One of my students has a long standing lower back condition which flared up recently to the point that his doctor thought he had slipped a disc – after a couple of weeks rest he came with a few others of the group to my teacher Karel Koskuba for a 3 hour seminar. Before we got started a couple of other students mentioned their own back problems – so we spent at least the first hour working on a very slow exercise for the back.
The other day I asked how his back problem was doing and this was the reply:
“The back is doing very well thank you.
The Karel visit really did the trick, and motivated me to get back to my training, because I was very nervous about putting any strain on my back.
The chat we had with Karel on standing triggered some thinking, as did the small slow movement over time.
As a result I was standing on Tuesday morning, and about 15 minutes in I noticed a small horizontal muscle group in my lower back was tense, I relaxed it, no idea how, and immediately the hips dropped forward. The back straitened, sciatica disappeared completely, and the tension in my right knee went.
I did 30 minutes standing and felt I could have carried on for another 30 minutes – totally relaxed.
What I’ve noticed now is that my chest is tense, not relaxed and not connected to the rest of me and feels like it’s limiting my breathing – something else to work on next.
– I haven’t had many breakthroughs as big as this and it was a bit of a shocker at the time 🙂 “
