Audio Podcast: Back pain, Dr. Sarno and the Power of Breath (Yogi Leslie Kaminoff)

Hi, my name is Erich Luedtke. I'm a developer at Curable. I suffered from chronic hand pain RSI and many other hard to explain ailments for many years. Dr. Sarno's book The Mindbody Prescription connected many of the dots for me. I have been able to live my life without lasting pain or the fear of pain since.

We've been interviewing a lot of doctors, therapists, TMS recoverers, and thought leaders over the past year. I've got to meet a lot of great people and heard a lot of great stories. Just last week we recorded a new interview with our friend Leslie Kaminoff, a yogi that has taught thousands of other yogis. Some of you may have met him a few weeks ago on the panel after the screening of All The Rage in LA.

In the interview, he recalls meeting Dr. Sarno in the 80s when his mother was going to see him for back pain. Years later, even fully aware of Dr. Sarno's work and all the healthy habits he had from practicing yoga daily, his repressed emotions caused him to slowly slip into his own chronic back pains. It wasn't until his partner stopped him from making an online article that "came to him in a dream" that he was about to make. She proclaimed the article it was "full of rage", and at that moment he made the conscious connection and he back spasm vanished.

He talks about the power of breathing and trying new techniques to break old breathing habits that may have started to form as early as when we were infants to affect our internal states. He explains as we get older, we unconsciously learn more sophisticated breathing techniques to deal with our more sophisticated environments and they are not always good breathing habits.

Listen and/or read the transcript of the interview here:
https://www.curablehealth.com/blog/yogi-leslie-kaminoff-on-back-pain-dr-sarno-the-power-of-breath (Yogi Leslie Kaminoff on Back Pain, Dr. Sarno & the Power of Breath - Curable Health)


This was particularly timely and interesting to me as I've been working on building new breathing tools for the Curable app. As a former singer, I have always been very aware of my breath and the power it has in my body. I was looking at breathing exercises as a way to experience those physical and mental changes from controlled breath in set aside time for meditation and as a way for people who are struggling to think rationally to begin their healing at a more core level.

What Leslie opened my eyes to is that alternate forms of breathing can have profound effects on someone. That breath provides a direct connection to experiment between what we can control and what we can't. That learning new patterns of breathing forces us to confront whatever breathing habits we may have but aren't aware of because unless we do that, we wont be able to do the new pattern. And letting go of old breathing habits is where the benefit comes from, not from mastering the new technique itself.

...and that yoga mixed with Dr. Sarno's knowledge can be a power mix for healing.


Does anyone else see the growing popularity of yoga in America as possibly a good catalyst for making mindbody medicine a more popular modality to treat chronic pain?

 

Hi, elue. I don't practice total yoga, but do like the breathing exercises. Especially the 4-7-8 and also alternate nostril breathing (there are some videos on how to do that on Youtube.) Deep breathing seems to be at the core of all yoga and TMS healing.