Chair Yoga for Spine and Hips: How Slowing Down Changes Everything

There's a quality of attention that most yoga practices ask you to skip over. The cues come quickly, the transitions move you from one shape to the next, and by the end you've done a great deal — but you may not have felt very much. Rhoda Miriam's chair yoga practices are built around a different premise: that the most important thing that happens in a yoga practice isn't the poses themselves, but the quality of noticing you bring to them.

In this chair session from her Yoga for Slow Living series, Rhoda guides you through movements for the spine and hips that are, on the surface, gentle and accessible. What makes them genuinely therapeutic is the pace at which you move through them and the attention you're invited to bring.

The practice begins where many people carry the most unexamined tension: the neck. Rather than simply stretching both sides equally, Rhoda guides you to identify which side feels tighter, then use that information to guide how you work. This isn't a detail — it's the entire approach in miniature. Your body isn't symmetrical, and a practice that treats it as though it is will only take you so far. Working with your actual body, on a given day, is where real change begins to happen.

From the neck, the practice moves through the shoulder girdle — coordinating arm movements with breath to awaken the upper body and expand breathing capacity — then into lateral tilts and gentle twisting that encourage the spine to find its full range of motion. These aren't exercises designed to make you more flexible in some abstract sense. They're an invitation to discover where your spine actually moves freely and where it tends to hold, and to work thoughtfully at that edge.

The hip-opening sequence follows the same logic. Rhoda guides you through a supported figure-four stretch — ankle resting on the opposite thigh — that reaches the external hip rotators without strain. She invites you to notice, after completing the first side and before beginning the second, the difference between your two hips. That pause, that noticing, is not incidental. It's the practice teaching you to listen. The session closes with chair cat-cow, a simple flexion-and-extension sequence that helps the spine return to balance after working asymmetrically.

What you'll likely discover is that chair yoga practiced this way feels less like a scaled-down version of something else and more like its own complete practice — one that asks something most movement practices don't: that you actually show up, at the pace your body needs, and pay attention to what's there.

Watch Rhoda guide you through the full practice below.