postures and habits.

So let's contemplate our navels. Have you ever had what you'd describe as a “knot” in your stomach, when you were nervous or angry perhaps? According to yoga philosophy this feeling is called a
granthi,
which translates as “knot or hardening.” Another translation I like is that a granthi is a “complaint.” When you experience a granthi, your body is talking to you, complaining that something is stuck! It's your job to help it become unstuck so that your prana, life force, flows freely through the Sushumna energy channel and rises up toward the crown of your head.

One of the most common granthis, the
Brahma granthi,
lies directly inside the navel region. This is no coincidence—in Hindu theology, Brahma is the manifestation of universal energy and the creator of the cosmos. Similarly, your navel is the source of creation in your physical body because it was your lifeline—through the umbilical cord—when you were in your mother's womb.

Your abdominal area is home to a number of Ayurvedic marma points, the energetic points that sit along your nadis. A diagram of these points would look somewhat like a constellation. There's one at the center of your navel, appropriately called the Nabhi point, and four more points that radiate diagonally outward from there. According to Ayurvedic science, stimulation of the Nabhi points kindles your inner fire (
agni
in Sanskrit), regulates all the functions of the abdominal organs, relieves abdominal pain, and stimulates digestion and elimination.
⁸
This might sound familiar, and it should, because the profound work of the abdominal marma points is similar to the influence of the vagus nerve we discussed earlier in this chapter.

To complete our Eastern view of the abdominal core, let's revisit the concept of
agni
. According to the Ayurvedic tradition, agni is the fire of digestion and metabolism that exists in every cell, every nadi, and every internal organ in your body. It regulates body temperature, aids in digestion
and the absorption of food, and transforms food into energy.
⁹
Yoga practice aims to awaken and balance the intensity of agni so your metabolism and digestion become even and stable.

Agni mainly resides at the lower end of the Sushumna energy channel. But it also combines with the energy of the abdominal area, where it's called
Jathara agni
(stomach fire), and rises up through the whole Sushumna. As it moves up toward the crown of the head, your fiery agni burns up energetic impurities as you inhale and releases them as you exhale, cleansing and purifying your energetic body and bringing both your body and mind to a place of clarity.

U
NITING
E
AST AND
W
EST: THE
H
OLISTIC
V
IEW

Now we'll turn to a concept from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to help you see your abdominal core as a powerful meeting place of your physical and energetic bodies. Yoga Sutra 2.1 discusses the concept of
tapas
—“austerity” or “purification” in Sanskrit—as one of the main components of what the text refers to as “the yoga of action.”
¹⁰
The Sanskrit word
tapas
also translates as “heat, burning, that which burns all impurities, self-discipline.”
¹¹

Since we've already discussed the heat of agni, you can probably quickly see that there's no better place in the body to pursue tapas than the abdominal core. In this chapter, you will notice more meditative practices than in previous chapters. That's because in addition to physical poses that will tone and strengthen your abdominal core, we're after the heat, the profound focus and discipline, that will keep you strong in your innermost core as well as your physical midsection. In short, we're after tapas.

In the context of yoga practice, tapas is the motivation that gets you onto your mat and keeps you there despite the unrelenting tug of iPads and text messages. It's the inspiration that led you to take your first steps toward wellness. It's the reason you opened this book. Tapas generates inner heat and the self-discipline to allow yourself—both your body and your mind—to become refined. Your mind quiets and you can access your inner self, the part of yourself that is larger than who you think you are. You can access, if I may, your very core. Practice your yoga with this kind of focused attention on your inner self, and your experience will become deep and rich, a living meditation on the path to oneness and wellness.

I said earlier in this chapter that we aren't chasing a six-pack abdominal
area, chiseled by countless crunches and sit-ups. I meant it! As you work your way through the meditations and exercises in this chapter, remember that what we're really looking for is healthy, disciplined progress toward abdominal tone.
Healthy
really is the operative word, because it is possible, even easy, to overdo abdominal work, leaving you at risk of overtightening your psoas muscles, pulling your lumbar spine into lordosis, or worse. If you're in a rush to achieve some standard of abdominal “perfection,” you really aren't in a good place to give your body the gift of tone, balance, and wellness. So proceed mindfully, and carry this mantra with you throughout your practice: Do your best, then rest!

