For Parkinson’s patient, yoga puts her back in control

The first time Kay Zepeda walked into Perfect Balance Yoga & Massage, it was with great difficulty.

She remembers it as a life-changing date: Oct. 21, 2011. She was 54 and had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few months earlier, though she’d known for a long time that something was seriously wrong with her.

She went to Perfect Balance because she had done some research and learned that yoga, massage therapy and tai-chi were among the best activities for alleviating the symptoms of Parkinson’s.

As Zepeda recalls it, it took her six minutes to walk from the front door of Perfect Balance and across the room. The co-owner of Perfect Balance, Rory Rogina, said he knew just by watching her walk that Zepeda had either Parkinson’s or MS. He promised her she would be noticeably better after just four sessions of yoga.

As it turned out, she felt better that first day.

“When I walked in, barely, one of the first things he did was to get me breathing—relaxed down and breathing,” she said.

Rogina added, “The first thing I told you to do was breathe. The second thing I told you to do was smile.”

Zepeda had always been active. She grew up riding horses, played volleyball in high school, was a runner and had even done some skydiving. But before that day in 2011, she had had to give up almost all activity, and she’d had to close the salon, Artistic Hair by Kay, she’d run for 13 years.

The changes were devastating.

“Mentally, I was a mess,” she said.

“Actually, I’d say you were clinically depressed,” Rogina said.

Hence his advice to breathe and to smile. When people are stressed out, Rogina said, they tend to take shallow, choppy breaths, which only increases stress levels. Breathing deeply into the abdomen affects the intercostal muscles that run between the ribs, creating internal expansion. Deep breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, slows down your heart, makes you calm.

That was all they did that first session—some deep breathing and a few simple stretches, but it was a good start.

“I’m sure I walked better when I left,” Zepeda said. “I just said, ‘When can I come back?’”

She started taking classes at once, along with some private sessions and massage therapy, and “the more I did, the better I felt. It was so obvious, so fast.” By the end of her second week, she asked if she could move out of the therapeutic class she was in, which involved very light workouts and included some people who were on oxygen.

She continued medication for her Parkinson’s, and still does, but the effect of her yoga practice was to give her control over her body again, the ability to make it do what she wanted it to do.

As Rogina explained it, a common symptom of Parkinson’s is the tremors that most people associate with the disease. But in others, including Zepeda, there is actually less spontaneous movement, even abnormal stillness, which can make actions like walking painfully slow.

Zepeda was soon taking classes on a daily basis, and sometimes even two or three times a day, and her progress was striking. She not only regained muscle control but was in great shape overall.

Then, 10 months into her yoga practice, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She ended up having a complete mastectomy on her left breast, followed by reconstructive surgery. The surgery involved cutting through one of her lat muscles, the biggest muscles in the back, and taking some muscles from the back and wrapping them around the front to support the breast implant.

Zepeda said her surgeon warned her not to do any yoga for eight weeks, to avoid damage to the muscles, but at her five-week checkup he cleared her to start doing yoga again. What she hadn’t told him was that she’d already been doing yoga for three weeks.

Zepeda continued to do so much yoga that eventually she underwent training to become a teacher at Perfect Balance. As part of her preparation, she and Rogina went to a five-day intensive training class in California. Rogina said the instructor kept using Zepeda as an example for the class, saying that most people who’d undergone the same surgery as Zepeda could barely do a downward dog, one of the most basic yoga poses, because of inflexible arms. Zepeda, by contrast, was doing all sorts of advanced poses.

She said she still has some problems with her right arm, a holdover from all her years as a hairdresser and using a scissors with her right hand. She also has some problems with her left arm because of the reconstructive surgery, but basically she has about the same range of motion now with both arms.

Zepeda started teaching at Perfect Balance last February. She teaches four regular classes a week and is the main substitute for the other 11 instructors there. She does almost all the activities she used to do, including riding horses.

She continues taking medication, but her doctor recently informed her that because of her progress in dealing with her symptoms, she is no longer a candidate for deep-brain stimulation surgery. As she explains it, most treatments for Parkinson’s involve stimulating the brain to control muscle movements. Through yoga, she said, she actually uses her muscles to stimulate her brain.

Parkinson’s is a progressive disease. There is no cure, just a constant battle to remain in control of her own body. “It’s not easy,” she said, either physically or mentally.

She knows she’ll never go back to being a stylist, mostly because it requires standing all day and using her arms in awkward, repetitive movements. One of the hardest things about giving up that profession, she said, was losing the sense of helping other people, of being an important part of their lives.

“Now you’re serving others again,” Rogina said, referring to her work as a yoga instructor. Zepeda agreed.

“That’s what keeps my heart happy,” she said, “being able to make that difference.”

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