Your body isn't broken — how to keep practicing yoga through pain, injury and hard health seasons.

Reality is so many women feel lost on how to navigate their yoga practice - when health factors are at play. If you have ever wondered, how do I practice yoga when I don't feel my best? Or how to practice yoga in a way that doesn't flare up pain or chronic health conditions. You're not alone.

In this episode, Yoga Therapist and Yog Teacher Keri Marino dives deep into the mindset and methods that will help you make decisions on your practice that honor where you are and help support your health goals. 

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Next steps ⬇️

Grab a free yoga practice to Come Home to Your Body

-> https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome

Start a consistent daily yoga practice in Daily Devotion - 21 days of 10 minute yoga practices plus email support to keep you on track

-> https://thenourishedwoman.heymarvelous.com/product/92272/lessons

Find out how deep your yoga practice is going - a free quiz to help you sort out of you're getting the most out of your practice

-> https://kerimarino.eo.page/deepenyourpractice

Help spread the word. If this episode resonated, share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Connect with Keri or learn more about her offerings at www.KeriMarino.com  and on instagram @the_nourished_woman

A gentle note: The Nourished Woman Podcast is educational and not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Please listen to your body and consult your provider when needed.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:44

Let's just be honest that if you're going to be a long-term yoga practitioner, you are going to come up against some different edges along the way. Or maybe you entered into your yoga practice already with some standing health issues and concerns that need to be considered every time you roll out your mat or choose a practice. As a yoga therapist, I'm very interested in this conversation because I learned early on in my career that certain yoga practices have different therapeutic benefits and contraindications. So, in other words, not all yoga is good for every woman practicing. Some yoga may do harm, and other yoga can help tremendously. And this is a very complex area because the biomechanics, the energetic aspects, the different layers of what's happening when we practice yoga are so complex in and of itself. And then when we start to apply it to you as an individual person with a very specific relationship history and health history and genetic familial things that you've been passed down and have gotten the genes have gotten turned on, like there's just lots here. And so I want to have a very honest conversation with you about how to practice yoga if you have pain, if you have injury, if you have some chronic health issues that are going on, or even more acute illness that's come up. Because it's really important to me that you're able to practice yoga in a long-term way, but in a sustainable way that actually honors your unique body wherever it is today. So we're going to get into a little bit of the nitty-gritty of how to do this and the mindset behind it, and some pro tips that I've seen work for many of my clients who have been navigating these different issues. So the first thing that I want you to do is to honor where you are, not where you were. What I mean by this is that you're going to practice satya, which is the concept of truthfulness. And you're going to be truthful with yourself about where you are with your health right now versus where you want to be or where you were in the past. And this right here is pretty muddy terror, muddy territory right from the start. Because so many of you have this idea of what you want your health status to be with your body. And that doesn't match whenever you're experiencing pain, whenever you're recovering from an injury, whenever you have some chronic health conditions or acute health conditions going on. Inevitably, it's human nature to not love suffering. And some of these experiences are limiting you, or they're causing you discomfort, or they're causing you pain, or they're causing you to experience things like migraines or digestive issues or back pain or whatever it is. And so we have to have this, this like radical honesty right from the start. This is where I am. This is what I'm going through. This is what my body is telling me. This is what my experiences are. This is what my nervous system is telling me. Here's the truth of where I'm at. And that is very important for you to acknowledge right from the start. Because if you're not being honest with yourself about where you are, then you're more likely to exacerbate whatever you have going on in your body because you're not doing that very first step of honoring where you are, not where you want to be or where you were. We need to know what's going on now so that we can take excellent care to adapt your yoga practice so that it will meet your needs as they are right now. And the beautiful part of this is that I believe in your capacity to heal and improve how you feel. And like I believe that in a very large and broad way because I've experienced it personally. I came to yoga with chronic pain and specifically lower back pain and migraines and anxiety and eating disorders. And I've also been through health issues along the way. I recovered from those initial ones, but I've had new ones along the way. I had chronic candida overgrowth, which led to like reoccurring yeast infections. So much fun. But also other things that have come up along the way, like miscarriages or weird knee pain or sacral