The Evidence-based Yoga Therapist with Dr. Loren Fishman

Michele Lawrence
You're listening to this is yoga therapy. I'm your host, Michele Lawrence. And I've had the opportunity to interview many of those who are making a difference at the intersections of yoga and health, and I'm here to share with you their stories and conversations. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Lauren Fishman. Dr. Fishman is a medical director of Manhattan physical medicine and rehabilitation in New York City. He's the author of 12 books and 100 academic articles, and a world recognized pioneer in the use of yoga and medical conditions and the treatment of lower back pain and piriformis syndrome. He spent three years in India before going to medical school and has used yoga to reverse the deficits of rotator cuff syndrome. Straighten the scoliotic spine and actually strengthen osteoporotic bones and aid in medical conditions as diverse as piriformis syndrome, insomnia, obesity and restless leg syndrome. Other non surgical interventions relieve plantar fasciitis arrest the development of Bunyan's and retard the progress of arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In addition to his private practice, Manhattan physical medicine and rehabilitation, he is Associate Editor of topics in geriatric rehabilitation. He's on the staff at Columbia University Medical School, and a past president of the New York Society of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Dr. Fishman has an advanced degree in philosophy from Oxford University. He's conducted clinical trials and he has worked with artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict the trajectory and endpoints of inpatient recovery in order to properly gauge hospital length of stay and reduce readmissions. He spent three years in India, one with BKS Iyengar before going to medical school. That's quite a lengthy bio. Dr. Fishman, it's such an honor to speak with you today. 

Dr. Fishman
Oh, it's an honor and a pleasure to speak with you too.

Michele Lawrence  
So in the podcast today, I'd love to dig into some of the work that you do. But first, I'd love for you to share with our listeners how you originally were drawn to yoga. Can you give us a glimpse into that?

Dr. Fishman
Yes. I mean, I humbly admit that I first came to yoga through TV. I was a little kid in Chicago, age nine or so. And we had TV about as big as a current cell phone. They had a Richard Kipling story AB of the jungle, I believe as its name. And on it, there was a little boy riding on the neck of an elephant pruning leaves for the elephant to eat. And then he came down and he did yoga. He did a couple yoga poses. I looked at it. I said, That's for me. I like that. And I was a regular kid. I mean, I played baseball, basketball, football, hockey, tennis, I did them all. But yoga. I really liked it. And then when I was about 18, I guess I met a woman. And she didn't do yoga. But she opened me up to yoga. And if she wrote off one day in a motorcycle, I said, I can do the lotus position. I never even thought about doing a lotus position. But that's what came to me. Then I went to India, and actually it was a girlfriend who said, hey, look, Mister, I am guys just a couple hours away. And we went to see. And it was an electric meeting was a wonderful meeting. I had rented a hotel room, I had to stay. He wasn't there. I had to wait a week to see them. And when I met him was just wonderful. I just kept the hotel room for a year. And I went to see him every day.

Michele Lawrence
Wow, what a great story. And so what year are we talking about there when you saw Mr. Iyengar?

Dr. Fishman
Ah, let's see. 1970 or 1971?

Michele Lawrence
So then we're talking 50 years ago when you had that experience. Tell us how you got involved in bringing yoga into western medicine. What were some of the earliest yoga interventions that you brought to the medical arena?

Dr. Fishman
Let me give you a little background. I mean, it's sort of a natural necessity. To me there were all kinds of Yogi's in yoga groups in ancient times, and some of them you know, do not bear mentioned but some were attached to the great houses the really rich people. And they were the priests, the doctors and the teachers in those places that teach these kids they take care of everyone They were sick, and they would minister to their spiritual desires and needs. And it was just a natural thing doing yoga every day when I'd see people that were sick. And even in medical school I taught it, it just seemed that it was just natural. And when I first started, I mean, you could look at it this way, anatomical knowledge is critical to both yoga and medicine. So they have this large shared reality. But whenever we use it with patients from you know, I've got into actual out of medical school, then I would say these are yoga like interventions. Because at that time to say, I'm doing yoga, I'm teaching yoga, I was afraid to patients who go out and say, you know that he's a quack. He taught me yoga, I went there for medical treatment, he gave me yoga. So I would say yoga like to dignify it a little bit inside, in a way, give it a duals origin. I would say piriformis syndrome was the first one first big one that where I use yoga to cure a significant medical condition. And when was that for a long winded answer? Yeah, no, that's great. Well, it's like 1992. No, was it that late? Couldn't have been, I don't know, sometime in the last century, quite a while ago.

