Chrys Kub is a physical therapist, yoga teacher, and Yaapana Yoga therapist. In this interview, she discusses the importance of structural health for alignment in yoga postures, as well as for laying the foundation for health and well-being as we get older.

Also check out Chrys' upcoming online course:

Foundations of Structural Health: Body Reading, Posture Assessment, and Asana Prescription. 

YogaUOnline: When you talk about postural assessment, obviously you’re not talking about yoga postures, but how we carry ourselves as we stand and as we walk. So, more broadly, the term that we could use to describe this is really body reading, i.e. gaining the ability to observe the structural health of a person. Is that a correct way to say it?

Chrys Kub: Yes, learning to read a person’s body, i.e. learning to assess the structural imbalances we all have, can tell you a lot about the students who come to your class. Most yoga teachers need tools to create a better picture of what students need through the their regular yoga practice. Obviously, when teaching privates, this is important, but even in regular yoga classes, this is a useful skill to have. 

Learning body reading is really about broadening one’s foundation in kinesiology and anatomy, two areas of knowledge that are critical for yoga teachers. The anatomy and kinesiology yoga teachers learn in the initial 200-hour programs is usually not sufficiently in depth to give teachers the background information to serve their students. For people working with mature students, i.e. those over 40 and up, this is particularly important. 

It only takes ten minutes to do an assessment of a student’s posture, but based on that, you can determine hat cues they might need for the particular structural imbalances they have. It also is a way to offer students better support in their active poses, and give them restorative poses that can help balance structural issues.

In addition, learning to read a person’s body can tell you not only about their physical body, but also about their emotional and mental body. For example, if someone has rounded shoulders, they may be depressed or hiding emotional trauma from that past. Or, if their shoulder blades are elevated and their chest is thrown forward, they might be a type A person, hard charging and very active. So learning body reading can tell you more than just about a person’s physical body. 

And that, of course, can really help yoga teachers design a practice. Even just while teaching a class, without doing a formal posture analysis of students, you grow in the ability to look at the person and get clues to how to cue a particular person. ‘What would they respond to? What kind of personality might they have? How do they approach the world?’ As a yoga teacher, you have so much more to offer your students in that way.

YogaUOnline: Posture assessment is really about being able to perceive the structural health of a person’s body. Structural health is not a concept that we often hear about in the medical world or the media. And yet, it has some pretty important health implications. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Chrys Kub:  Our body has this wonderful design—when we hold ourselves properly, i.e. when our posture is perfectly aligned, our body can work very efficiently without pain or discomfort all life long. But there are many factors that will cause our body to fall out of alignment over time: Our life experiences, our postural habits, an athletic activity that causes us to overuse certain muscles while other muscles get weak—there are numerous factors in life that will cause us to lose that perfect postural alignment. When that happens, the result can be repetitive stress injury, compromised breathing, back pain, and over the long term, arthritis or other chronic pain issues. 

However, our posture, or structural alignment, has a spill-over effect in so many other ways. For example, think of someone with rounded shoulders—a very common misalignment in the Western culture. Well, that collapses the chest, which in turn compresses your diaphragm, and it makes it more difficult to use your arms without impinging your shoulders. It may also affect digestion, because the organs are compressed. Everything is connected. It’s never just one thing. 

YogaUOnline: Most people with rounded shoulders or other posture imbalances believe that that’s just the way their body is aging, and there’s nothing they can do about it. What’s your take on that?

Chrys Kub: Well, in our society we often assume that most of the apparent effects of aging are inevitable. But there are so many things about aging , which don’t have to happen, and certainly, postural imbalances can be avoided.   

YogaUOnline: Are postural imbalances individual or are there certain common patterns that people fall into?

Chrys Kub: Well, there are definitely common patterns. When you’re new to reading bodies, you may  get overwhelmed when you do an assessment, because of all the things you observe.  But then you begin to notice that certain things follow each other. For example, a rounded upper back will usually also lead to forward shoulders and a forward head. There are certain patterns that you will begin to see. And then you will know exactly what to do to address that as far as asana prescription.

YogaUOnline: It sounds like this is useful not just for people who teach yoga, but something that can be very applicable to one’s own body as well.

