In this video, Breathing Deeply Founder and Lead Teacher Brandt Passalacqua speaks with SarahLyn McConaughey, C-IAYT and Breathing Deeply Advanced Program graduate, about a client she worked with presenting chronic low back pain of over 10 years. SarahLyn walks through her assessment process, the practices she prescribed, and the outcomes her client achieved across nine months of one-on-one yoga therapy work.
How Yoga Therapy Helps Chronic Low Back Pain
Chronic low back pain is one of the most common and most undertreated conditions in the Western world. For many people, it becomes something they simply learn to live around, managing flare-ups, modifying activity, and quietly accepting that things may not get better. What is often missing is not more treatment, but a different kind of assessment.
Yoga therapy approaches low back pain by looking beyond the site of pain itself. Rather than treating the symptom in isolation, a trained yoga therapist assesses the whole person, examining movement patterns, muscular imbalances, breath habits, and how the nervous system and mind are contributing to the experience. This is what allows yoga therapy to address root causes that other modalities, including massage and general exercise, may not reach.
In SarahLyn’s case, a thorough muscle assessment revealed that her client’s glutes, particularly the glute medius, were chronically weak, leaving the lower back to compensate and creating a persistent trigger point pattern.
A targeted 20-minute daily strengthening practice, combined with trigger point work and a meditative component to support an accompanying autoimmune condition, produced measurable pain reduction within four months and complete resolution within nine months. Nine sessions across nine months. A 10-year problem, solved.
This is what yoga therapy is capable of.
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Breathing Deeply is a Yoga Therapy and Meditation School co-founded by lead teacher Brandt Passalacqua in 2011. Breathing Deeply offers two levels of certification: Foundations of Yoga Therapy and an IAYT-accredited Advanced Program, offering C-IAYT eligibility.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and yogis, caregivers, therapists, teachers, medical professionals, parents & children with the same intention—to serve others, lessen suffering, and co-create a new paradigm in wellness.
Brandt talks about common questions applicants have about the Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy Program. Tune in to get the full program details.