Michele Lawrence
And I keep asking you these questions about when and how long ago because I really want to share what a pioneer you are.  And how long you've been at it, and how much there is to doing the work over a long period of time like that. So I hope you don't mind me asking those questions to kind of date it a little bit.

Dr. Fishman
So piriformis syndrome probably goes back further, I'm trying to figure out what house I was living in. And we left that house in 1992. No, so it must be in the 80s in the 80s.

Michele Lawrence
So I'd love for you to talk with us more specifically about the work you've pioneered around scoliosis and osteoporosis. And if you could maybe tell the listeners a bit about what are the yoga interventions that you've used and tested for straightening scoliotic curves and strengthening osteoporotic bones? And why did they work?

Dr. Fishman
Yeah, okay, let's start with scoliosis. There's a basic misunderstanding that goes back hundreds, maybe 1000s of years, which is, when you're curved to one side, set your curve to the right side, then your left side tends to bulge and your left side sort of rotates backward. It happens for a number of reasons, if not critical to what we're talking about here. And for hundreds, and I say maybe 1000s of years, people identified that bolje side as a strong side. It's big, it's hard, is bulging. Surely that's a strong set. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I analyzed it in terms of the concept of Buckminster Fuller, the architect that built the geodesic dome, a tensegrity structure. And that's his concept is a structure that's held together not by glue, or nails, or rivets, but it's held together by tension between its parents. And that applies to the music dome, it also applies to us humans. I mean, that's what our muscles do is they apply tension. And the scoliotic curve is curve to the right, because the muscles on the right are stronger. It makes perfect common sense, even though it isn't what meets the eye. I mean, what meets the eye is not that the world is round, either it looks pretty flat. But that the truth is it's round. And the truth is, that's the side that matters. So all we do in the yoga, is we strengthen the weak side, we strengthen that side that for 100 years was thought to be the strong side, but it's actually the weak side, because the curve is bent away from it. So that's what we do. Now what do we use for a lumbar curve vassy stessa is the pose, it's the strongest best, most powerful pose, here's the key, you do it for as long as you can, on the convex side of the lumbar curve. Now some people have that call an S curve, which goes to the left, lower down, it goes to the right, higher up. And then the dividing point is usually just about the end of the ribs t 12 l one. So if you have a thoracic curve, it may go to the exact other side and there. I can't take much credit for this. It was really an Eastern European bodybuilder who was a patient of mine, and he came up with it. For the upper body. The best pose is the side plank, but where you raise your legs up on a chair or something like that, to at least the height of your forearm, you do it on your forearm. And again, the convex this time of the thoracic or the convex side is down. Now there are other poses we use, but though that's the key, when it comes to ask you a process. Once again, it's not really a yoga use of yoga. I mean, just as we use our tongue for talking, and it was originally not intended for that at all, but we do a pretty good job. So it is that yoga was intended to I think it's like what Hata Yoga is a study break from meditation, you meditate for two hours and then you don't want to play racquetball, you do something like that says, Does our postural uttanasana or a standing pose, you want to do something gentle and stretchy. But we use yoga for a first in the US to process. We use it to put pressure on the bones, using a law that goes back 100 years rules law WLF he was a German surgeon and anatomist who read an article