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About Michaelle Edwards |
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I created the YOGALIGN® method during the course of my 30+ year personal yoga practice, 15 years of teaching yoga, and performing deep tissue massage for over 20 years as a trained, licensed massage therapist.
I began my study of yoga with Swami Satchidananda in 1972. Asana or posture study was only one limb of the 8 limbs of yoga I studied with this great yoga master. Sitting for satsang and learning yoga philosophy, meditation, and pranayama from Satchidananda is an experience that set my course on the path of Yoga and I have immense gratitude for the time I spent in his presence. Satchidanda was a true yoga master who had a keen mind and a huge heart and I very much appreciate the teachings I was given when I spent time with him at Pomfret Center in Connecticut. We did asana for an hour in the morning but we did not dwell on asana or postures as the most important aspect of yoga as we were seeking to direct our mind and heart energy to connect with our higher selves and merge with our divine source.I was attempting to free my mind of excess chatter which I felt was at the root of my suffering and I truly wanted to connect with the divine love of god or source. I put in a request to join the ashram but it was decided by Satchidananda that my work was out in the world.
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Soon after I left the east coast, I decided to travel on my own in Mexico and Alaska and always continued my daily yoga practice wherever I went. Moving west to Montana in 1976, I found out that there were no yoga teachers available anywhere in that state at that time. I decided to study yoga more intensely but now on my own using Iyengar's classic Light on Yoga text. That book became my bible and I spent hours every day reading it and teaching myself every aspect I could of Iyengar's yoga.
Years later, when I moved to Kauai in 1983, I began to practice Ashtanga yoga and continued with a full practice until I was injured after about a year and a half of practicing Ashtanga vinyasa. I was doing a standing forward bend in half lotus while reaching around holding my big toe and I heard and felt my lateral collateral knee ligament tear. For almost a year, I could no longer do lotus or run the beach and I was forced to rest and let my knee heal. I began to spend time studying human anatomy and physiology trying to gain a deeper understanding of the muscle, bone and connective tissue structure. My knee finally healed but then I began to have pain in my hip and groin whenever I did triangle pose. My neck was going out of alignment frequently and I began to feel like my body was becoming unstable. Someone told me it might be a tight psoas problem. I had heard about the psoas muscles being involved with hip and movement but I had no functional knowledge of how to really engage them or release them. I was fascinated with the idea that since the psoas is actually muscularly connected to not just the lumbar spine but the diaphragm too that perhaps it was more than a hip flexor and was also a huge factor in the power of our movements and breathing process.
I started to wonder what the point was of doing yoga poses that put the spine in extreme flexion or extension and began to practice in a different way by listening to what my body told me to do and making sure that I did no movements or poses that seemed to cause any strain in any part of my body or compress the movement of my diaphragm. I added self massage to my entire practice and devised ways to keep the spine aligned as though I was in movement rather than holding static positions as I had been trained to do. I analyzed the function of yoga poses questioning each movement the way an engineer would look at a structure. Through this I began to realize that some yoga poses are not natural for our human design and that there was really no "right" way to do them.
Hundreds of hours later with the help of many clients with injuries, pain and misalignment, I created a system that would be pain free and yet give the body strength and suppleness by rewiring how the brain tells our body to move. The ancient philosophy was not what I questioned, it was the poses that seemed to compress my spine and make my sacrum feel weak and sore. I now know that many yoga poses are not ancient like the 4000 year old yoga sutras and that much of what makes up modern asana is at the most 50 to 100 years old. Many yoga poses and salutations are based on military drills, woman's gymnastics and contortionism and this has been researched and documented by Mark Stapleton in his book Yoga Body published in 2010.
I am adamant in my desire to help people understand that over stretching our ligaments, compressing the spine, and doing extreme yoga poses does way more harm than good. Yoga is not about tearing ourselves apart at the seams. Yoga is about removing the obstacles that obscure our true nature whether in the body or the mind. The work continues as I see there is no end to learning and everyday I discover new ways to extend and align the spine and reveal the effortless ageless "kid" body from within.
Recording and performing professionally as a musician and vocalist for the last 25 years has also helped me to develop many of the unique aspects of YOGALIGN®. I participate in many sports including swimming, surfing, windsurfing, kayaking, biking, hiking, skiing, horseback riding, running and childrearing. I am injury-free and more mentally, emotionally, and physically fit than I was as a teenager. I hope you find your natural alignment and that YogAlign gives you the important tools to align naturally and let your body in its own innate wisdom heal itself.
with aloha,
Michaelle Edwards
Hanalei, Kauai |
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