In Praise of Chair Yoga

by Nina

Recently we’ve been featuring some yoga poses you can do while seated on a chair, such as a chair twist, backbend and forward bend. We’ve been offering up these poses as “office” or “travel” yoga, for those times when you don’t have the space or option of practicing on the floor. But it’s also true there are many people out there who cannot practice yoga standing up. They may have a chronic disease, such as Parkinson’s or Multiple Sclerosis, may have balance problems, or may be too weak to get up from the floor for any number of reasons. They may even be in a wheelchair.

To be honest, it’s only lately that I’ve come to realize what a godsend chair yoga can be for such people. As I’ve been learning more and more about the aging process, I’ve started to understand how important it is to keep moving your joints through their range of motion. If you don’t, you will continue to lose mobility, and very quickly (I watched my own father go through this when he stopped exercising). But if you do continue with your yoga, even while seated on a chair, you can help slow down your losses (and, maybe, depending on your condition, maintain or even regain some mobility). That was driven home to me this weekend when I took Shari Ser and Bonnie Maeda’s therapeutic workshop “Yoga for Neurological Disorders.” One of the students in the class shared her story with us. She is a middle-aged woman with an inherited form of Muscular Dystrophy who had been a yoga practitioner before she came down with the disease. As a participant in a study of people with the disease, she was told that keeping up with her practice during her illness was clearly helping her slow down the progression of her disease. She seemed both very committed to and very grateful for her practice. She was also an inspiration to others in the class, whether they were currently dealing with a neurological disorder themselves or were just, like me, interested in learning to help those who are.

Cat Pose in a Chair

And although I’ve read many books that talk about the benefits of chair yoga for people with chronic illnesses and even helped produce the photo shoot for one such book (Yoga As Medicine by Timothy McCall), Saturday was the first time I did a full practice of chair yoga myself. I have to say, I was eating a little humble pie during the practice, as some of the poses were more strenuous than I was expecting. One particular pose was a revelation to me. We did a version of Downward-Facing Dog where you sit on a chair facing a wall, far enough away from the wall so you can touch your fingertips to the wall when you bend forward. Start by sitting upright with your feet flat on the floor, hips-width apart. Then bending forward from your hip joints, bring your fingertips to the wall and walk them slowly up the wall, until they are in Downward-Facing Dog alignment, keeping your ears aligned with your arms. What a great shoulder opener and upper body stretch! I thought it would be wonderful for anyone who can’t bear weight on their hands due to hand or wrist problems, and I found it much more effective stretch—at least for me—than Half Downward-Facing Dog at the wall. My partner in the class and I decided to dub it “Quarter Dog,” and I hope to take a photograph of it one of these days.

If you are interested in learning more about chair yoga, Loren Fishman and Eric Small’s book Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis: A Journey to Health and Healing has some excellent examples (some even done in a wheelchair). And, uh, yeah, Yoga as Medicine also has a number of good ones. If you know of any other resources for these, do let me know!