written by an engineer I was building a crane in the city of Cologne. And the German engineer wandered into a natural history museum and saw the bones of a vultures when clutched his forehead and said, My God, the architectonic of the vultures wings, were exactly what he was doing with the head of the crane. He said, Isn't God wonderful? Look how things recapitulate so on. And Wolf, read this article, he said, Hey, I see that all the time. And he formulated this principle, the lines of force. And I'll say it right. The architectonic of a bone follows the lines of force to which that bonus subjection. And that's exactly what we do in your whether work via anatomist in England, Sheffield, England, and by the name of Smith, who did experiments with turkey wings, that shows that eccentric calls on bone, not the normal ordinary things you usually do not walking, actually build bone more quickly than the typical things. So Yoga is just a prime case. So what I did is, I mean, at first I told my friends and some of my friends said, You're crazy. You're gonna break their bones, you can do yoga with people with osteoporosis. And I said, Maybe you're right. And I did a two year pilot study. In my office, I took 200 patients who all had osteoporosis and 100 of my didn't do anything with the other 100. I taught them yoga after work once a week for two years. And I taught them yoga that I thought would be good, that would put pressure according to will slot on the hips, the femurs, the hip bones, and the lumbar spine, which are of course, the three most frequent sites fracture and are also the sites studied in the dexa scan that doctors do to look for bone mineral density. And two years later, I was looking at the data and it looked pretty good. My middle son walked by and saw me working in my day to day and what you're doing, I said, I'm trying to look at this data from this study I've been doing he said, Are you going to publish it? I said, Oh, no, it's too small study. No one would be interested in this. He said, You won't be signatories to give the data. So I emailed him the date, he went upstairs to his desk. He came back five minutes later and said, it's significant. So I got fire in my belly. I got really excited. I didn't publish it as a pilot study. And I made a disk, I made a DVD. And I made 1000 copies. And I just gave them away to people who were interested in building their bone mineral density doing yoga. And I did a really dumb thing. I mean, a really dumb thing there. And I was coming for the last time to New York, except the city center. You may know what a beautiful building. And I met him here and talk to him, of course. And because it was such a gala occasion, I rented the back page of the little libretto that they gave out about him. And I took the back page and I said yoga for osteoporosis, and I advertised this free study. And about a week later, in the mirror, I said to myself, you know, you're really pretty dumb. You are enterprising yoga for us. Your Grace is for people who do yoga and the osteoporosis anyway. So how are they going to get better do a yoga they're already Yogi's? Yet I persisted, because I wanted to see what would happen. And it turns out, doing exactly the kind of yoga that we have given them. And the way we do it, they build bone 83% of these people just bone. So I publish that to my statisticians at the is the head of statistics at Harvard, you know, it's not a slug fly by night study. And I was more surprised than I. So they're both based you could say on non yogic principles, the case of scoliosis, strengthening muscles, which really Yogi's are not that interested in, there's no muscle and onda and scholar, osteoporosis, where people really aren't out there doing yoga to put stress on their bones. And yet Yoga is a wonderful vehicle for doing this. And along the way, of course, people meditate people do yoga for other reasons, they catch on to what Yoga is all about while they're getting better. So it has spiritual benefits. There's no doubt about it to me.