And stay in touch with your inner fire. Your practice starts with a Fire Meditation that will connect you to your agni. When you practice the poses in the rest of the chapter, remember to focus on the flow of your breath and energy in your abdominal area in order to feel the heat you created, and let it help you concentrate and purify your source of personal power. I hope that along your journey you'll find what can be a profound mixture of the physical energy that tones your abdominal core and the vital energy that tones and purifies your internal organs and energetic channels.

Y
OGA
P
OSES FOR A
H
EALTHY
A
BDOMINAL
C
ORE

Ask and Listen: Preparation for Practice

Fire Meditation

Sit comfortably on your mat or on a blanket with your legs crossed. Your legs and hips should be relaxed. If there is tension in your inner thighs or abdomen, support your knees with blocks. Relax your shoulders and neck. Feel free to sit against a wall for extra support.

Place your hands on your abdomen. Inhaling through your nose, mindfully observe as your breath moves down through your throat and chest, into your abdomen, and down into your hips. Feel your whole abdomen gently expand and spread outward. Exhale completely from your hips through your abdomen, up through your chest and throat, then out through your nose. Feel your abdomen gently softening back toward your spine. Feel each of the next three breaths deepening and lengthening, until you
feel your whole abdominal cavity filling with prana as you inhale and completely emptying as you exhale.

Visualize your inner fire, your agni, as a flame born in your abdominal area—a beautiful elliptical light that illuminates your inner self. As you inhale, visualize the flame pointing down toward your hips, and as you exhale, visualize the flame turning upward toward your chest and throat and out your nose, following the flow of your breath. With each inhalation, visualize yourself “fueling your fire” and watch its flame consume the impurities in your body. With each exhalation, visualize releasing the ash of what has been burned out of your body as the flow of your exhalation turns the flame upward and out into the clean, fresh air of the room.

Repeat this Fire Meditation for ten to twelve breaths. With each new breath visualize your body becoming a clean, clear vessel of life force.

“Knit–Your-Abdomen” Meditation

Now you'll explore how to find and engage your abdominal muscles, layer by layer. Lie down with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Your lower back should be comfortable; if it isn't, support it as shown in the
Deep Hip Meditation
. Place your hands on your abdomen.

Layer 1: Rectus Abdominis

Keeping your hips on the floor, lift the tip of your tailbone slightly upward, just enough to angle your pubic bone toward your navel, shortening the distance between them. Feel your lower abdomen and navel moving down toward the floor. Then shorten the distance between your navel and your lower ribs. You should start to feel the rectus abdominis—the long muscles that run from your pubic bone to your breastbone—becoming active and engaged.

Layers 2 and 3: Obliques

Perhaps you remember that earlier in this chapter I used the image of your abdominal wall muscles acting like woven layers of mesh that support your abdominal organs and lower back. Now imagine that you are “knitting” back and forth across your abdomen, drawing the fronts of your hip bones
toward each other so that the front of your pelvis narrows, and drawing your lower ribs toward one another to narrow the distance between the right and left lower ribs. The layers of mesh should knit together and feel snug without a feeling of muscular gripping (you should be able to breathe with ease). With this action, you will access the next two layers of muscles, the external and internal obliques. These are the muscles that run diagonally across your abdomen and connect your ribs and your hip bones. When they become engaged, you can feel your abdominal wall moving toward its center—your navel.

Slowly straighten your legs one at a time while you maintain the knitting action of your abdominals. (If you placed a folded blanket under your lower back, you'll need to take it away.) When you lie down flat, feel that with your abdominals engaged, your lower back's arch is elongated rather than overdone, and that it is supported by the actions of the abdominals.

Before you explore the deepest layer of abdominal muscles in the next step, take a moment to check in with your lower back. If it is comfortable and happy, you are good to go. If not, return to the bent-knee position and keep your feet on the floor. You'll skip layer 4 until your lower back feels comfortable. In the meantime, you can enjoy the feeling of your abdominal core becoming alive and active by finding layers 1, 2, and 3.