Hooray! It’s finally Spring! The sun feels great, the garden calls, and your first thought is, “How can I rev up my metabolism and detox from the cold weather crud?” We all want our bodies to keep pace with the warmer temps and return comfortably to our active lifestyle. Cures for Winter bloat and sluggish digestion are everywhere. Some say eat fresh radishes and take up running. Others tell you to buy special fiber drinks that are supposed to help your body release toxins. It’s hard to keep up with all the products on the market that are supposed to be miracle cures for Spring Detox. Don’t want to spend all that money and have to ingest green froth? Yoga is a sure-fire natural remedy for regaining that Clean Feeling Inside! But, how, exactly, does it work?

If you Google Yoga and Spring Detox at the same time, you will probably get hit with a dozen New Agey Blogs that tell you to do Twisting Poses. While it seems logical that Twists ‘wring out’ your abdominal organs, somehow encouraging them to release accumulated waste, left to its own devices, your body is perfectly equipped to do the job of Winter Detox all on its own - without an overabundance of Spinal Twists. But (and it’s a big but), that’s provided your spine is healthy and you have consistently, throughout the year, practiced a wide variety of poses

The very best way to use Yoga as a support for our bodies during the change of seasons is to keep the spine lengthy and spacious all year long. The greatest cause of slow metabolism, poor digestion, and other organ and glandular ills, especially ones that seem to worsen during times of temperature change, is poor circulation, ie, lack of fresh blood into our cells and metabolic waste out. Other causes arise from poor communication between your brain and your organs, or your brain and your glands because something is impeding the flow of dialogue between them. Both of these types of ‘circulation’, if you will, need a certain amount of spaciousness to occur.

Compression of your spinal bones, (where the nerves exit, trying to make their way to the stomach, liver, large intestine, etc., and where your endocrine glands live, along the front of your spine), is a very common and often overlooked problem, significantly contributing to all sorts of ills down the road. When our spinal bones lose the space between them, our health suffers. Physicians call this condition Spinal Disc Degeneration. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly common as we age, and I am not talking 80 years old. Many younger adults, women especially, begin to show signs of this condition in their 40’s and 50’s, although it often progresses undiagnosed until it causes a fracture in your spine or begets some serious problem.

What can I do about it? In Yoga, we don’t look at any condition under a microscope. We are more interested in treating the Whole Person. If you have organs or glands under stress, ie ovaries, adrenals, or thyroid not working up to snuff, an experienced Yoga Teacher will ask to have a good look at your spine moving in and out of various positions - assessing whether or not you have lost space in the areas of the spine that relate to those particular glands or organs that are giving you trouble.

For example, if you are struggling with a lot of perimenopausal bleeding and fibroid tumors, your Yoga Teacher might look for compression in your Lumbar Spine. If you struggle with chronic acid reflux or are dealing with a cranky gall bladder, she would probably have a took at the level of compression in your Thoracic Spine. But, first, a good teacher would recommend you see a board-certified physician, to rule out any serious medical problem. An ethical Yoga Teacher would never suggest you not take the advice or medications that a bonafide physician prescribes to you.

After ruling out any significant medical condition, she would suggest you practice the types of Yoga Postures that help to recreate the original space between your spinal vertebrae, most especially in the areas of the organs/glands where you are having problems. This will, in the long run, save your height, give you a beautiful flat stomach, and, in the short run, enliven your organs and glands with healthy and vibrant cellular respiration (the fancy name for your body’s natural ability to take the Good In and Let the Bad Out), as well as facilitate much more productive brain-body dialogue through happier, more spacious nerve roots..

What causes Spinal Disk Degeneration and accompanying gland/organ issues? In simple terms, Poor Posture, caused by repetitive movement under the pull of strong gravitational forces, which press down on your spine with thousands of pounds of pressure every day. To counteract this enormous downward pressure, someone needs to get up against the front of your spine and provide some real lift and support. And that would be YOU!

Regular sit-ups are not going to do the job. Don’t let any Personal Trainer put the snow over you. Just lifting weights does not lengthen your spine. Running degenerates your spine even faster than sitting still. Wow, you say. Yes, I say. We need to recruit special muscles, specifically made for this job. Traditional fitness methods do not usually require that you engage these Bad Boys, in the same way Yoga does.