Chrys Kub: Absolutely. I’ve learned a lot about my own posture.  As a yoga teacher you may assume “Oh, I have really nice posture. But then when you study more, you’re like, “Oh, I guess I do kinda throw my shoulder forward and the hips a little bit back. So, that might be why I get more easily tired on this side, and keep having pain in a certain area.” So yes, it does help you understand your own body better as well.

YogaUOnline: Tell us about the online course you will be offering. What will you be covering and what can people expect to learn?

Chrys Kub: Well, we will look at normal alignment for each part of the body, such as the head and neck. Then we will look at the most common misalignments for that part of the body.  All misalignments are linked to muscles imbalances. So for each section of the body we are looking at, we will also consider which muscles might be elongated, which muscles might be short, and which muscles might be weakened because they’re in an elongated position. 

Based on that, you begin to see which yoga asanas you might want to use to address those malalignments and help that person change their posture. We’ll be using both asana that engage  muscular energy in an active posture  as well as restorative poses that can help people access a deeper level of flexibility. This is unique as a therapeutic approach; there are many times where we have imbalances because certain muscles or joints  are extremely stiff. The only way to address that is through restorative yoga where you can stay in a supported posture for an extended period of time to allow those areas to begin to let go and release.

YogaUOnline: Interesting. And there is a video you made especially for the course as well. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Chrys Kub: Yes. In the online video that accompanies the course, I give an example of two people receiving a postural assessment, and after the assessment, I take them  through  little mini practice for their issues. The video gives you a real life idea of what you would be able to do with this information on actual clients.

YogaUOnline: That will be extremely useful, because body reading is such a detailed art in a sense. There are so many layers to it. There is certainly a lot that you can pick up from photos, but seeing it in action, and particularly seeing someone like you who have worked with thousands of people doing this kind of thing, is a great way to pick up all the details. There is a lot of things you don’t see when you don’t have a trained eye.

Chrys Kub:  Yes  it does take practice. However, once you have this knowledge, you start looking at everybody: When you’re in the grocery store, when you’re at the mall, you begin look at people and mentally assess their posture. Over time, you’re able to start to integrate this skill and read more and more details in people’s bodies. But until you know what to look for, it’s difficult to even try to do that.

YogaUOnline: Yes, in my experience, it creates another level of intimacy with the body, and opens up a level of perception that you didn’t have before, because, as you said, if you don’t know what to look for, you tend to not see these things.

Chrys Kub: Exactly. And there is such a need for more people who can assess these structural imbalances and help people improve their posture. I have just started working at an assisted living center, and probably 90% of the elderly people living there have poor posture with rounded shoulders, forward head, stiff lower backs and crouched gait.  Once they develop that posture, it affects their energy level, their ability to have eye contact with you, and it impacts their well-being and energy level in so many other ways. 

Hopefully, as we become more aware of this issue, this next generation as we age won’t have to succumb to these changes. So many of these things can be addressed before they become a problem. So hopefully, this won’t be the case when our generation gets to that age.

In this interview with Yoga U Online, Robin Rothenberg, founder of Essential Yoga Therapy, discusses ways in which yoga can help us become more aware of mental patterning that work against, instead of for us. Also check out Robin's upcoming webinar on Yoga U.

Yoga U: Robin, you have been practicing yoga for most of your adult life, and have taken more than six or seven different yoga teacher training programs. It’s clear that yoga is a great passion of yours! Tell us about how you got started and what spurred your enthusiasm for yoga.

Robin Rothenberg: Well, when I started practicing yoga, I was a basket case. I hurt all over, I had absolutely no energy, and I had two babies. If it were today, the condition would likely have been diagnosed as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, but back then, no one knew about those terms.

Then, I started doing yoga. My first exposure to yoga was Iyengar yoga. I started in a gentle yoga class, because that felt like all I could do. Within the next 24 hours, I experienced this wonderful surge of energy, where I didn’t feel so wiped out, and I didn’t hurt so much. So I quickly became a big fan of yoga, and then started going to classes two times a week and then three times a week.

Within a year, I felt like I was waving a little white flag saying, “Okay, I get it. I just have to do yoga for the rest of my life to feel healthy.” And at that point, I embarked on the first of something like six or seven teacher training programs, so that I could learn more, and share what I was learning and experiencing with others.