Michele Lawrence
That's so wonderful. I love that story. And I truly find your work so interesting because it is evidence based and as such can be embraced both by the mainstream yoga practitioner and the medical provider. 

Dr. Fishman 
Right, and let me say, Michelle, that it's true. We do x rays, the scoliosis, we do x rays before we start an X rays every five months. For the osteoporosis, we get dexa scans. That's the beauty of being able to straddle both fields, I can do the what is medically accepted as documentation as actual scientific measurement. I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. 

Michele Lawrence
No, no, that's helpful. I mean, to put more oomph behind like the evidence base piece that you provide, you're using actual scans, right. And I guess, like, I just found the story that you told they're so exciting. I'm curious of all the past projects that you've worked on, which one was the most interesting to you and why and maybe it's one of the ones you've already mentioned, or maybe it's a different one.

Dr. Fishman
It's a different one. This one, I was the first patient, I was driving downtown with all three of my kids in the backseat of a taxi cut me off on Seventh Avenue. I pulled the wheel as hard as I could do, I did avoid the accident by getting myself a massive rotator cuff. I mean, these two tendons, they were pulling rent asunder, they were centimeters apart, and my shoulder when I got the MRI, so we went at that meeting, we meant that we were visiting friends didn't hurt at all, but I just couldn't lift my arm. And we visited the friends on the way back, everybody else went for a cappuccino and I got an MRI, I wrote myself a prescription got an MRI on the way home, went to the same man who'd done surgery on my right shoulder from a little skiing accident much earlier, my life. And he said, Oh, I can't do this one. This is a massive one. So I made appointments with the two you know, mavens in New York, one of them the head of the International Association of elbow and shoulder surgeons, and the other one, an excellent surgeon. But even though I'm a doctor took me a month to get an appointment with him, and the meantime, I missed doing yoga. So one day, I stood on my head in my house and put chairs and I was very responsible. And my wife came downstairs. And she saw me he said, Lauren, like Burton says you Lauren, what are you doing? And I quickly got up, I was about to be sheepish and apologize. And then I realized, Hey, I could lift my arm. And I lifted my arm. Oh, no, I couldn't have lifted it up that high to save my soul. What was a total tear, there were no fibers there. So I figured I'd done something different. I knew I hadn't healed that injury in three minutes on my head, took my yoga dogs to my office, I had a physical therapist do EMG a test where you look and see which muscles are active. So I stood on my head and then I did the maneuver again. And sure enough, I could raise my arm. And to this day, I'm raising my arm and the basis of that this is like, I don't know, 1520 years later. So it seemed to me I was onto something of some objective value. So the next 10 patients I saw with rotator cuff, I told them the story I just told you, oh, by the way, I kept the appointment with the two doctors just to hear what they say I was never going to have surgery. They went through this and the residents are saying well first workout here and I'm also there. And then they said they got an answer the question, Well, Dr. Fishman, what can you do with your arm? So I raised my arm over my head. And they all gasped, both places. And then the first doctor and the second doc both is was one voice. They said, you don't need surgery, you're doing better than you would do with the surgery. And they wanted to know what I did. And I told them and I tried to explain it. I said, Do you agree with that? And again, with one voice, the two places said the same thing. They said, We don't know. We don't understand the shoulder that well. And that was handing down the gauntlet to me. So the next 10 patients I saw with rotator cuff, I told him this story. And then I said you want to try it? And they all said yes. And they were very diverse group. One was a rather corpulent accountant from Scarsdale. One was believing in a prison Superintendent from Texas, brought up his daughter for scoliosis. And he had a rotator cuff of the 10. They weren't all like that. I mean, one was a female patent lawyer who is 81 years old and had been doing yoga for 40 years. But of the 10 nine got almost as much better or as much better as I did. So I figured I was really onto something. When I advertised I said, you know, come in, I can do this by advertising. I mean, I would send out a newsletter at that time, and I just put it in the newsletter. And that accounts for probably the most interesting thing I'm doing now that I just finished actually I got an NIH grant. It's a little bit of a story. It's a grant about an objective scale for pain. And Yoga is the most effective way to do it. Here's what you do. You take people with rotator cuff, you let them try to raise their arm. I hate doing this because it's agonizing for them, but they do it. And we filmed them on a very highfalutin camera so we can look at their faces, and it's the corners of their mouth and the corners of their eyes that really tell you how much pain they're in and then I teach them to maneuver or I teach them a sham maneuver that isn't going to work. And we ask them to raise their arms again, and film them when they do that. And then if they were Sham, I say, you know, there's another maneuver I want you to learn. And then I teach them the real maneuver, and film them again. And then we feed this data into artificial neural networks. And we have other people's schools, children, and so on charge on their own how much pain these people are in to construct an algorithm. So the doctors who are prescribing opioids, that's another epidemic that's ongoing, that's actually prescribing opioids and will, I think, within a reasonable amount of time, have a way of objectively judging how much pain their patients are in, you can't fake. I mean, the means the artificial neural networks are excellent at telling you who's faking, it was different muscles involved. There. I work with a man down at Carnegie Mellon, who's a psychology PhD and also in robotics and a woman to Dr. Cohn and Dr. zakia, Amal, an Algerian woman who's really good at this stuff, too. And that's probably the most exciting thing I ever did. Right now I have another I have a scoliosis one that's going on that I just got the grant last week. Nobody knows about it, but you and everybody listening, right?

