Creating Yoga Books Helped Me Stretch My Writing Voice

Creating Yoga Books Helped Me Stretch My Writing Voice

By Holly Lebowitz Rossi

“Write the book you want to read,” goes the classic aphorism. In my case, I persuaded my longtime yoga teacher to partner in writing two books I want to be able to pull off my shelf when I need to be reminded to live fully in my own body.

It started with my lower back, which by my early 30s was the repository of so much chronic stress that I had shooting pains in my sacral joints, a repetitive stress injury from clenching my lumbar spine into an overarched position called “lordosis.” 

At the time, I couldn’t have told you whether I had sacral joints, never mind where they were located in my body. And lordosis? As a religious studies major and divinity school graduate, I would have guessed that had something to do with some sort of God-centered prayer ritual, not the cause of the stabbing pain I routinely felt in my lower back.

I didn’t know much, but I knew I had stress, and I could tell that stress was expressing itself in my body. I was a booked-and-busy journalist, writing about religion for the secular media. My husband and I had just weathered his yearlong deployment to the Middle East with his Army Reserve unit. And we were struggling to get pregnant and spinning through the dizzying maze of fertility treatments.

Situational stress with physical manifestations were the logical—and scary—causes of my chronic pain. 

I had read enough magazines at the airport to know just a little bit about the $88 billion global industry that reportedly engages 10 percent of the U.S. population alone. I knew just enough to lead me to suspect that yoga might be a good thing for me to try. I even learned that lower back pain is a leading reason people cite for starting to practice yoga. I found a “Gentle Yoga” class at a studio within walking distance of my home. And there, I met Liz Owen.

Liz has taught yoga since 1990, and her experience immediately impressed me, both in the tone and content of her classes. She speaks with calm authority of someone who has both extensive training and personal experience with yoga practice. She has a depth of knowledge that ground abstract concepts like the “energetic body” in accessible physical movements and postures. She has confidence when adjustments are required—and in that “gentle” class, with so many of us struggling with disruptive pain in our backs, knees, shoulders, or necks, many were required. 

I enjoyed how each class had a theme, a beginning, middle, and end that traveled a throughline of wisdom, insight, or focus. As a religion journalist, I was curious and eager to learn about the Hindu religious and Indian philosophical concepts that (appropriatively, it can easily be argued) inform American yoga. The class wasn’t a spiritual practice, but neither was it a fitness class. The connection between culture, history, and physical wellness spoke to me as a student of religion and as a writer who aspired to educate and illuminate readers about the richness of how we embody religion, spirituality, and everything in between in our everyday lives.

Over a few years, my relationship with Liz evolved from teacher to friend to—after some extensive persuasive effort on my part—writing partner. We produced a few audio meditations for Beliefnet.com, where I was working at the time as the Health & Healing editor. And then we embarked on a journey that resulted in our two books: “Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back: A Practical Guide to Developing Strength and Relieving Pain” (Shambhala, 2013), and “The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety” (Hachette, 2019).

“Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back” is a richly illustrated resource meant to educate readers about our bodies so we can approach back challenges with hope and strength. “The Yoga Effect” is an accessible and evidence-based series of practices grounded in published scientific research studies Liz co-authored with a team from Boston University School of Medicine. In a nutshell, the studies show what practitioners have known for centuries—that when it comes to depression and anxiety, yoga helps.

My story—the story of my chronic lower back pain as a young woman, and of the anxiety and depression I have journeyed through in ways connected to but not limited to my back pain—does not appear in our books. This is because the books aren’t about me, they’re for me. Actually, they’re about us, and for us—the “us” that hurts, that seeks healing, and that turns to yoga for support, empowerment, rest, growth, and nourishment. 

In addition to helping me become a person who talks about chronic low back pain in the past tense, yoga helped me—if you’ll forgive the pun—stretch my writing voice. From Liz I learned that bringing ourselves through a series of physical movements, breath exercises, or meditative reflections is very much like telling a story. Along the way, we have to learn how to name what hurts, what is changing in our bodies over time, and what our bodies are telling us, right here in the present moment. But we also have to feel the fullness of what it means to inhabit our bodies, from our most powerful to our most vulnerable feelings. 

Learning to write with these twin goals in mind, with journalistic accuracy but also with gentleness to the reader who has taken the courageous step of seeking out support for her challenges has been the great gift of making these two books with Liz.

That, and the fact that when I feel a twinge in my lower back or feel my energy sagging on a dark winter’s day, I can head to my bookshelf and read from the books I’m grateful to have written. 

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Holly Lebowitz Rossi is coauthor, with the yoga teacher and certified yoga therapist Liz Owen, of Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back: A Practical Guide to Developing Strength and Relieving Pain (Shambhala, 2013) and The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety (Hachette, 2019). She lives in Arlington, MA.

Find out more about Holly on her website http://hollyrossi.com/

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