pain. So, or TMJ, right? Like there's just complications. There's bits, pieces, and layers going on. So, as I'm speaking to you, I'm speaking to you as a woman in on the path and also a woman who's helped other women along this path. So let's just be honest with yourself about where you are and with anybody that you're bringing in to help support you as you apply yoga to your life to feel better. Do you have hypermobility? Do you have anything going on? Do you have some kind of eye disease going on? Do you have some kind of weird thing going on with your heart? We need to know where you are. The next thing is to have an anti-inflammatory approach. And so knowing where you are is important. And also knowing how to practice yoga in a way that's not going to irritate and inflame you is also important. So I want you to have a less is more based mindset rather than how advanced of a pose can I do, like how challenging of a pose can I do. I don't even really like that word advanced, but like how hard can I go versus how much can I accomplish? Like those like no pain, no gain mentality, that's not what we're after right here. I would so much rather see you do less when you're in a time of healing a pain pattern in your body or recovering from an injury or responding to a chronic health issue or an acute illness. I would so much rather you do a lot less and do it well and do it in a way that doesn't irritate your body or your nervous system, then I would rather see you do like huge dramatic poses or really hard things or just challenge yourself immensely. Like this is not the time to do very hard work on your yoga mat. This is a time to do easier, softer work because what you're doing when you do that is actually teaching your body to receive these movements in a way that it can actually relax into, it can soften into, and that it can trust. Ultimately, we want your body to feel safe. So do less and know that that's actually more. And you're not failing if you're not doing the hardest version of a pose or if you're not breaking a sweat. Yoga practice was never meant to be exercise. It was meant to be a place for liberation. And so do less, know that it's more. Trust that you're gonna progress over time. You may not get the fastest progress ever. I'm gonna be honest with you. Sometimes it takes time, effort, repetition. It takes the right strategy in order for you to build the muscle strength and the structural integrity to get the body somatically to work with the mind and all the different to get your nervous system to rewire, it takes time. And so know that you will progress over time. I started this off telling you how much I believe in your capacity to heal. And that if you can put yourself in the seat of trusting that and really celebrating the progress that you're making over time, that's gonna go a lot further for you. Another important thing to note on this anti-inflammatory-based approach is that you understand the difference between pain and discomfort. So, pain, like true pain, ouch, it hurts. I can't relax into it, it's not gonna go away, it hurts me, maybe it hurts me now, maybe I did a practice and then I felt pain the day after, and that lingered and it impacted my functionality. Pain. And then discomfort is different. Discomfort is I don't like the way this feels in my body, or I don't like the way that this feels in my mind or my nervous system. But it's not actually causing me pain. I can take some breaths and sit with this, I can relax into this, it's not going to have negative lingering effects on my psyche or on my body. This is a really important discernment for you to be practicing. Because if you're somebody that already has pain cycles that are active in your body, your reactivity to pain signaling is going to be high. And so as you're practicing, you want to ask yourself genuinely, is this true pain or am I uncomfortable? And if it is true pain, stop immediately. Don't do that. Or if you know that doing a certain movement pattern causes you pain, like and you're actively in a stage of that, not like it caused you pain 20 years ago, but like it causes you pain if you do it in a more recent sense, then don't do that. It's just not necessary. Why would you do that to yourself? But if you're just feeling uncomfortable, then there might be something for you to work through there. It might be something for you to stay with, it might be something for you to do a less is more, but staying at that particular practice and working through it over time so that you can teach your body how to feel safe and your mind how to feel safe around it, and your nervous system and your energy body and your psyche and like your soul how to receive these different practices. And another key part of an anti-inflammatory-based approach is that you have medical clarity. You know what's going on, you've gone to see a licensed medical professional for insight on this issue. As long as that's affordable for you. Let's be honest, that sometimes it can be hard to get answers from doctors or physical therapists, or sometimes it's not always in the budget. But to the best degree that you can, you have medical clarity about what's going on. I oftentimes like for clients of mine that have some kind of pain cycle in the body or some complex medical history to have a physical therapist that's addressed what's going on and that I can collaborate with. I will actually get HIPAA releases on both our ends, and then I'll make contact with that person to talk about my client so that I can make sure that I have medical clarity as their yoga therapist or your yoga therapist if you're one of my clients, and or that I've seen records of what you're doing