Hi there! My name is Olga Kabel and I am a yoga practitioner, yoga teacher and yoga therapist who is constantly striving toward balance on and off the mat. When you work with someone privately, you have the responsibility to make yoga work for that particular person. To make it possible, you have to learn as much as you can about the student, carefully choose the elements of the practice that are appropriate for him, plan the practice according to his needs and help him integrate it into his life. These are the skills that I’ve been consistently cultivating for the past 10+ years and these are the topics that I write about in my blog .
Lower back pain can show up for all sorts of reasons. While there are some general guidelines we can use to help our students deal with their discomfort, it is very important to try to identify the culprit of their pain. Oftentimes there is one important factor that either causes the pain in the first place, or gets in the way of natural healing. We need to use our investigative powers to try and identify this important factor based on our conversations with the client and our observations. The factor can be physical, physiological or mental-emotional, and it is usually not immediately obvious. Here are some examples of those key factors from my recent work with clients, that helped us figure out what was going on and deal with their lower back pain. Those case studies include sample practices.
Wendy came to see me because of persistent pain in her left shoulder. She was a puppeteer and animator who spent a lot of time leaning over her work table rearranging puppets. She loved her job but was worried that she was slouching too much. She also liked to swim, to go to yoga classes and had recently decided to try ballet, but her shoulder pain was interfering with all those activities.
Below are the records of our work together over five sessions (including the evaluation session). At the end of the month Wendy’s pain was mostly gone. It doesn’t mean though that this type of practice will work for any shoulder pain; so please use your good judgement, training and experience in making those decisions.