The whole experience really inspired me to look more deeply into how I was living my life, including the importance of diet and lifestyle for health. Everything affects how we feel. And that transformed just about everything – my relationships, the way I parented, everything.

Yoga U: So it sounds like your interest in yoga was inspired by your own experience of the health benefits, which is so often the case. Is that what led you to be interested in viniyoga and yoga therapy?

Robin Rothenberg: Well, I was always drawn to the people who knew a lot about the body, who did a lot of adaptations of yoga poses, and who could give very grounded explanations for why one person would need to do the pose in one way and another person another way. That always made sense to me—there just isn’t a one-size fits all approach to yoga.

In my earlier years, the people who had the most impact on me were Judith Hanson Lasater  and Ramanand Patel, who is a senior Iyengar yoga teacher, who also is very adept with yoga therapeutics.

Then I went to the first Yoga Journal conference in ’92, and I sat in on a Sutra class  with Gary Kraftsow.  Gary’s class was on the Yoga Sutras, and he was talking about the importance of our willingness to transform habitual patterns that lead to suffering and about cultivating the capacity for self-awareness about how our thought patterns lead to suffering. He was talking about how yoga is a means to see ourselves more fully, with appreciation, gratitude, and acknowledgment that it’s not all about us, and that we are supported by this source of universal energy.

As Gary spoke, the tears started flowing and I just felt like, okay, this is what I’ve always felt yoga is about, but none of my teachers have been talking about this. They’re just telling me I have to put my pinkie finger in this position in Downward Dog, like that’s what it’s about. And it’s not about that for me.

I realized that I really wanted more of that deeper understanding of the inner transformation of yoga, beyond the musculoskeletal positions, the postures, and even the fine tuning of adaptation of posture. I wanted more of that.

That was a life-changing moment for me, a real watershed moment. At that point, I was a certified Iyengar teacher, and I started studying with Gary and went through his viniyoga training. He and I worked very closely together; I went through his therapist training as well, and assisted him with his therapist training as it was evolving. And of course, we co-wrote the protocol for Karen Sherman’s study on yoga for back pain together. So the transition from Iyengar to Viniyoga was a huge turning point in my yoga practice and teaching.

Yoga U: On your website, you say that we all have a responsibility for reducing suffering in ourselves and then going on to assist in the healing of others. Do you feel that yoga offers a particularly useful path to be able to do that?

Robin Rothenberg: I’m a big believer that yoga is an inside job. As yoga teachers, we’re practitioners and students first, teachers second. The best teachers are the most avid students, who are doing their own personal work.

Studying the Yoga Sutras, working with pranayama and meditation, and working with Vedic chanting really helped me personally to shake me free of beliefs and patterns that were causing a lot of suffering for me and for the people I lived with. It helped me become wiser and more compassionate with myself, much more open and positive about things.

Yoga U: Can you share an example of that experience?

Robin Rothenberg: Well, I’m going to tell a story from two different perspectives, yet both are true. The first perspective is that I had a lousy childhood. My mother was clinically depressed; my father, was a driven perfectionist with bad temper, who tended to be physically and verbally abusive. That’s the environment I grew up in. I could never get it right, never be good enough, all of that. I carried that with me through my twenties and through part of my thirties.

The other story is that my mother, by the time she reached middle age and I had young children, was the most loving and wonderful grandmother.  She had really grown tremendously.

At one point, she said to me, “You know, Robin, I have done everything I can to make up for what I didn’t give you when you were a child. I know I wasn’t the best mom, but I’m doing the best I can now to provide a loving support for you and the girls. If it’s not good enough, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull out of the relationship, because it’s too painful for me. There’s nothing more I can do.”

And at that moment, I realized I was the one who was holding on to the past and not allowing her or our relationship to evolve and be in the present.

In the same way, my father is now one of the most loving, supportive, compassionate people. He’s one of my best friends. My granddaughter, his great-granddaughter, adores him. My children adore him. My husband adores him. He’s a very loving and wonderful man and is deeply apologetic for years that he pushed himself and he pushed all of us kind of over the edge.

