How Yoga Can Relieve Headaches

Series Summary

Tension headaches have been around even longer than yoga. But now we know that combining this ancient affliction with the ancient fitness regimen can produce very effective results. The various styles of yoga that have made it to the West all share a common core: positioning the body into a particular posture while focusing mind and breath leads to physical and spiritual well-being. These arts of positioning the body have been passed on for thousands of years, and encompass one of the oldest cultural traditions known to exist. To practice yoga, then, is also to join with the ancient sages, drawing human history up into yourself and connecting with the past.

In this free series of headache pain relief, our yoga master will show you various poses and stretches which will help to relieve your tension headache. She begins the series with a brief overview of the causes of headache pain, then demonstrates how to make it feel better. Learn poses such as reverse prayer, the seated child, the recycling cobbler and the down dog, as well as stretches for your entire body. Watch this series and feel better the Expert Village way!

Video Transcript

"ELIZABETH ROSE: In this series we're going to talk about simply yoga postures for relieving headaches and neck pain. It's helpful if you know the major muscles in the neck and the jaw and face, so that when you're doing your poses you can think about targeting those muscles. The big culprit in tension headaches and in most neck pain are the trapezius muscles; they're fan shaped muscles that attach from your shoulders out here to the base of the skull and run all the way down to your midback so there--they come all the way down on either side of the spine, there's two of them. They're the muscles that will allow your shoulders to shrug and your shoulder blades to move down and your shoulder blades to move together. These are the muscles where you hold out your tension when you're stressed at work and you're doing this and you're walking around and somebody says "God take a breath" and you go "Huh...." that's releasing your trapezius muscles. We hold lots and lots and lots of tension there; it's extremely common and can cause us a lot of pain and a lot discomfort. The other muscle that for me and I found for a lot of my students can be a problem is the masseter muscle that this jaw muscle that causes you to clench your jaw. You can feel it if you press your teeth together, it's going to pop out on either side here. This is a major muscle and a lot of people do this in their sleep and it's what causes TMJ. This can cause lots of headaches as well. There are other various muscles in your lips, your cheeks and your brow and in all of your face as well that are affected but not as much as these two. So in this series that I'm about to do, we're going to talk a little bit about how to relax and put some movement into the trapezius, the neck and the jaw to hopefully release those headaches."