After months of agonizing back pain, Suellen Rinker was at a loss.

A surgeon suggested a range of options: painkillers, medication injected into the spine, back surgery. An MRI scan revealed a herniated spinal disk, and the pain, like a stabbing ice pick, filled her days with misery and robbed her nights of sleep.

“I was taking massive amounts of ibuprofen,” the 51-year-old Portland woman says. “I did have one of the spinal shots. It wasn’t particularly effective.”

Suspicious of surgery, Rinker decided to try a therapy her surgeon hadn’t offered but her primary care physician enthusiastically endorsed: yoga. Working one-on-one with a physical therapist yoga instructor, Rinker learned to practice …

Every day, almost without fail, Connie Tellman escapes to the solitude of her grown daughter’s former room to meditate.

After doing yoga postures to relieve body tension, she sits cross-legged on a pillow, hands resting on her knees, eyes closed. For 15 minutes or so, she silently repeats her personal mantra, breathes rhythmically from her diaphragm and methodically touches the 108 small wooden beads of her mala necklace.

“Your mind concentrates on the breath,” said the 52-year-old Indianapolis woman. “You go within and close out the distractions of the world, so you can focus on your inner self.”

Local people who meditate agree on how it makes them feel: peaceful, calm, centered.

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Yoga that includes gentle stretching exercises combined with meditation can lessen the symptoms of fibromyalgia, a U.S. study found.

Twenty-five women diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain syndrome, took part in a 2-hour weekly yoga class for eight weeks.

At the end of the study, the group reported improvements in both physical and psychological aspects of fibromyalgia, including decreased pain, fatigue, tenderness, anxiety and better sleep and mood, HealthDay reported Thursday.

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Ed Gabrielsen has spent his life trying to marry the body and the mind, first as a singer and later as an instructor of yoga and meditation. He has worked with people touched by cancer at the Dempsey Center, teaching a class titled “Music and Meditation.”

He currently teaches at Healthy for Life Wellness Center in Norway, where his wife, pediatric doctor Jill Gabrielsen, also has a medical practice.

Name: Ed Gabrielsen

Age: 47

Hometown: Norway

Single, relationship or married? Married

Children? We have two children.

You’ve been a musician for a long time. What does music do for you? Music is an art that expresses thoughts and emotions in a way that goes beyond words. I feel very fortunate to be a musician because my life …

This summer I led yoga on a month-long Buddhist meditation retreat in The Santa Cruz mountains, and when I returned home to the city this book, “Freeing the Body Freeing the Mind” was in my mailbox. It appeared like a welcome-home gift and a tool for reflecting more deeply on my own joyful exploration of Hatha Yoga and Buddhist mediation as one practice.

I had been pondering the relationship between the two traditions and how the two practices support one another, and this book is a deep reflection of these very themes. In a compilation of 13 essays from a …

Hospitals and meditation are coming together, what with the growth in mindfulness-based programs that started with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction several decades ago. Sutter Hospital, in California, is one of the latest to add a Meditation Garden.

Meanwhile, at an Asheville, North Carolina, hospital, meditation is being used to help breast cancer patients. According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, a study “found patients using the body/mind/medicine therapies, including guided imaging, reported lowered blood pressure, heart rates and anxiety levels.”

In military medicine circles, the army’s plans to build up mental ‘resilience’ in soldiers serving in Iraq include a meditation room with stained glass windows.

There’s an Asheville connection with regards to Rev. Teijo Munnich, who is said to have been …

As well all know, mathematics is dangerous — especially trigonometry. Rooted as it is in ancient Greek religious practice, young minds exposed to mathematics become open to unwholesome — possibly demonic — spiritual influences. Nah, just joking. The bit about math being rooted in religion is true, naturally, but the possibility that the hypotenuse is the straight line to hell seems far-fetched, to say the least. But Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler believes something very similar about yoga, according to an article in the Clarion Ledger. Yoga comes from the Hindu tradition, but of course dressing in a leotard and stretching your hamstrings doesn’t strike most people as much more than a way of calming down and …

Nearly 20 million people in the United States gather together routinely, fold their hands and utter the Hindu greeting of Namaste — the Divine in me bows to the same Divine in you. Then they close their eyes and focus their minds with chants of “Om,” the Hindu representation of the first and eternal vibration of creation. Arrayed in linear patterns, they stretch, bend, contort and control their respirations as a mentor calls out names of Hindu divinity linked to various postures: Natarajaasana (Lord Shiva) or Hanumanasana (Lord Hanuman) among many others. They chant their assigned “mantra of the month,” taken as they are from lines directly from the Vedas, Hinduism’s holiest scripture. Welcome to the practice of yoga in …

Recharge your batteries with a weekend of calm and relaxation! Join retreat leaders Amala and Sunada on this residential retreat — where you can relax, be taken care of, and regain some perspective on your life. You’ll rejuvenate body and mind with wholesome vegetarian meals, meditation, yoga, and massage. You’ll also learn ‘take-home’ skills to help you manage stress and enhance self-care in your daily life at home.

The retreat is open to anyone who is suffering from burnout, stress, overwork or who feels disconnected from their ability to enjoy life.

Union Leader: RAYMOND, NEW HAMPSHIRE – Concerns about the type of crowd that might gather and a lack of information led the board of selectmen to deny a request by a local resident to hold a yoga for peace event at the town common on Sunday.

Sunday is the International Day of Peace, which is sanctioned by the United Nations.

Resident Molly Schlangen sent a letter to the board requesting use of the town common for a brief gathering with complimentary yoga classes to “promote peace in our community and in our world.”

Schlangen, a local yoga instructor and formerly the school nurse at Lamprey River Elementary School, held the same event last year. About 20 people attended and took part in …