So there is a tremendous amount of growth in them, and in my ability to make peace.  It’s not that the past isn’t true, but I don’t hold on to that. I don’t hold a sense of being a victim of that childhood or being an abused person. Overall, I feel the compassion that has grown in me with the realization that we have the capacity within us to be the best of people and the worst of people.

The truth is that we’re complex. The more compassion and warmth and honesty that we bring to the table, the more we can truly help ourselves, support ourselves in transformation as well as other people.

Yoga U: Yoga has this wonderful concept of creating space or stepping into the witness, where we increasingly are able to look at our own emotional and mental reactive patterns.

Robin Rothenberg: Exactly. I don’t think I would’ve really understood what my mother was saying if I hadn’t started yoga at that point. I had the ability to say, “Oh, I’m not holding present time reality. I’m living in a past reality and she’s inviting me to join her in the present. If I look at her through the lens of the present, there’s nothing wrong here. This is really a beautiful relationship that is evolving.”

Yoga U: In your upcoming webinar on Yoga U, you’re focusing on how to deal with those patterns of emotional angst, worry, stress, and anxiety that we all struggle with from time to time. You say that certain yoga techniques can help rewire your set points so you’re less likely to react to a stimulus the way you would previously have flown off the handle. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Robin Rothenberg: I teach from the foundation principles of the Yoga Sutras. The Yoga Sutras are all about how to transform our mind, so that we stop creating suffering at the root source, which is in the field of the mind.

Looking at everything through that lens, we can see how our perception colors our reality. As that famous yogi, Mark Twain, said, “We see the world not as it is but as we are.”

Asana can be done in a very introspective way to help us to see our patterns. Our breathing patterns are even more subtle, however, and are more closely linked to our nervous system. And of course, our thought patterns are even more subtle.

When we become more observant of our breath patterns, our thought patterns, and our emotional patterns, we can start to see how some of those patterns really are like pouring kerosene on the fire, as opposed to cooling the fire of our emotions down.

We often have these emotional responses to things that are well beyond what is really being called for in the moment. The yoga practices are about regulating our own nervous system, taking charge of our nervous system, recognizing when things are revving us up unnecessarily, and then using our breathing practices or physical movement practices to discharge that tension, whether that means doing your yoga asana practices or going for a vigorous walk or run.

And, it’s one thing to discharge that physical tension, but you can go deeper and say, “What are the thought patterns that are circulating, that are continuing to throw kerosene on this fire, as opposed to cool it down?” That can help us make more conscious choices about how we really want to proceed, and get us back to our innate wisdom.  I strongly believe that is what Patanjal’s Yoga Sutras and the ancient wisdom teachings are all about—helping us to find our way back to our own innate wisdom.

Yoga U: How will you work with people in the webinar to help create a framework for working more consciously with those kind of mental or emotional patterns?

Robin Rothenberg: In my own experience, I find that that education about how the practices of yoga impact the physiology, the nervous system, the digestive system, the cardiovascular system, and the respiratory system are a useful tool to feel more empowered in utilizing the practices of yoga. It’s useful to know why these practices feel so good; it’s because you’re actually changing the physiology.

So we’ll take a look at what happens in the brain when we get hijacked by emotion, and how yoga practices interrupt those processes and get us back on track.

We will go one step further by working deeply with some specific practices that I’ll be outlining in the video that accompanies the webinar, where we will play with this whole idea of perspective. We’ll be exploring how using our yoga practices to keep our nervous system calm, we can actually revisit some of those emotional trigger points, but from a slightly different perspective, and start to open up the space around how we’re holding feelings.

I’ll also be sharing the teachings about Yoga Nidra. My new CD, Soothing the Spirit, which is a Yoga Nidra specifically targeted to reduce anxiety. That is a little redundant, because Yoga Nidra in general is really oriented towards calming the nervous system and reduce anxiety.

We’re stepping away from the things that make us feel anxious and then stepping towards them to start to build our resilience. Yoga is not about rainbows and sunshine. It’s really about cultivating courage and developing our resilience so that we can handle the things that are challenging with more equanimity. It’s not about just putting ourselves in a little bubble room, where we only have the vegetarians and the soft music and the people who agree with us. It’s about being able to step out into the world with a real sense of centeredness, grace, receptivity, and not feeling fearful or vulnerable, because we’re solid inside.

