When she was a teenager, a doctor told Marina Nellius that her rheumatoid arthritis would eventually force her into a wheelchair. “He said I’d be crippled by the age of 25,” she says. “I remember his exact words. It utterly broke me.”
Gentle yoga provided a lifeline for Nellius.
Desperate to find a way to get better, Nellius joined a study about 10 years ago on the effects of yoga on arthritis patients at Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center in Baltimore. During the study, Nellius learned how to practice gentle yoga, a slower, less physically challenging version of the discipline.