by AMANDA WINTERS

Sequim Gazette

By his mid-30s, Rob Gold was broken from an overactive lifestyle of extreme sports.

“I couldn’t walk down the stairs in the morning, I had to go down them on my butt,” he said. “I spent so much time doing and not any time undoing.”

After six months of Svaroopa yoga, which consists of simple yet powerful pose variations to dissolve tension along the spine, his body felt 20 years younger, he said.

“Did it give me my worn-out disks back? No,” he said. “But relaxed muscles don’t put pressure on it and don’t make it painful. When you support the body and align it correctly, the body releases.”

Gold attended and later managed the Master Yoga Teacher Institute in Pennsylvania. He also owned his own yoga studio. During the summer of 2011, he visited his parents, who had retired to Sequim, and decided this was where he wanted to be.

Gold recently established Kailash Yoga Therapy, at 542 N. Fifth Ave., where he will teach group Svaroopa yoga classes as well as conduct one-on-one yoga therapy sessions with clients.

The poses are simple and strong, using chairs, the floor, the wall, blocks made of cork, and blankets — no contortion-like positions or complicated balancing acts commonly seen in magazines.

As an athlete, Gold was skeptical of the effectiveness of the Svaroopa yoga poses, he said.

“I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m going to lie on the floor with blankets?’” he recalled. “It’s very subtle but very effective.”

Svaroopa yoga is about winding down, finding inner peace and relieving pain and tension by opening up the body’s core and decompressing the spine.

Classes, beginning March 4, will teach groups of eight the Svaroopa poses, while therapy sessions will provide variations of the poses tailored to the needs of the client, he said.

For more information, call Gold at 460-6774 or go to www.kailashyoga.org.

Reach Amanda Winters at awinters@sequimgazette.com.