Juliana Spicoluk knows that the stress of everyday life can manifest in physical ways — and she's a pro at relieving the body of that burden through yoga. The cocreator of the Boho Beautiful brand, whose YouTube channel has over 1.5 million subscribers, is a certified yoga and Pilates teacher with lessons you can check out on that YouTube page or on Patreon (where she and her husband, Mark, currently offer weekly full-length livestream yoga classes).
Due to a back injury from rhythmic gymnastics, Spicoluk had to quit the sport, and that's when she found yoga and Pilates — she told POPSUGAR that she used them both as a form of therapy and to build strength. "I was a 17-year-old girl who could barely walk, it was that bad. So yoga definitely saved my life," she said. She's also learned to utilize yoga for easing stress, and one of her favorite poses is Pigeon Pose.
Some people hold tension in their shoulders, but it's also common to hold tension elsewhere, such as the lower body, Spicoluk said. She finds that she personally harbors stress in the glute muscles and piriformis muscle, which can also cause lower-back pain, she noted, and Pigeon Pose gets deep into that area. The worst thing that we can do is suppress stress and anxiety, "so if it needs to leave our bodies, we've got to let it go." Pigeon, she said, is a great way to activate the release of those emotions.
Spicoluk added that many of her students, both in person and online, write to her saying that they've felt a similar type of release through the pose. Pigeon is popular especially in Yin Yoga, where you hold postures for minutes at a time, and people get very emotional, she noted.