Several years ago Nadiya Nottingham was diagnosed with scoliosis or curvature of the spine. She was told that she would have to have an operation to put pins in her neck or she would be paralysed in a couple of years.

Ms Nottingham, originally of Ireland, now of New York City never had that operation. Instead she turned to yoga, and has never looked back. She stresses that yoga wasn?t necessarily a cure for her problems, it did help her to improve her breathing and bone health.

Today at the age of 48, she maintains a private therapy practice in New York City. She will be on the island this weekend to give workshops for Living Yoga called ?From Cheekbones to Sitbones: Supporting Good Bone Health?. They begin this Friday.

She originally started yoga because of a collapsed lung due to smoking.

?I wanted to start doing something that would get me back in touch with my breathing,? Ms Nottingham said. ?Yoga helped to turn my life around. It helped me to clear my lungs. My lungs are in better shape now than they were before I was a smoker.?

Halfway through her yoga teaching career she was diagnosed with scoliosis, curvature of the spine which was causing some bone loss.

?I started studying how the bones are affected by movements,? she said. ?I studied with Sara Meeks who is an expert on osteoporosis and a physical therapist.

?Through my work with her and through my own studies of anatomy with my other teachers and my chi kung teachers who have students in their eighties and nineties I have since defied the diagnosis that I needed surgery.

?I was told I would be paralysed if I didn?t have the surgery in my arms. I did have this tingling sensation where the nerves were compressed. That is all gone. I have maintained good posture. I feel like I have turned my life around not once but twice.?

Ms Nottingham said that for her, yoga has been a form of self-empowerment.

?I think it is very important to have good doctors, but I think healing is a team effort,? she said. ?We have to support ourselves and be part of our own healing process, as opposed to going to the doctor when we are already sick. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.?

She said that scientists are discovering that even a minimal amount of exercise throughout life improves bone health.

?After a period of being relatively sedentary that is when the disease starts to set in,? she said. ?It is really only in westernised countries that the rates of osteoporosis are so high. In other countries such as Japan, people walk more, they ride their bicycles more, they have more community involvement. There is more for people to do continuously through from age 50 to 70.?

She said using muscles strengthens the bones the muscles are attached to. If we don?t work and lift and walk, that process slows down to the absolute minimum.

?The body is very intelligent,? she said. ?It doesn?t want to over work. What is great about that is that we have the power to make a change, to become more active.

?Even if you have been sitting around for the last five years, you can decide to ride your bicycle for ten minutes. Very simple stuff like doing yoga and chi kung make a difference.?

She said that her workshops are for people of all ages. This summer she plans to teach workshops at a Jewish Centre in New York to elderly Holocaust survivors.

One of the things she has learned from taking chi kung classes is something called ?the shaking of bones?.

?It is a very gentle shaking movement,? she said. ?It is almost like African dance except you are not jumping up and down. We complain that gravity is not good for the face, but if we were in zero gravity our bones would suffer seriously.

?The astronauts, for example, suffered terribly from bone loss from being in zero gravity. The astronauts can?t walk properly when they step off onto earth again, because of zero gravity. So NASA started using these sound vibrations to shake the bones.

?I wrote an e-mail to the teacher, and said look at this. She said, actually what we are doing in chi kung is better. The astronauts are doing it passively, whereas we are actually using the ground for the gravity.

?The shaking of the bones that we are doing in chi kung gets the lymph fluid moving. Our bodies are eighty percent water. In a stagnant pool of water that is where stuff starts growing.

?Our bodies should be considered more like a river. Simply movements of shaking, inhaling up, and exhaling down - that gets this watery body to flow.?

In her workshops she also talks about the benefits of decreasing the amount of meat in the diet, and increasing the amount of green leafy vegetables and fruit.

?Osteoporosis itself isn?t the result of one thing happening,? she said. ?It is linking the currents of our lives. If we have weak digestion we are not absorbing our nutrients.

?Weak digestion can come from poor posture and lack of exercise. It is import to check you don?t have a serious underlying factor that may be contributing to weakness in absorbing nutrients.?

Ms Nottingham will also talk to workshop participants about the negative results of stress in our lives, and things we can do to help reduce that stress.

?One of the people I love to read is Dr. David Hawkins,? Ms Nottingham said. ?He wrote a book called ?Orthomolecular Psychiatry?, about the effects of stress on the body.

?He also wrote another book where he talks about the difference between power verses force. He wrote that power or force is internally generated by ones attitudes. Of course there are outside forces that act on our stress levels, but also how we think about things affects it. If we have a family member who is very disturbing to us, maybe it is better to only talk to them once a month on the phone.?

She said learning stress management is crucial to improving ones overall personal health and well being.

?It is important to help create situations where things are less stressful and to realise we have this ability to reduce the stressful situations ourselves,? she said. ?I realise that that is easier said than done, but it is important to realise that worrying is a choice. We can decide. We are the ones who decide just how stressful something is.?

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