Centered and Strong

Hello Scoliosis Warrior!

Does your yoga class leave you feeling worse rather than better?

Are you worried that your yoga class could be making your scoliosis worse?

Are you tired of being the one person in the room with scoliosis, who has to modify poses?

Are you tired of being in pain?

Are you tired of relying on other people to help you feel better (chiropractors, massage therapists, etc)?

How would it feel to be part of a community of people with scoliosis, with movement classes that are specific to scoliosis?

How would it feel to move with confidence?

Mandy began practicing yoga roughly 25 years ago. At that time, she had graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Environmental Engineering and found herself bouncing around the U.S., from state to state and job to job, with a general sense of discontent. Once she began practicing yoga, what kept her coming back to her mat weren’t the physical benefits of her practice. It was the way in which her mind seemed to turn off during yoga. The “what next, what if” worries, concerns and chatter seemed to fade away. It was as if the physical postures took enough concentration to quiet down all of her mind chatter, and before she knew it, she was even moving without thinking. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the answers to her worries would come. It wasn’t long before Mandy would turn to her yoga mat before making any big life decision.

In 2003, Mandy graduated from her first 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training program and began teaching yoga classes throughout Central Pennsylvania. While Mandy knew she had scoliosis, she was lucky enough to be pain free. Throughout her childhood, she had gone unmonitored and unbraced. She had no stigma around scoliosis, and at that point didn't even bother to write scoliosis on her health history forms. It was during this first Yoga Teacher Training that she overhead the teachers whispering, "Does Mandy have back problems?" It was a bit of a lightbulb moment - Oh, other people think scoliosis is a problem. 

Over the years, yoga became a larger part of her life. Mandy left the engineering world behind in 2009 and began teaching and seeing yoga therapy clients full-time. She continued to go about life ignoring her scoliosis (and most likely doing things that were causing her curve to get worse). 

In 2014, with the birth of Mandy’s second son, her practice took a big turn. Suddenly Mandy found herself with intense back pain. Mandy sought the help of a wide variety of professionals, both mainstream medical and alternative health: chiropractors, her family doctor, a specialized pain management doctor, massage therapists, an acupuncturist, a Feldenkrais practitioner, and a Physical Therapist. While Mandy received varying amounts of compassion and true desire to help from each of these professionals, one theme remained the same – she was still one of the healthiest people they worked with, and nobody could understand the source of her pain.

Fueled by her desire to truly understand the nature of her pain, she began to research Yoga for Scoliosis and jumped into learning with both feet. Mandy has studied with Rachel Jesien, Loren Fishman, Alison West, Stuart McGill and Elise Browning Miller. She then carried that learning into other movement modalities, becoming a Certified Personal Trainer and taking college courses in Exercise Physiology and Physical Therapy. 

In many ways, Mandy feels like her yoga journey has come full circle as she is now seeing great physical benefits from her practice. Within four months of changing her yoga practice to account for her spinal curvature, she was again living pain free. She also finds her dormant engineering mind sparking back to life to help understand the very complex spinal relationship that is created by scoliosis with its lateral curves, accompanying rotation, and possible hyper-kyphosis and hyper-lordosis.

Mandy has worked with scoliosis and other backcare clients in her State College, PA studio for over 8 years and is excited to bring her teaching online to help others become centered and strong.