 It's about scoliosis, it's for teenagers, most scoliosis is in, it's called an adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, which means that occurs between the ages of 12 and 20. And nobody knows where it comes from. And if someone's in that age group, grandchild or a child or yourself, then the study, we're going to use yoga on one side to strengthen the weak side. And we're going to use small safe doses of botulinum toxin on the other side, to weaken the strong side. So this may make it work faster. Right now, people get better at the rate of about two and a half to 5% a month, which means in 10 months, they get either 25 to 50%. Better. So if you had a curve of 40 degrees, it could be 30 degrees could be 20 decrease after a year, after 10 months of doing. But I would like to make it faster. I think a 17 year olds go to college The next year, and when they go to college, sometimes all bets are off. They don't do what they're supposed to do. So and this would really help things a lot. So that's my most exciting current project. Yeah,

Michele Lawrence  
yeah. So just circling back on a couple of the things that you mentioned. So the rotator cuff maneuver, and work that you did resulted into a pretty big published study, too, right. And so folks can access that and read more about that. And I know I have, and it's been out there for a while. And the thing that I think is important to know to at least the way I understand it, is that you don't actually have to do a full on headstand, right? You can take the body position, a headstand and apply it to the wall. 

Dr. Fishman
For example, there was a brilliant Israeli physical therapist and yoga she does yoga too, who worked with me for 13 years, Tova, Ovadia invented that because some people have cervical problems, they have glaucoma, they have cardiovascular issues, or the cerebral vascular issues, so they can't stand on their heads. If you've had a stroke, or you have a coma, or you had a herniated disc in your cervical spine, you can't do it. Yeah. So then it against Well, it works almost absolutely as well, probably 90 95%, as well. There are a few patients where I have to repair back and let them do the head scan. But if they're not head standards, you can bring a chair over and let them put their thighs on the chair. So they're upside down. But they're not supporting much weight, just their torso is really vertical, their, their eyes are horizontal and their shins are supported by their thighs on the chair. And almost anybody could have it, you have to do the Iron Guard type hitscan, by the way to make it work, you have to say, Now raise your shoulders away from the floor. Or if you're doing it against the wall, you say, Now take your shoulders and bring them far from your ears. And you've got to have a little bit of a foil something that you're working against, or else people they don't cut nada, how to do it, right. And then afterwards, by the way, in the rotator cuff saying afterwards, I mean, within 20 seconds, you got to get him to turn around and raise their arms up to the side and abducting twice. And you must say to them, you know, these are people in a lot of pain. And they're scared to do this. Some people haven't raised their arms in seven years. It's really very difficult for them to get this in their heads. I look them in the eye and I say bravely, boldly, fearlessly Raise your arms all the way up to your head quickly. And I do it. So they sort of follow me and they do it. And then I say now raise your arms forward, bring your arms in front of you and over your head and do this twice. And that's it. Cuz you must teach them what you're doing is you're replacing one muscles function with another's. And so you have to get them to know that and then some people, I'm an example of this and other people are too. You only have to show them once. And then they do it for the rest of their lives. Wow. It's amazing. Now some people it's not true. I mean, people have their shoulders a lot like, I have one person he's a Hall of Fame pitcher had to come up from Pennsylvania three times, and cello and violin players who use their shoulders in a certain way. Large scale, and a woman is a large scale painter, fine art painter, and she had a column number five, but she got it. It's harder. Some people take some, even a couple of weeks. They have to do it every day. 

Michele Lawrence
Hmm. Well, sounds like you're part magician in this too.

Dr. Fishman
It feels like one woman. That literary editor lives in Chelsea, she older when she learned that she couldn't raise her arm just save her her soul. And I taught her this and she could raise your IV, she held up her crooked finger. And she said, It's a trick. One more teaching of a clump of graduate students how to be the kind of doctor I am. And they want to do injections, people with rotator cuff syndrome. This was a little person who only spoke Spanish and she was 65. If she were a day, I had to talk into the phone on the wall, which went to the interpreter, who then said it back to her in Spanish. And then she would answer in Spanish would go to the wall. So the interpretive back to Munich, as I was saying myself, this is never gonna work. But I tried it anyway. And sure enough, it worked. And the woman she looked up at me, she said, it's student Morocco. It's a miracle. And there was a resident standing there with a syringe in her hand ready to give her an injection that she did not need. And later in the day, I went back to my office on Park. And it was a six foot 11 inch basketball player there who also couldn't raise his arm to save his soul rotator cuff. And I taught him the same maneuver. But he raised his arm up and he actually played basketball at night. And he looked at me and he said, it's a little dirty. He said it's a blank, blank and miracle. Same thing that's a little Spanish woman's.


