“Yoga is inseparable from my life force.” Larry Payne didn’t actually say that, but he could have. A yoga instructor for over 25 years, Payne has attended to all aspects of the practice, expanding his knowledge and commitment to the philosophy with an intelligent attention to the Western mindset and perspective in his teaching. This fall, Payne is offering a class at Loyola Marymount University, designed to train yoga teachers to be yoga therapists and apply classical yoga postures for use in clinical settings to help treat common ailments and conditions. “The biggest complaint that patients have is that yoga teachers have little training in anatomy and physiology, and that doctors have zero training in movement,” Payne says. “Right now, a doctor, who is an excellent diagnostician, may say to a patient’let’s say a 40- or 50-year-old man”Take yoga.’ If this man walks into an Ashthanga class, he’ll get murdered.” Payne hopes that after his course, participants will be equipped to work with various medical specialists, chiropractors, osteopaths and physical therapists. The Level I course will focus on the musculoskeletal system. Students will meet one weekend a month for a year and address principles of practice, anatomy for yoga teachers, the origin and treatment of common low-back pain and upper back, knee and hip problems. In addition, the course will cover communication tools for working with doctors, including reading reports and understanding terminology and clinical notes. The optional Level II course offered the following year will focus on other systems of the body, including the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, reproductive and endocrine systems. Although Payne now follows a well-established lifestyle of yoga and healthful eating habits, including meat, he was not a natural. An overstressed advertising executive in the late 1970s, with severe back pain, Payne in desperation took a “why-not” stab at yoga. “I remember being embarrassed, thinking I couldn’t possibly do those strange postures the right way,” Payne recalls in his book “Yoga Rx.” With a compassionate teacher who instructed him gently with breathing, stretching and relaxation, Payne’s pain disappeared for the first time in two years. That epiphany sparked a life change. “I had enough money from advertising to sustain myself for a couple of years,” Payne says. His conversion took him to yoga centers all over the world and, eventually, to India, where he has returned several times. In 1981, he returned to Los Angeles and became a full-time yoga teacher and founded the Samata Yoga Center in Venice. In his own practice and in his classes, Payne has always kept the Western mentality in mind. He has developed User Friendly Yoga, which focuses on postures and breathing to help the practitioner become more aware of his or her body’s posture, alignment and movement with the goal of leading to deeper awareness of the self and to one’s surroundings. While it can be argued that yoga by its very nature is therapeutic, Payne distinguishes yoga therapy as yoga postures that are specifically adapted to treat specific health problems, such as back pain, asthma, migraines or menopause. “There are a lot of people who don’t fit into a group yoga class,” Payne explains. “For example, those who need one-on-one attention and who can’t do what’s being served by the classes’which are generally geared for healthy people and for general conditioning.” In yoga therapy, Payne does an evaluation and constructs a series just for individuals. To help them do it, he makes a CD of instructions for them. “Compliance is hard,” he admits, “but pain is a great incentive.” On one of his trips to India, Payne visited a number of yoga therapy clinics, which he recalls with a grimace. “When I reported a digestive problem, I was instructed to drink 10 glasses of salt water and throw up. If you’ve got the time and you’re there with people who know what they’re doing, that’s fine, but that wouldn’t be appealing here.” In the West, a yoga therapy practice has to be compatible with our culture as well as practical, user-friendly and safe, Payne says. “There are several important principles that I feel capture the essentials of effective yoga therapy practice in our modern world. These are: commitment to a daily yoga therapy program; combining breath and movement; emphasizing function over form; incorporating dynamic and static principles of motion; focusing on the spine; slowing down your pace; avoiding competition and staying faithful to sequencing.” While most of these principles are self-explanatory, a few need further explanation. For example, the emphasis on function over form. Payne is far more concerned that we be attuned to our own body, rather than pushing ourselves too far to achieve some idealized perfect posture. Staying faithful to sequencing is important, too, Payne says, because there is logic to the sequences of the postures that maximizes the benefits. The routine, whether 10 minutes or a half-hour, always starts with a transition posture that leads the practitioner away from the stress of the day, followed by a warm-up to prepare the body for the main postures. The postures are selected to address the goal, and are always balanced by compensating postures to bring the body back to neutral. Finally, breathing exercises and relaxation techniques allow rest before the practitioner moves back into his or her day. Payne’s class at Loyola Marymount is geared toward applicants who have completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training or its equivalent. Payne will introduce the first lecture followed in subsequent weeks by Western medical doctors, an ayurvedic practitioner, chiropractor, physical therapist, and a specialist in allopathic and traditional osteopathic medicine. Payne prepared the course with Dr. Richard Usatine, who co-authored “Yoga Rx,” and who has taken a holistic approach to treating patients. Usatine is vice-chair for education in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Yoga Rx program begins October 8 at Loyola Marymount. Call 338-1971. Payne’s class at Jiva Yoga Studio on Sunset meets Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m.
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