Usually, the collapse of space that we experience in our spine occurs at Junction Spots, where one curve transitions to another. These are the most vulnerable places in our supporting structure. Unfortunately, they are not made strong by our long muscles, like our belly’s six-pack or our long back muscles - although they do play an important supporting role.

These delicate spinal curve Junction Spots are fortified by mastery of your ‘Round Muscles’; think pelvic floor diaphragm, respiratory diaphragm, and even your hyoid diaphragm, a thin piece of horseshoe-shaped facia that supports your thyroid gland. A well-trained Yoga Instructor will point you to the diaphragm you need to work on and show you that the organ or gland that is giving you a fit usually lives very close to the diaphragm she is wanting you to learn to engage.

So, do use Twists in Yoga to ‘Detox’? Yes, we do - but not without integrating the practice of Axial Extension, the formal way of saying - Creating Space along the entire length of your Spine, aided by the engagement of your many (probably unused) Round Muscles. Quality Yoga Teachers seek to help their Students regain lost structural and muscular support in their spines via their diaphragms (in Yoga - Bandhas). That’s the first task. We choose which poses to offer based on what we see in front of us. Reclaiming your natural spinal curves and the spinal spaciousness you were born with is absolute gold to a thoughtful Yoga Teacher. We don’t believe that most of our Students need surgery, drugs, or lengthy repeat chiropractic visits to correct what is, basically, a construction issue.

If you had lost support for the foundation of your home, and one of your windows was leaking as a result, you wouldn’t just go out and buy a new window, paint a wall, or paper over that spot. You would get in there, down and dirty, and find out what the heck was going on at the root - fix it, and then move up from there. In quality Yoga, this is what we are all about - teaching those who come to study with us how to re-create their natural Spinal Curves and enjoy the resulting return of spaciousness between their vertebral discs. At that point, Spring Detox is not even really needed. The Body is handling things quite well. And once the spine is well-supported and healthy, Twist Away!

There’s one other real plus from working on your mat in this way. After years of not using your diaphragms properly, you will also often develop problems in the shape and directionality of the curves of your spine, not just loss of height and organ/glandular problems. Has anyone ever told you that you suffer from a ‘reversed lumbar curve’ or ‘forward head posture’, or ‘dowager’s hump’? Engaging the appropriate regional diaphragms in your body will go a long way toward healing what is wrong on a physiological basis (organs/glands) AND heal these misshapen curves in your spine.

But, because it is not an Instant Fix, and occurs slowly, over weeks and months of dedicated practice, we just don’t see droves of people rushing to Social Media, wildly sharing about their miraculous Yoga Cure. And, because we don’t experience the most significant pain/problems of Spinal Disk Degeneration until we are quite elderly, most of us won’t feel the impetus to keep working on healing our spinal curves when things are only ‘mildly wrong’. Those ads for the green froth are just too flashy. Taking up running promises such quick results. Truly, unless you have experienced it for yourself, it seems almost unbelievable that simply correcting the curvature and space between your spinal bones could do anything significant enough to spend all that time working on it.

Sadly, in the race between the Tortoise and the Hare, Yoga is the Tortoise, for sure. This day-in-day-out Personalized Approach to Practice doesn’t offer much glitz, glamour, or greedy green drink results. Usually practiced on a floor that needs washing, between piles of laundry that need folding, it’s the type of consistent health routine that’s benefits show up over time, similar to how a lifetime of choosing broccoli over chips becomes apparent as you head for retirement, healthier and more radiant than anyone you know.

But, that’s the point, isn’t it? Real Deal Yoga isn’t about instant progress, social media, or even miracle cures - even if it does bestow the most profound state of health we have ever experienced. Authentic Classical Yoga is about the Character that is built On the Road to that Radiant Health - the honest-to-goodness Peaceful, Persevering, Passionate Equilibrium that arises - Body, Mind & Spirit - from applying ourselves to something of genuine value over a long period of time.

So, does Yoga help with Spring Detox, or not? The short answer is Yes, very much. But not in the ways you might think. The best bet for never having to think about ‘Spring Detox’ again is to find yourself a quality Yoga Teacher, one who takes great pleasure in helping her students take ownership of their own Mat Time, rediscovering their magical Round Muscles and reclaiming their Spine-Supporting Super Powers, so necessary for the long-term health of our organs, glands, and absolutely regal height.

Stand Tall, Feel Clean & Twist Away!

Namaste, Kate

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