Michele Lawrence
That's great. So let's talk a little bit more about the NIH grants to produce research on lower back pain. Oh, yeah. Looks like it's on hold for at the moment due to COVID. I think this what I understand.

Dr. Fishman  
 I got an email from her yesterday. Oh, she's coming up a week from today. I think we're gonna get started. I really do. I have to go back a stage. You want me to talk about it? Yeah, I think it would be really cool to talk about it. I want to do some historical academic review. Most of the articles about yoga and back pain, make an immense mistake. They think they treat all back pain, or they call it chronic back pain. They don't distinguish between the causes of back pain and yet different causes have not just different treatments, they have antithetical, absolutely opposite treatments. I mean, what's good for a herniated disc is bad for spinal stenosis. And what's good for spinal stenosis will hurt, you can even extend the herniated disc and make it worse. And so that's a mistake. It's sort of like early cancer treatment. They said, well, let's get the cure for cancer. But you have to distinguish lung cancer from testicular cancer from breast cancer, they don't have the same tree. And what's good for one can be bad for another sort of like, let me put it a different way to antibiotics cure inflammation? Well, yeah, if the inflammation is due to an infection of bacterial infection, yeah. And you've got to get the right antibiotic to. But if the inflammation is due to an autoimmune disease, the antibiotics won't touch it. You got to know what's going on. In a way, you've got to know the diagnosis before you can treat. I mean, what does a lion in the forest do if he gets a thorn in his foot? He looks at it. He wants to see what it is. And I'm afraid that some parts of modern medicine if departed from this common sense, and that's what's so different about the study we're doing. It's really very elaborate study. It's a big five year and immense study hundreds of patients, we pay them because we give them cell phones, and we can call them up at any hour of the night or day. That's why we have to pay him not too many people will do it and ask them how much pain they're in. Because we want to find out the pattern that makes for chronic pain versus acute pain for the different causes of back pain. I distinguish seven basic causes of back pain is probably accounts for a good 90% of back pain. It doesn't mean you can't have a bullet in your spine or have other weird things fall backward on it. subway station floor, the main causes are very clear. And I think everybody knows them. And I can go on about them, but maybe it's too much for now. But anyway, that's the study, it's to find out the pattern of acute versus chronic pain. And then using yoga to cure. I was gonna say, and then finding the appropriate yoga interventions based on the type of pain, yes, and how yoga succeeds, and how yoga fails. Because the ones chronic are going to break through in spite of the fact that we're giving them yoga, we're giving them all yoga. I guess I didn't mention.

Michele Lawrence
Well, that's really cool. And it's going to start soon and go on for five years. So we've got a little bit of time before we're going to hear what the results are.

Dr. Fishman
Yeah, I should say, you know, it's a little self advertisement. But I'm giving a course, in seven basic causes of back pain and how you can first recognize what's wrong with somebody. And secondly, how you can ameliorate their pain, reduce their suffering, relieve it, sometimes 100%, sometimes, make sure it doesn't come back or any way reduce the likelihood that it will. I'm doing that at yoga Ville, in Virginia, and it's going to be broadcast. You know, it's an online thing. That yoga, well, this is such an under center there. Yeah. And I'm doing the SEO for us, too. In September, in October, in September, in North Carolina, art of living  in October, a nice little place in Maryland, a little bit like you, Michelle, dynamite woman who runs this center is just she's got hundreds of classes, right? It's a little place very unassuming. She's not out to brag. She's out to teach yoga, and do it.

Michele Lawrence
Well, that's great. I'll share the links for those upcoming things in the show notes here. So our listeners can learn more about that and sign up if they're interested in it. Yeah, good. So finally, and I like to ask this question of each of the guests on the podcast, in our training programs at inner peace yoga therapy, we teach our students who are studying to become yoga therapists that one of the key pillars to do in the work of a yoga therapist is to first have your own steady daily practice your sadhana. And this sets the foundation and it comes before holding space or applying techniques or doing any other work with others. So I can tell already, because much of what you do is born out of your own experience that you have your own practice, and you've mentioned it. But I'd love to know what it looks like. What does your daily practice look like? And I imagine like most of us, it probably changes over time, too. But maybe what does it look like today?

