By Jen WiecznerThe Daily Northwestern

Ryan Insley flowed from one yoga pose to the next. He lifted himself into a bridge, rolled into a shoulder stand and then bent himself into a bow.

There was nothing wooden about him at the Chidambaram Yoga Center in Evanston on Monday, though three years ago his mother would have described him as stiff as a board.

Watching him, you wouldn’t guess that the 9-year-old had cerebral palsy and leg braces waiting in a wheel chair just outside the room. Or that he had undergone surgery over the summer in which the adductors in his legs, along with his left hamstring and calf, were cut to make them longer.

Ryan’s cerebral palsy prevents his muscles from relaxing so they are in a “constant state of tightness,” said Ryan’s mother, 43-year-old Chicago resident Judi Insley.

She said her son has been working with Michelle Demes, the yoga center’s owner, since a doctor first suggested that surgery might help Ryan more than three years ago.

“I just know that after he started yoga he was able to move easier than he used to,” she said.

The method Demes uses is called Yoga for the Special Child, developed by Sonia Sumar.

At her center at 1571 Sherman Ave., Demes teaches private classes for children with autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, anxiety disorders, ADD and ADHD. She also works with those recovering from accidents, surgeries and injuries.

Demes said modifications of yoga poses and their approaches depends on the child, but the techniques she uses during sessions are the same.

“They can all do the same things in different ways,” she said. “Even if they can’t sit up, can’t talk, can’t walk and couldn’t see, they can still do yoga – that’s the best part about it,” she said, adding that a child with cerebral palsy might do a pose lying down that a child with Down syndrome would perform while standing.

Demes took up Yoga because of her daughter, who is autistic. She trained to teach Yoga for the Special Child method when her daughter was 8, after exhausting speech, occupational and physical therapies.

“The traditional methods really weren’t doing very much. We were out of their expertise,” she said.

So she looked into alternative methods such as acupuncture and other Eastern practices and finally came across Yoga for the Special Child during a training session in Evanston.

She said she was sold after Sumar worked with her daughter for just half an hour.

“It had a completely different angle than any other therapies that I’d been exposed to,” Demes said. “She wasn’t treating the child by disability, she was looking at the whole child.”

Demes said she thought yoga helped endow her daughter with a body awareness that minimized the sensory problems and routines typical of autism without having to purposefully participate.

She said children also get sick less, cooperate and perform better in other activities after doing yoga because of the relaxation, breathing techniques and physical conditioning that go with it.

One child who was taking medication for behavior and temperament modification stopped needing it after working with her, Demes said.

“They just can’t miss it,” she said. “Those changes just take place energetically, physically and emotionally.”

Insley said her son’s post-surgery recovery has been phenomenal, due in part to the yoga he practiced before surgery.

“He was walking in his cast,” she said.

Now, Insley said Ryan is doing things his physical therapist has never seen a child with cerebral palsy do, such as walking in a straight line, one foot in front of the other, with good balance. She said she hopes that Ryan will realize that yoga keeps his muscles flexible and prevents them from contracting and that he will continue integrating yoga into his life.

“The fact that he was able to be flexible surprised us,” she said. “We didn’t think he could do that.”

Reach Jen Wieczner at [email protected].