with other professionals like chiropractors or whoever you're working with. I want to know. If you're my client, I want to know with as much medical clarity as I can what's going on. And I want you to know this for you. Moving on, I want you to think broadly so that you can benefit more. One of the things that I see a lot of women stop practicing yoga because they have some kind of pain, injury, illness, health issues that are chronic going on is because those things came up and then you didn't know how to practice yoga safely anymore. You didn't know how to let your practice meet you where you are. And so you just completely cut yoga out of your life. And if you're listening to this podcast and that applies to you, I know that you're not satisfied with that. I was talking to a woman earlier this week and she was, and she's a new client of mine, and I asked her how she was feeling about getting started with me, and she shared a couple of things. But one of the things she shared was that she's afraid to realize how much she's missed her yoga practice because it's been about 10 years since she practiced because of some health issues that are going on. And so she was describing how meaningful her yoga practice was for her and the depth that she found inside it. And now that she's gonna get back into it, I don't know if there's gonna be some grief or some tenderness that comes up from it not being able to be there all that time. And so being able to think broadly about your yoga practice is really important because it's not just about poses, y'all. It there's so much more to yoga than practicing physical poses. There's pranayama, which is energy medicine, and oftentimes we think of this as breath work. There is meditation, there's mudra, there's working with yoga philosophy, there's restorative yoga, there's all of these different aspects like chanting, there's tantra yoga, there's karma yoga, there's nana yoga. My goodness, there's so many options. And so if you're only thinking of your physical yoga practice as what yoga is, then you're gonna be limited. And I don't want that for you. And frankly, as your yoga therapist or as a yoga therapist, I want my clients to be doing more than asana. That's not where, that's not the gold mine in yoga. Yoga is so much more. And so oftentimes I'll advise clients if they're going through a time when their body is physically more inflamed or they're going through some recovery period, that we're just really adapting how you're practicing. And honestly, I get really fucking excited because this oftentimes is a catalyst for a woman to start practicing in a much broader way than you're used to. So think broad and think beyond the yoga math. Think beyond the physical practice. The next thing is to get true expert advice. I kind of touched on this area. We want medical clarity. So I would not expect to go and work with my regular yoga teacher and to be able to get expert advice on how to adapt my practice to meet the needs of my body. I would want to look for somebody who had more clinical knowledge. And so the facts are that yoga therapist education is regulated in a much different way than a yoga teacher's education is. Yoga therapists are highly trained to be able to have knowledge and expertise in this area. So use the correct professional to help you get clarity on what is going on. And some green lights are that you're gonna look for a yoga therapist who has who really understands both the science aspect, like they're willing to get into the research, but they're also really gonna hold space for your own subjective experience. They're gonna be tuning in, they're gonna be wanting you to listen to your body and to help you adapt and adjust based on the communication of your body. The next thing is to judge less and to have better boundaries. Boundaries are how we say yes to ourselves. And oftentimes when you've got some kind of a health journey going on, there is a lot of judgment. And it's very easy to get tangled up in that web of feeling down about yourself or feeling bad about where you are or feeling hopeless or feeling despair or feeling frustrated or angry. And that's fine. Please feel your feelings. I'm a huge fan of you feeling your feelings. They hold important information. And also when you're practicing, this is not judgment critical brain time. This is time for you to be in the essence of yoga, for you to be connecting to yourself, body, mind, spirit, life, for you to be really in tune and in touch with yourself on a much deeper level. So scrap the judgment. It's not helpful, and have better boundaries with yourself. Feel free to be playful and silly and be like, man, my brain is trying to beat me up right now, and I'm just not going there. Next, I want you to practice discernment. Ask yourself, how does this make me feel? Maybe keep a journal after you practice. Reflect, how did that practice make me feel? Did that feel like it helped? Did any part of it feel tricky? Did I have any results that came from that? Positive or negative? I want you assessing. I want you tuning in and noticing. Is this helping me or is this hurting me? Is this benefiting me or is there something more effective out there? And lastly, enjoy it. Enjoy your yoga practice. Stay at it and know that your yoga practice is healing on so many different levels. Girl, how much time do you have? I could go all day on the healing bit benefits of yoga. And I say that jokingly, but you know, you know, you know, you know, I mean it. So, so, so many different benefits. And that's an entirely separate podcast episode. All right, let me know how this one landed for you. I hope it helps, and I'll see you soon, love.