Dr. Fishman
I mean, Oh, you think I still do yoga? Of course. I'm only kidding. Yes, I'm addicted. I don't spend as much time as I want to. I mean, I spend about an hour and a half to two hours a day, I wake up early, when my kids were little, once the kids are up, all bets are off. So you have to get up at 530 and do yoga before the kids get up. And I've maintained that habit. I do us enough for about God's I tell myself, it's 45 minutes, but it's not. It's an hour and a half. And I meditate every day to a half an hour, 40 minutes, every day, at least once. I mean, what I say to people, and I believe myself is doing meditation once today, rather than twice a day. It's kind of like walking on one leg. Residents and walking on two legs. It makes a tremendous difference to do it twice a day. And what do I do? Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do standing poses all that Australian guard taught me then I do forward bends. And then I meditate. Tuesday I do inversions for half an hour I stood on my head for half an hour just on my head for 30 years. So I don't know a long, long time till I did a little experiment with to see if glaucoma really got worse with headstand. Answer. Yes. How long does it take 15 seconds. So I can't stand my head for that long anymore. I don't even go home. Oh, but I get somebody an ophthalmologist anesthetize my eyes before I did it. And I still see very well but not as I can't do that for more than about 10 minutes now. headstand. I'm not. It's not good. So that's Tuesday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday standing poses for of it's Tuesday, inversion Thursday and Sunday back bends and Saturday. Like a bouquet of forward bends that more than an hour just do push them out on us on a Friday after an hour and other poses for a minute each. Then I meditate meditate. I do a little breathing is a wonderful book by a man named yo Gandhi. I think that's a pseudonym, a nom de plume, you know, and he writes books that are basically question and answer. And the book I'm thinking of here is called lessons in ecstatic living. It's self publishes them there on Amazon. And in there is a meditation that is essential. My life really, I've probably been doing it for about 10 years now, that meditation, it's a breathing exercise, the yoga in that book is nothing special. It's not bad, but it's not like an Australian guard. But the meditation and the general approach in that book is wonderful. I recommend it too. And then I do just plain meditation for the longest period of time. And then I do a little with the with Iraq is shot shaman of Kashmir did a series of short meditations, 10, short meditations, subjects like love, wisdom, abundance, things like that the inner space, as opposed to outer space. So that's what I do. And it's something Australian girl said, yoga doesn't change your point of view, it changes the viewer, I've noticed that myself in my relationship with my wife and my kids in just about everything I do, and don't do. So that's what I do.

Michele Lawrence 
Yeah, you're such an inspiration in so many different ways. And thanks for sharing everything with us today and giving us a little glimpse into your personal practice, too. And I'll put a bunch of links up in the show notes for today so that our listeners can learn more about you and all the works that you're up to, including the things you mentioned, but not limited to, and, of course, much of that is posted@sciatica.org. And I'm excited that will be encompassing some of your programs into our training curriculum at inner peace yoga therapy, as well. Thanks so much for your time today.

Dr. Fishman
Can I intrude and say one last days? Yeah, I mean, I just it's something I think is important and is not commonly said that, in a way, you're much better off doing your yoga slowly. Don't try to get in all the poses, and then, okay, now I'm ready to go along with my day or do whatever I do next. It's in a way Yoga is like Japanese drawing, where it's not the lines, it's the space between the lines that really the lines define that space. At least for me, many of my best ideas and thoughts and stuff come between, you know, while I'm doing yoga or right but not in the pose, sometimes they come in poses, but sometimes they come not infrequently between the poses because you're drawn for yourself, a certain environment. And that environment is something for you to enjoy and benefit from.

Michele Lawrence
That's lovely and meaningful really resonates with me too. Thank you so much. It was a real joy talking with you today.

Dr, Fishman
It's a joy to talk to you, Michelle, you ask very good questions, loving questions.

Michele Lawrence
If you'd like to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit us at inner peace, yoga therapy.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai