Re: Benefits of Yoga

[Guest guest]

Dawn,

Two years ago I was suffering greatly from CMT-X. I was 40 pounds overweight and

I had a serious problem with trying to move around. All and I mean all exercise,

even the one I actually enjoyed, which was bicycling in the Netherlands where

it's flat, and not in my hometown where every direction is uphill, and the base

elevation of the valley floor is 4500 feet, meaning it's also very hard to

breathe, I experienced as torture. I had no idea how I could possibly lose any

weight, and when I moved to Los Angeles from Amsterdam in 2007, I thought I

faced 40 more years of decreasing physical ability and increasing pain.

I suspect that you are actually doing too much in the way of exercise. Why? That

was my problem for my whole life. Until I took a yoga. Specifically a hotly yoga

style known as yoga tuneup. You can search for that on the Internet, as I don't

want to violate any rules in putting up an advertisement URL.

In the past 15 months I have managed to totally reshape my body, lose 35 pounds,

straighten my back, move my head and shoulders back to where there were supposed

to be by strengthening muscles in my back and neck. Muscles in the neck are very

often problematic in CMT, than a decade ago I had a problem where I could not

hold up my head when I got tired.

Now I have a straight back and the hump at the top which kind of rounded into my

neck is now straight. I have developed muscle actual muscle in areas where I

didn't think I could build muscle again due to CMT and its lack of

communication.

But the results are unmistakable. I am now able to drum my toes. Toes are very

far away from the central core of your body, and usually the place where CMT

starts first... in the feet and ankles and with hammertoe. Speaking of hammer

toe, my toes and my fingers as result of the yoga but I have been doing are now

able to be straightened out far more than they could be just one year ago. I

have professional photographs taken at the University of Amsterdam's teaching

hospital of my hands in 2007. I simply could not straighten my fingers out in

any way like I can now.

One of the scariest things about my examination at the University of Amsterdam

was the doctor showing me just exactly how bad things really were. I didn't even

know people could move their fingers independently left and right with respect

to each other. I could not do that but now I can with certain fingers, and just

like the feet and the toes, the increasing ability, the return of other

abilities lost in previous years, and just generally feeling better and stronger

have all accrued to me as a result of just two yoga sessions per week plus

whatever I can manage at home.

So I was one of the people who believed you could not really get better with

CMT. I got this impression by listening to the doctors and reading the

literature. But my experience with yoga tuneup has put a big damper on my

feelings of helplessness with respect to CMT and its constant progression.

This week when we discovered that increased abilities have now reached all the

way down to my toes, my yoga trainer said, " I will now no longer believe when

you tell me something is impossible. " I was so happy to see such progress that I

agree with her: I simply don't know what isn't possible anymore.

Further, when I left the Netherlands I was in a great deal of pain, and I was

using great deal of pain medication. The yoga exercises succeeded within the

first five minutes of the first session in reducing pain significantly. Over the

months, the amount of pain medication that I need has fallen off to the point

where I was able to eliminate an entire drug, OxyContin.

So even though I'm the last person who should be saying this because CMT has

made life pretty bad for me, at least through the time when I left to go live in

Europe, and also in Europe. CMT prevented me from getting many of the jobs for

which I am qualified and for which I applied, and it prevented me from having

the career that I should have had given what I studied and when I studied it and

where I studied it and who needed that information.

But if you can't get through a job interview without having to be excused to the

bathroom, you won't get a job. That's another thing that the yoga has helped

with. Because of the weight loss, weight which was born mostly around my waist,

which has been reduced from 36-31 inches in a year, there is less stress on the

internal organs. That means there's less pressure on the bladder, so I have to

use the toilet less frequently and I have to use the drug flomax less often to

keep the urgency at bay.

So my suggestion to you is that you find a different way of exercising, perhaps

yoga, and that you exercise less vigorously. With CMT and exercise, often more

is not equal to more.

I hope that helps,