Yoga, Breath and Pain Management Masterclass

Most yoga teachers have someone in the class with ongoing back or neck pain, and a private worry about how far to take them.

Ruth Boaler spent twenty-five years running yoga classes inside an NHS physiotherapy department, taking referrals for everything from post-surgical scoliosis to osteoporosis. What she wants for this evening is straightforward. You leave confident rather than cautious.

Practical yoga, breath and awareness techniques for ongoing back and neck pain, drawn from 25 years of NHS clinical practice

Ruth is a retired physiotherapist. She worked in Rheumatology, started a fibromyalgia group when almost nobody was using yoga for it, and helped pioneer Dru’s Backcare and Wellbeing courses with Dr Ned Hartfiel.

She’ll be presenting her experience after working with people in pain, in groups, over years. Its benefits have been demonstrated by randomised controlled trials led by Dr Hartfiel across organisations throughout the UK.

Moving with your breath

When someone has lived with pain for a while, certain movements carry a memory of it and our breathing pattern very likely changes. Watch a student who is wary of bending and you’ll notice the same sequence: hold the breath, brace, then move.

Dru Yoga works well to transform that pattern, with its free-flowing whole-body movements, soft joints, and breath leading rather than following. This is one of the reasons Ruth has used it in a clinical setting for so long.

What we’ll practise

The Elements Sequence. Breath-led, easy to follow, endlessly adaptable, with mudras, breath awareness and visualisations built around it.

Body Scan with Islands of Comfort. Instead of scanning for what hurts, you go looking for the places in the body that feel safe. There are always more of them than a student expects. Resting with these enables you to build awareness and being in the present from arenas that direct you towards ease.

Counting the breath. Counting matters more in pain management than it does in anxiety work, and Ruth is clear about why. We’ll cover several ways to do it, including counting on the fingertips.

Unlocking the abdomen. Many people hold their tension in their belly, and prana doesn’t travel far until that softens. We’ll start here, with a short sequence, before any breathing technique.

Two or three breathing practices you may not have met before. Collected by Ruth from postgraduate breathwork and pain courses. One of them does something rather beautiful with the whole body, and we’ll keep it as a surprise.

What the evening is for

We’re not aiming to remove anyone’s pain, and Ruth would be the first to say so. Success involves desensitising, pacing, building resilience, and coming to understand what pain is doing. Her phrase for the aim is simple, yet incredibly profound: to become the owner of your pain rather than its slave.

She’s also firm that this asks something of the person practising. What actually makes a difference is when people invest ten or fifteen minutes, three times a day, over six weeks or so. This is worth knowing before you offer it to a student.

Grounded in both tradition and current evidence

NICE guidelines recommend supervised group exercise as a first-line offer for chronic primary pain, alongside medication and psychological approaches. Dru Yoga has been doing something close to this for decades.

Chronic pain affects between a third and a half of UK adults, just under 28 million people. If you teach, you are already working with it.

Pranayama carries one further advantage. Ten minutes of alternate nostril breathing gives someone a change they are likely to notice straight away, which is reassuring in a field where most approaches take months to show anything.

Who it’s for

• Dru Yoga teachers who want more confidence working with pain in their classes
• Yoga teachers from any tradition
• Graduates of Dru’s Backcare and Wellbeing course or Dru Yoga Therapy
• Physiotherapists, osteopaths and other therapists curious about what yoga brings to pain management
• Anyone living with ongoing back, neck or musculoskeletal pain who’d like tools of their own

And if you’re coming for your own body rather than anyone else’s, that’s exactly a good reason!

A note on suitability: this is an educational class, not treatment. If your pain is new, changing, or hasn’t been looked at by a clinician, please see your GP or physiotherapist first.

If you can’t make the evening

A recording will be available afterwards, so book anyway and watch it when you have a clear hour.