The ME/CFS Society of NSW Inc.

by Jennie Sharpe

Your backache runs from the tip of your spine to the base, spreading tentacles through muscles you never knew existed. You can’t sit, lie or stand without a cacophony of silent protest rippling through your body. What have you done to deserve this? Yoga.

It sounds innocent enough, but when I tried an hour’s gentle yoga class some years ago this scenario hit me like a tonne of bricks and took almost a week to recover from. “Never again,” I vowed, and even now, having progressed so many years further down the long road to health, I still eye yoga with suspicion.

Yet many people with CFS swear by that odd conglomeration of postures and breathing exercises that make up a yoga session. Could it really be that powerful? And is there any truth to those claims of healing properties? Most importantly—do the benefits outweigh the costs?

I put these questions to Judy Krupp, founder of north shore’s The Yoga Room and yoga teacher to celebrities such as Donna Karan. “Yes” is the answer to all, but with reservations.

With CFS patients there are cautions involved”, she tells me “I would recommend starting with half an hour … First I would take them through breathing exercises and then, very gently, into stretches. If you overdo it there can be a toxin release”.

She agrees I probably did too much for a first time but promises there are great benefits even to the slowest, most gentle yoga class. “Yoga is a slow way to create strength. You work the entire circulatory system, including the immune system. It detoxes the body by working the organs. And by strengthening leg muscles, for example, you are strengthening the meridians within the legs.”

It sounds wonderful, but what happens if you are housebound and can’t make it to a yoga class? Or so ill that the thought of even half an hour of yoga sounds like running a marathon?

Long-time CFS sufferer and Society member, Karyn Crimmin, faced those inevitable issues of deteriorating health but longed for “an antidote” to her now-stationary life. “The body aches for movement”, she says. “I felt … I needed to do something physical.”

She found the answer in Fiona Agombar’s book, Beat Fatigue with Yoga. Agombar, who herself had CFS for nine years, is a therapeutic yoga practitioner based in London. Beat Fatigue with Yoga is designed to aid people with fatigue to “become calmer, less stressed and more content”, eventually bringing about a “huge improvement in … health and stamina”

According to Karyn, the most valuable component of the book is that it is just that—a book; containing exercises that can be done in the comfort of her own home at her own pace. “15-20 minutes of yoga makes you feel you’re doing something substantial,” she says, “and it’s much easier than all the energy expended on going to a class.”

Agombar has also tailored her book to fit the needs of people with varying degrees of CFS. In her chapter on CFS, she lays out a programme of exercise for four different levels of the illness, from mild to very severe.

Karyn says she uses these gradating exercises for the alterations between good days and bad. An ‘inversion’ exercise which simply involves lying on the floor with the feet at right angles against a bed for three minutes can be increased on a good day by lifting the hips off the floor. “I do eight exercises and I just slightly increase one of them. It’s just a slight increase – not pushing yourself.”

The importance of not pushing yourself can’t be stressed enough by Judy Krupp, in both yoga and in life with CFS generally. Yoga, she says, puts you in touch with your body: “the greatest benefit of yoga is that it integrates the mind and body. You become astutely aware. It tells you you’re tired today, or sore today, and you spend the rest of the day aware of that”.

Karyn Crimmin agrees that the positive emotional benefits of yoga are one with the physical benefits. “It gives me something concrete to concentrate on [and] clears the mind” she says. “I feel ‘up’ … after doing it. The body feels more alive. On a psychological level it’s calming.”

Both Judy and Karyn talk of yoga’s ability to teach people acceptance of where and who they are. “The big thing”, says Karyn, “is that many other forms of exercise are done to change something about yourself whereas yoga is more about acceptance of yourself—getting in touch with and making the most of the body you have now. And that is very much what is needed with CFS.”

Judy, whose daughter had CFS as a teenager, asks me bluntly if I am a high-achiever. “Yes”, I admit, half-guiltily. As was her daughter, it seems. “I used to say to her, ‘it’s ok to be mediocre’ … Yoga teaches people to be in the now, to not think about how they’re going to get out of bed tomorrow or how they used to be on top…It teaches you to be good to yourself, and then to others.”