A Healing Journey with Yoga

In 1991, after I had been practicing yoga for two years, my colitis flared up. My doctor had told me that colitis comes back at intervals and that everyone has their own period of return. It looked like mine was two years. I was devastated and flew home to New Jersey to see my doctor and start treatment.

Over the next three weeks, my symptoms persisted, even with the treatment. I began again to lose weight and become lethargic. Two years earlier Dr. Brenner had told me that when the symptoms returned they might be more difficult to control. He had even mentioned the possibility of surgery and a colostomy bag. I was sad and scared.

The doctor had also told me that the medicine would make me temporarily sterile, but that I could go off it later in life when I wanted to have children. Even at age 19, when I felt as close to having children as to retiring, this side effect disturbed me. Something that made me temporarily sterile seemed a pretty harsh substance to put into my body.

As fate would have it, though, I needed the meds for only a little longer, because the following week something unexpected and somewhat miraculous happened.

One evening in October 1990, I noticed that my symptoms were worse on days that I had skipped yoga. And I wondered, therefore, if doing more yoga would lessen the symptoms. For me, this was a giant leap. I had never heard of a mind-body connection. I had no clue that the choices I made could affect my health.

Once I made the connection, I decided to medicate my condition with yoga. I self-medicated with four Sun Salutations, followed by 10 minutes of deep relaxation, five times a day.

Taking these 20-minute yoga breaks five times every day was a huge time investment. But it felt like the right thing to do.

I was a man on a mission. I was Rocky in Rocky IV.

And my effort proved worthwhile.

Because three days later, my symptoms were gone.

GONE!

No losing weight and becoming lethargic. No medicine that made me sterile. No colostomy bag.

I was elated.

It actually makes perfect sense that yoga would help colitis. Sun salutations involve a repeated sequence of forward- and backward-bending yoga postures. These poses stretch, relax, and massage the muscles and organs in the abdomen and stimulate circulation and energy flow—all of which increases oxygen levels and improves cellular waste removal.

Furthermore, colitis is an ulcer in the colon, and like any ulcer it is affected by and possibly even caused by stress. Exercise, and especially gentle exercise paired with deep, relaxed breathing, triggers a parasympathetic nervous response (referred to as a “relaxation response”) that helps relieve the stress. Many people, like me in 1990, spend all day in a sympathetic nervous state (a fight-or-flight stress response), and yoga literally resets the body’s stress switch from stress response to relaxation response.

Yoga also helped me gain awareness of my body and my belly so that I could notice when I was tensing up and then release and relax those muscles. In addition, yoga taught me to stand straight rather than slouched over. I used to stand like Bull in Night Court. Perhaps I didn’t want others to feel small, or maybe I was just trying to hear my girlfriend, who measured in at a grand total of four-foot-eleven.

Better posture is good for the organs. Picture your colon or liver working hard but being squished in an awkward position between your hipbone and ribs as you slouch over a computer. Now picture your organs resting freely in your body. Uncramped, they have better circulation and are more able do their jobs. Indeed, improving posture to uncramp the lungs is the first thing singers are taught: “If you want to project your voice you need bigger lungs, so stand up straight.”

You can try this right now. Slouch and try to breathe a slow, deep breath. Then do the same thing while sitting up straight. In fact, a full, relaxed breath, impossible while slouched, actually triggers a relaxation response.

Ten minutes of deep relaxation five times a day would change anyone’s life, whether or not he or she suffered from colitis. Imagine how relaxed and focused we’d all be, all that tiredness and irritability gone. I think we’d see the end of all war and hostility, a full-scale Age of Aquarius, if we all rested for 10 minutes every three hours.

Sun Salutations massaged my muscles and organs, moved things around, broke up the blocks, and allowed some of the pooled energy to flow and release. This gave my colon wall a chance to heal itself, just as a cut on my finger would mend on its own. As the famous physician of integrative medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil, states, “Wounds heal by themselves. . . . If we want to foster healing and promote health, we should . . . encourage the body’s own, innate mechanisms of self-repair.” Stretching, relaxing, resting, reducing my stress level, exercising, improving my circulation and energy flow, and straightening my posture were supporting this innate process in my body.

Find out about upcoming programs with Brian Leaf at Kripalu.

Brian Leaf is a Kripalu Yoga teacher. This article is excerpted from his book  Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi: My Humble Quest to Heal My Colitis, Calm My ADD, and Find the Key to Happiness. He is also the author of Misadventures of a Parenting Yogi: Cloth Diapers, Cosleeping, and My (Sometimes Successful) Quest for Conscious Parenting.