That’s what I’m hoping to share in the webinar –how to pull on specific yoga practices to work with the mind-body connection to reformat our thinking and create a broader base of understanding, and a greater capacity to take on the adversity that is a part of life. Life has a lot of challenges. So we want to help ourselves to have the great flexibility of mind that enables us to ride the waves of life and not get pulled under.

So in short, the webinar will provide a resource for people, who are interested in learning more about the possibilities that yoga has both for health and healing, and for growth and transformation in life.

This blog post also appeared in Huffington Post's Yoga section. If you feel to share it, please Facebook share it via HuffPost here.

It’s hard to read any yoga blog these days without coming across the lengthy, messy break-up currently unfolding in the Anusara yoga community following the disclosure of Anusara-founder John Friend’s, well, rather philandering ways.

In the wake of the NYT yoga wreckgate, that’s a lot of upheaval in otherwise tranquil yoga world.

Time to take a deep Ujayi breath, and hold on to your center. Oh, darn. There goes another quasi-spiritual leader, who, surprise, surprise, turns out to be just another flawed human being.

While everyone has been quick to de-friend Friend, so to speak, take one step back, and there’s a valuable lesson for all of us in the Anusara debacle, which applies not just those in the yoga community. Without a doubt, Friend went off the deep end, losing perspective and his footing in the process. However, those who enabled his behaviors by structuring for him the pedestal from which these actions could unfold are not beyond reproach either.

Which comes first, the guru or the follower? Are we who follow and turn someone into a larger-than-life character with powers (and privileges) we would not bestow on ‘normal’ human beings, ultimately, enablers? By giving away our powers to partake in the perceived glory of that person, are we innocent ‘victims’ or do we really help create the monster?

The phenomenon of ‘guru-ization’ extends not just to the yoga world, but to any area where a strong, charismatic person leads a group of people. Think politicians, religious leaders, rock stars, and yes, yoga superstars (yoga groupies, anyone?).

 As Lauren Jacobs writes in a Huffington Post blog:

Human beings are unfortunately often all too happy to be led into wherever they think they will be safe, loved, and taken care of. [Such leaders often seem to be] permitted to act above the rules that govern the rest of us, [because]  people are so beholden to them than no one will speak out against them.

Those of us who have been part of any type of movement with a strong leader have all experienced just how starry-eyed, head-in-the-clouds, ambitiously idealistic most everyone gets around them. 

Some followers are driven by personal ambition, some are driven by an unconscious search for perfection, a longing to the days when the world was a simple black and white, and parents the perfect, infallible protectors in a safe world (and many by both). It’s tempting to seek out that same perfection in another human being, and give away one’s power to a charismatic, inspiring leader.

Without fail, we are all robbed of that illusion sooner or later. Inevitably, there comes a time when the realization dawns that the teacher/leader is, well, just as flawed and human as everyone else. And, often times that person is enabled to make even larger mistakes than the rest of us by the permissive, starry-eyed idealism of those around him.

With each fallen guru, we will decry and denounce, and this will inevitably go on for a while. But beneath all the finger pointing, we should not forget to ask the difficult question: Are we the ones who set ourselves up to be failed?

Ultimately, when the illusion breaks, it is not a bad thing. It is a wonderful thing. It is an invitation, not to anger and hurt, but to move into a world which exists, not in black and white, but in shades of grey.

When the hurt disappears, the realization might just dawn that it’s okay to separate the teacher from the teaching. When someone sidesteps, there’s no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That teacher inspired us, because he/she brought something valuable to the world—at least for a while. Whatever that valuable teaching/inspiration was, however long it continued to uplift and inform us, that has a value in and of itself.

Anusara yoga has helped deepen the yoga practice of thousands of people, produced some of the best yoga teachers in the country, and heightened the bar for yoga teacher trainings (disclosure: I am not an Anusara-trained teacher). That's an accomplishment that doesn't have to go away, because of Friend's personal issues. The teacher is not the teaching.

Once we learn to separate the teacher from the teaching, we may just be able to appreciate what is valuable, without giving away our power. We can give ourselves permission to live in a world of shades of grey, where seeking the comfort of black and white is just too costly an illusion to buy into.