The Complete Guide to Fibromyalgia by Sharon Ostalecki

Healing Through Yoga: Sarah Bates, M.A., O.T.R/L, R.Y.T.-500

Yoga means "union" - connection, joining. Yoga is that shining moment when body, heart, consciousness, and spirit are all awake, present, and aligned with each other and with the universe. The traditional practices of yoga - a set of ancient disciplines developed over the past 6,000 years - form a network of paths leading to that goal.

In a way, yoga is the opposite of fibromyalgia. In fibromyalgia, the body is painful, fatigued, and clumsy; the heart is sad or out of touch; the consciousness is clouded with brain fog; and the spirit is trapped in an unsatisfactory life. Every part is pulling in a different direction.

Yoga practice gives us tools to relate to our body and life in a new way, a way healthier for the body, happier for the heart, clearer for the head, and more peaceful for the spirit. Yoga can be practiced by people with mild, moderate, or severe fibromyalgia. In this chapter, I explain how to begin the practice of yoga at each level.

How and Why Yoga Helps Relieve Fibromyalgia

Leading medical authorities now recognize fibromyalgia pain as involving central sensitization, a malfunction of the pain processing centers in the brain and spinal cord. Unfortunately, this not only causes pain, but also limits the brain from having normal sensations.

The brain uses normal sensations to guide bodily movement and posture. For example, the brain controls balance by reacting to normal sensations from the inner ear, the eyes, and the body's proprioceptors (sensing position) and kinesthetetic receptors (sensing movement) in all the joints and muscles. From these combined sensations, the brain puts together an internal image, or map, of the body's position and what it's doing right now. Then it uses that body map to guide our actions.

Pro athletes have exceptionally accurate body maps in their brains; for example, they can sense exactly where to reach up a hand to catch a ball. Normal people have a fairly accurate body sense. But for people with fibromyalgia, the body sense is distorted by pain. We can't quite feel where our bodies are or accurately sense our rate of movement. So we are "clumsy." We drop things and bump into things, frequently injuring ourselves.

Repetitive movements and exercise in poor alignment cause pain, which leads to exercise-related flares (sudden worsening of fibromyalgia symptoms). So we become afraid to move and exercise. Then we ache, because the tissues are deprived of oxygen by low muscle tone and immobility. All this pain makes us afraid to use our bodies. We become tense and anxious, so we move clumsily and re-injure ourselves. We curl up in a protective fetal position to sleep or support ourselves with numerous pillows, never lying flat to fully open the chest. Doing this contributes to shallow breathing, which in turn contributes to hypoxic muscle pain and aching. All this leads to poor circulation, which causes tossing and turning to get blood to all areas. This unconscious shifting deprives us of deep sleep. Fatigue contributes to pain, clumsiness, and brain fog, which contribute to more injuries and even more pain - a vicious cycle.

Yoga can help with all these problems. Breathing practices increase the oxygen supply to the tissues, reducing aching. Increased oxygen to the brain can help clear brain fog. An exercise done slowly with meticulous attention to posture and alignment, yoga postures allow us to exercise without micro-injuries, thus reducing the chances of exercise-related flares. By constantly varying your yoga practice (which is easy to do, because there are many yoga poses, so you needn't repeat the same ones daily), you avoid the hyperpathic pain triggered by repetitive motions. By learning new postures and movements, you provide new sensory input to the brain, thus bypassing the learned pain patterns of allodynia and learning new ways to feel your body. By learning deep relaxation skills, you improve your sleep. Also, by exercising regularly, you improve your muscle tone and circulation, providing adequate blood supply to all your muscles so you can sleep better.

By starting at a simple level, you gain confidence in yourself and in your body. As you gradually but steadily advance in your practice of yoga, you grow stronger in every way.

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