About Lisa

You’ve probably heard this saying before:   “Listen to your body.”  

Maybe it was in a yoga class, at the gym, from a doctor, or as advice from a friend or relative.  But what if your body doesn’t “speak” to you until it’s at the breaking point?  What if you just can't hear or understand what your body is telling you?  What if your problematic movement patterns are so ingrained that they actually feel good or normal?

When I first began practicing yoga in 1998, I immediately re-awakened the natural flexibility and openness that I had enjoyed as a child. After a period in my life of being more sedentary, it felt wonderful to move again.  The stretching was easy for me and it became something my body craved. 

​Being a natural teacher, (I was already teaching elementary school), I immediately knew I wanted to teach this thing called Yoga.  I quickly signed up for teacher training, and began to teach.  

After about 5 years of sampling many of the various yoga offerings available, attending trainings, and gaining certifications, I came across a newly popular style of yoga that I fell in love with.

Every pose was a backbending "heart opener" in those days! (2010)

I practiced in this style for about 5 years and enjoyed the ease of teaching its systematic, blueprint movement cues.

One of the catch-phrases in this style of yoga was "Open your heart".  
Looking back on pictures from events, one can see that this instruction was widely interpreted as "pull your shoulders back and thrust your ribs forward" - which caused my low back to overarch, compress and weaken. Ouch! 

I was taught to "hug my muscles to the bones" - which for an overachiever like myself meant contract, contract, contract - causing a great deal of unnecessary tension in my body. Ouch!

I learned to "melt my heart" - unknowingly turning off the most important stabilizing muscles of my shoulders - forcing my wrists to bare more of the burden. Ouch again! 

I was also taught other very well-intentioned "universal alignment principles" (I now know that there is no such thing!) that were designed to work in harmony with those mentioned above, and create the perfect balance - an "optimal alignment blueprint" - for EVERY body.   

I sure wish I had known then what I know now!  

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. . . Enter my constant back discomfort and low back gripping

a yoga teacher's worst nightmare!
​

My body began to break down from the repetitive stress and biomechanical misalignment in a practice that was known for alignment.  I was doing everything I was taught.  My posture and my practice were often praised for alignment and form, yet I practiced with gradually increasing (and mostly secret) pain and tightening back muscles for several years.  

I was a yoga teacher! I wasn’t supposed to have pain!  How could the practice I loved be the cause?  Yoga is supposed to be therapeutic, right?  

Soon, I began the quest for someone to "fix" me.  Sports massage, chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture, Rolfing and other forms of therapy amounted to a great deal of $$.  But getting up every morning, practicing the same way, and expecting someone to "take away the pain" just wasn't working.  How could I continue to teach something that wasn't even working for ME?

After 2 unsuccessful years of worry, frustration, and searching, I knew there must be something that I was missing.  We are each a beautiful but complicated system with different body proportions, bone structures, ingrained patterns, injuries, posture, and stresses that are carried with us from a young age.  We all have a unique movement signature.  There can't possibly be an optimal blueprint that will meet the needs of everyone!

It was then that my research and searching led me to a growing new approach in the yoga community - the world of natural movement, science based movement practices, and brain science. 

Through my research and reading I came across Jill Millers' Yoga Tune Up® and immediately signed up for training and became certified.  This training was the beginning of opening my eyes to what was really going on in my body.  

I dove into the teachings of many modern movement innovators and have based my
YOGA MOVES™ method on their work:

Katy Bowman's Nutritious Movement® - moving MORE and with more variety - it might be that simple!
Erwan Le Corre's MovNat® - moving naturally as our ancestor's did.
Tim Anderson's Original Strength®  - returning to the developmental movement patterns of childhood to RESET the body.
Jill Miller's Yoga Tune Up® - the outside-the-box movement system to eliminate pain, improve posture, and enhance performance.
Bill Hubert's Bal-A-Vis-X® - integrating the mind-body with novel eXercises using sandbags and balls.

The insights into the body that these “yoga and movement pioneers” share have opened my eyes and taught me how to "listen to" (and actually hear) my own body.  This information has been a source of pain-relief, inspiration, and motivation ever since. As I became a stronger, better informed mover, I began to inhabit my body differently than I used to, and my pain gradually disappeared.  

When you look at me now, I hope you’ll still think that I have impeccable posture!  But the way that I now achieve it is vastly different.  I steer away from that “delicious stretch” in certain parts of my overstretched body, and instead work on strengthening, stabilizing, releasing chronic muscle tension, and retraining my nervous system (aka the brain) so that it doesn't perceive a threat every time I move.  I've learned to listen to my body in a different, more informed way.  

And now . . . I often hear it reminding me:

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should!"

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