What your lower back is trying to tell you
A student of mine used to come to class complaining about what he called his sleep injury. He would say something like: I went to bed feeling fine, I woke up with my back tight in knots. Did I twist it weirdly while sleeping? What is going on?
His way of thinking captures something universal about how we think about the lower back. We assume the pain must be mechanical. We assume something must have happened. A twist, a lift, a wrong move, a strange sleeping position. Something specific that we did, or something specific that was done to us. If only we could figure out what.
But often, nothing happened. We just went to bed, and we woke up hurting.
This is not a mystery, but it is a sign. The lower back has a way of holding things that the rest of the body — and the mind — cannot fully carry. And when the load gets too heavy, it speaks.
The story we tell about back pain
Most of what we hear about lower back pain is mechanical. Bad posture. Weak core. Lifting with the back instead of the legs. Twisting awkwardly. And those things are real — they really do cause back pain, and addressing them really does help.
But anyone who has worked with back pain over time, in their own body or in other people’s, eventually notices that the mechanical story doesn’t explain everything. You can have perfect posture and still hurt. You can do all your core work and still hurt. You can lift with your legs every time and still wake up with that ache that has no obvious cause. The standard story covers some of the picture, but not all of it.
What I see again and again with my students is that the lower back is one of the most reliable places in the body where mechanical causes and emotional causes braid together. Treating one without the other usually doesn’t resolve the pain. And sometimes, the emotional or nervous-system layer is doing far more of the work than the mechanical one.
Why the lower back, specifically
The lower back is, quite literally, in the middle of everything.
Anatomically, it sits at the center of the body: it carries the weight of the upper body, transmits force from the legs, mediates between the mobile spine and the stable pelvis. Every motion of the arms, every step of the feet, every breath of the diaphragm travels through it. It is the structural crossroads of the human body.
But the lower back is also in the middle energetically. In the yogic tradition, this is the area of manipura — the third chakra, the solar plexus, the seat of personal power, agency, and what the tradition calls our “inner fire.” It is where we feel our capacity to act in the world. When we lose our sense of personal power or suppress it in some way, the area around the third chakra often registers it first.
And the lower back is in the middle emotionally, too. We “shoulder” things, but we carry them in the lower back. Grief settles there. Suppressed anger settles there. The weight of responsibilities we cannot put down settles there. The body has its own language for what it cannot fully process, and the lower back is one of its most articulate voices.
So when stress — the cumulative kind we have been talking about in this series — lands somewhere in the body, the lower back is one of its favorite places to land. It is the place where so many demands already meet. It is already holding so much. One more thing tips it over.
The pattern I see again and again
Over the years, I have worked with many students who came to me because of back pain. And what I have learned is that the cause is almost never one thing. Sometimes it is about the body, sometimes about the nervous system, sometimes about the emotional life, sometimes about all three at once. The point is not that emotional causes replace mechanical ones. The point is that the lower back is one of the few places in the body where you cannot reliably separate them.
It is also one of the most common places where stress symptoms surface. And the path forward, for most people, is not just to stretch the back, or just to strengthen the core, or just to manage the stress. It is to look at all the layers — structural, physiological, energetic, emotional — and ask which ones are speaking loudest right now.
That is what I cover in the new webinar 10 Common Causes of Lower Back Tension and What You Can Do About Them. It is one hour of real case studies, ten students I have worked with over the years, each with a different combination of causes, each requiring a different combination of responses. You will also get two additional practices for the lower back:
- Rise & Mobilize: Standing preventative practice for the lower back (25 minutes)
- Release & Restore: A floor practice to relieve piriformis tension (35 minutes)
The webinar is free with the purchase of any yoga series during our Spring Sale, which runs through May 31. Every series is $10 off, and each one is built around a different layer of the system — structural, energetic, physiological, or mental-emotional. Whatever you choose, the webinar (10 Common Causes of Lower Back Tension) comes with it.
Next week, we will return to Antonovsky’s framework and look at the second pillar of the Sense of Coherence: manageability, the felt sense that you have what you need to cope. As it happens, that pillar is exactly what a body-based practice is designed to build. Tune in!
