
Declining a chair to sit in, Marnie Hartman relaxes into a squat position on the floor to talk about the book she’s co-authoring, “Pain Science Yoga Life.”
“It’s a book about using yoga as a modality to treat persistent pain,” she explained in an even tone.
Hartman, who owns the Body IQ Physical Therapy and Yoga studio in Haines, has been a practicing physical therapist for 17 years, though she thinks “It’s hard to imagine that’s true,” she said. She began to re-define the way she treats chronic pain after meeting Niamh Moloney, who would later turn out to be her writing partner, at an international pain conference in England eight years ago. Moloney is an Irish native who formerly taught Physiotherapy at the University of Sydney, but recently relocated back to Guernsey, England for family reasons. The two saw an intersection between medicine and yoga, and began a conversation that continued into years of correspondence, research, and, ultimately, the production of their book.
The opioid epidemic in America has triggered many doctors and patients to seek other methods of pain treatment, Hartman said. “The realization that we’re in a bad state has given people a bit of a desperate look at ‘What else is out there? What other approaches can we use?’ Maybe we need to look back into traditional approaches that [were] historically used,” she said.
Hartman’s holistic approach comes from growing research and awareness that doctors can no longer separate the psychosocial emotional side of pain from the physical side. “Yoga just kind of automatically puts this container where the two have never been separated,” she said.
In layman’s terms: “We like to think that pain lives in the body part that we feel it in, right? But it does not,” Hartman explained. “One hundred percent of the time, pain is an output of our central nervous system,” she said. “Almost like any other sense that we have. You know, vision does not live in our eyes, light receptors live in our eyes, and it’s our brain that interprets that light and creates a meaningful vision for us, right? Pain is the same.”
Brains interpret pain differently based on how in tune they become to transmissions from a multiple system of inputs, including nociception, what Harman colloquially calls “danger receptors.” The more signals these transmit, the more reactive the brain becomes to pain “driven potentially without a great peripheral source.”
“In the medical world we tend to call it catastrophic thinking, that pain isn’t getting better and so it means that something has to be really, really wrong,” Hartman said. However, that’s not necessarily true. Continued pain might actually just mean that you’ve gotten really good at what you’ve been practicing, which is protecting yourself. The next steps are to learn when you need to protect yourself and when you don’t, Hartman said.
For example, if you haven’t sprained your ankle two weeks ago, then maybe the pain doesn’t live in your ankle. Maybe it’s a bigger picture than that.
“I tend to put it in these terms of: There are things that we can control and there are things that we can’t control. If we can put all of our efforts and energies into the things we can control, then a lot of times the things we can’t tend to soften.”
Healthy mindset, breathing, and posture are among the list of things Hartman’s found can impact health, and all principles taught in yoga. Also, “What else is going on in your life? What other stresses are you under? How are you eating? How are you sleeping? How are you communicating with your loved ones?”
Though Hartman and Moloney’s book is written with a foundation of evidence intended for yoga teachers and medical professionals to implement, “we want it to be tangible for anybody to pick up and understand,” Hartman said. The authors have softened and simplified the language to be written clearly, and without medical or yogi jargon.
In regards to her personal teachings, Hartman said, “Part of my mission is to present the material in a holistic way, you can have whatever your current faith system is- and this just gets to be included.” Nobody is saying that you should become a Buddhist or a Hindu, she said, the bulk of it is mindfulness.
Hartman and Moloney’s contract requires final submission of the book by August 2019 to Handspring Publishing in Scotland.