inMotion Magazine

Living Healthy 39 Have you been thinking about trying yoga as an amputee? Yoga is now practiced by nearly 36 million people in the United States. With over 2 million amputees in the U.S. alone, there is much opportunity to add yoga to your health and wellness routine. You don’t have to be an athlete to practice yoga. In fact, you don’t even have to have limbs! All you need is you, your breath, and curiosity to receive its benefits. Yoga is thousands of years old, and yet it is a timeless approach to wellness. It incorporates stretches, breathing techniques and specific poses to strengthen, balance and revive suppleness and health in the body, as well as activities to reduce your stress, relax your mind, heal your pain and increase your vitality. Yoga helps you restore your sense of you after limb loss by integrating tools to clear the mind of unhealthy thought patterns, build a compassionate relationship with yourself and reclaim your true essence. A typical yoga practice involves centering, tuning in to your inner world, with meditation and breathing that aligns the mind and body together. After centering, the practice continues with deep, abdominal breathing that increases circulation and respiratory function while also invigorating and energizing the body and the mind. From breathing, we move into warm-ups to prepare the body for the movements and poses to follow. Then come the poses. Each pose has a purpose, from learning how to balance on one leg in Tree pose, for example, to bending forward in Standing Forward Bend to release tight hamstrings and relax the central nervous system. Every yoga session ends with relaxation, a time to absorb what you have practiced. What I find most special about yoga is its attention to the sacredness of every moment, a reminder that we are all part of something bigger and more beautiful than we could ever imagine. Yoga can be practiced at home, a fitness center or a yoga studio. Many amputees prefer to take some private yoga online or in person with a yoga professional before attending a group class, in order to feel safer and more confident about yoga for their type of amputation and prosthesis. When practicing at home, there are many options: yoga books, downloads and online videos are great resources. In a studio, it is better for amputees to learn from an experienced yoga teacher, especially someone who is knowledgeable about adaptive yoga. Some amputees wear their prosthesis the entire time. Some take it on and off, while some wear no prosthesis at all, using crutches or a wheelchair Mountain Pose A Mountain Pose B Mountain Pose C