Letter on the Roller

A Letter to Yoga Tools on the Spinal Roller
February 23, 1996

Dear Allan,

May thanks, indeed, for the copy of The Yoke; like all the rest of your booklets it is very interesting.

I write to say that - much as I am unable to believe it - I am entirely free of all lower back pain. In the last thirty years I have not been able to say this. Sometimes it has been less than at other times, but it has always been there. Now, it is gone. What's more, the new looseness and strength in my back tells me that it will likely remain absent.

I have very conscientiously followed your exercises, and I have used the roller every day. I have also incorporated other Yoga exercises, and the result is miraculous. At one point I suffered for a few days with a kind of `pins and needles' going down from my right hip all the way down the leg to the foot, but I persevered and that disappeared.

I added a little addendum to your roller exercise. I moved the roller, a few inches at a time, from my neck down my back all the way to the sacrum. At each stop I would rock from side to side and then I would flex the muscles on either side of the spine against the roller - first one side then the other till the muscles got quite tired. I noticed at first that those on the left of the spine (the good side) were considerable stronger than those on the right (the bad side). Very quickly, though. I gained good control of the right side muscles, and it was then that the pain began to diminish, eventually to disappear entirely. I can now get out of bed in the morning the way I did when I was a teenager, and it is marvelous.

Suffice it to say that I am both relieved and delighted, and I thank you. I will continue for all the years to come, to do the exercises that you have shown me; though simple, they are amazingly effective. I think that the roller is particularly effective. I only wish that I had started this years ago, but I was always afraid that I'd do more harm than good: perhaps cause some kind of permanent damage. I suppose that this attitude is very common, considering what the advice of most doctors is.

Thanks again, Allan, and best wishes to you.
A.D.
Puyallup, WA 98374