Unwinding scoliosis with yoga

SACRAMENTO -- To see Kim Wagaman on a yoga mat - her supple spine stretched, her limbs angled with apparent aplomb - is to witness a body perfectly aligned and in harmony with itself.

She's a yoga instructor, after all, so such flexibility is a given, right?

Not in her case. Wagaman, 34, who grew up in Carmichael, Calif., and teaches classes in Sacramento, once was so restricted by scoliosis that she spent most of her teenage years in a neck-high brace.

The curvature made her spine look like a winding country road, veering right in the upper thoracic region, swerving left in the lumbar area. She also had a smaller curve high in her neck and was showing the beginnings of kyphosis, a rounding of the shoulders.

"I made a conscious effort to hide the back of my body," Wagaman recalls. "I'd enter a room at a party and position myself with my back to the wall. There was all this insecurity and denial. And there's this drive to fix the issue."

In Wagaman's case, that drive put her on an unusual path to confronting the condition. Her parents already had ruled out spinal-fusion surgery as too invasive.

So as a junior in high school, Wagaman chose to send the cumbersome "Milwaukee" brace, which she had worn 23 hours a day, to the back of her closet and look for more promising alternatives.

For her, the better way turned out to be yoga. In her early 20s, Wagaman started practicing poses, which led her to study under the leading practitioner of yoga for people with scoliosis.

Over time, Wagaman found that tweaks to standard yoga poses - a change of hand positioning, a more pronounced shoulder twist, a deepening of breath - not only eased pain but strengthened muscles around the spine, leading to better structural alignment. The weight bearing down on her left leg no longer is heavier than on her right side. One hip no longer is higher. Wagaman has trained the right side of her rib cage to return to a standard position.

Her spinal curve hasn't gone away, of course, but Wagaman firmly believes her adherence to yoga has delayed further complications and has taken away whatever bodily limitations she had.

Now, with a 500-hour yoga teaching certificate, Wagaman offers Yoga for Scoliosis workshops. A big part of the classes involves mastering variations on classic yoga poses, such as the downward-facing dog, the triangle and the puppy pose. But there also is an emotional component.

"A lot of us have the concept from our society and culture that we're deformed, not right as we are," she says.

"We try to work through that. You have to accept that your practice is going to be different than others' in terms of poses and expressions."