Virtual gentle chair yoga: How one KY health department is keeping residents healthy
In an empty second-story room on the edge of downtown Paintsville, Mary Beth Castle closes her eyes, takes a measured deep breath, and talks to her iPhone.
“I want you to breathe deeply. Begin to notice how it feels as you’re breathing,” she says slowly. “Is it smoothed or forced? Just notice what your breathing habits are. Are you breathing through your nose or through your mouth? Where do you feel your breath in you?”
She pauses for a few seconds. “I want you to exhale either through your nose or through your lips as if you’re blowing out a candle.”
Castle, health coordinator for the Johnson County Health Department, has livestreamed an hour of gentle chair yoga on the department’s Facebook page to hundreds of viewers most weeks since late March, when the initial wave of COVID-19 first crashed across Kentucky. Later that same month, when Gov. Andy Beshear began shutting down the state’s economy to slow disease spread, she proposed this standing yoga date to her director as an alternative to her bi-weekly in-person classes. Knowing many in her county would be sequestered, she wanted a way to connect with them, even if it was virtual.
She’s led these weekly sessions since March 17, either from this second-floor room at the health department, or from a room in her own home, where she now works for part of the week.
“We just wanted to provide some normalcy through the pandemic because everything has just been turned upside down,” she said before her December 15 session.
Her convivial personality is as big as her red hair, and she often begins these livestreams with a plug for mask wearing. If she’s not wearing hers, she explains why.
“I do have my mask. I don’t have it on, simply because as I’ve told you before, I’m upstairs, and when I’m upstairs, I don’t have to worry about seeing anybody,” she told viewers on December 15. “Remember that it protects everyone around you, and of course we know it protects you as well.”
Castle, who’s 58, is a Johnson County native. She taught middle school economics for 33 years before retiring in 2017. As she tells it, the following half year was tough. “I stayed retired for eight months, and I thought, I can’t do this,” so she got a job in public health, instead.
It’s a small department, which means she wears many hats: she’s the public information officer, the lifestyle coach for the diabetes prevention program, the American Lung Association freedom from smoking facilitator, and early on in the pandemic, she chipped in with contact tracing. Lately, she makes trips to grocery stores and pharmacies to fetch groceries and medicine for families in quarantine or isolation because of the virus.
Pre-coronavirus, she’s the health department’s community liaison, humming around town leading nutrition, hygiene and exercise classes in the public school system, and teaching gentle chair yoga twice a week at the local senior center and the Paintsville Recreation Center.
“I want you to hold onto your chair, and I want you to just move forward a little. We’re going to work on our hips, as well as all of our leg muscles,” she said during her December 15 session. “Bring that leg up off the floor if you can and then you point the toe out. And then I want you to pull that toe back in toward your heart,” Castle directed as she flexed her own foot. “Then just work that foot back and forth.”
Her virtual classes have amassed quite the following over the last nine months. Her mid December class was viewed by 862 people, which is a lot for Johnson County, she said. Castle also leads a book-reading and puppet-talking session each week for children in the community. She and her puppets, both, wear masks.
These livestreams are buoyed by Castle’s engaging demeanor; she tends to greet people by name as they sign on, the same way she would if they were to walk through the door. “Remember, those hands need to be washed and sanitized. Hi Bonnie!” Castle said. “We know we’ve seen some deaths, but hopefully we won’t see anymore, but it can happen, so that’s why we want to make sure that we are, Hi Pam, I was just talking about you!”
‘A stress reliever’
Gentle chair yoga is pretty much how it sounds: it’s gentle yoga practiced while sitting upright in a chair. With equal emphasis on stretching and mobility, Castle likes to categorize it as a “no pain, no strain” form of exercise.
Pam Ratliff, who Castle greeted by name, can attest to this motto. At 63, her participation in gentle chair yoga preceded the pandemic, and she’s been an avid participant in Castle’s virtual sessions since March. Every Tuesday just before 1p.m., Ratliff readies in the sun room of her Staffordsville home. Her husband occasionally joins her.
“It’s a stress reliever,” especially during the pandemic, Ratliff said last week. “You take an hour for yourself, just to stop and relax and focus.”
Much of the crowd who tunes into Castle is older, Ratliff said, and considered at higher risk for catching the coronavirus. “A lot of them are older like myself, and they’re just afraid to get out a lot. This is something for them to do to keep them moving,” she said.
As Castle led her session, a helicopter flew overhead on its way to the Paul B. Hall Regional Medical Center across the street, where, like the number of new COVID-19 cases in this county of about 23,000 people, the number of coronavirus-positive hospitalizations has risen in recent weeks. Eight Johnson County residents were hospitalized this week with the virus.
The COVID-19 incidence rate in Johnson County, like almost all of Kentucky’s 120 counties, is considered dangerously high; this Eastern Kentucky county has been in the “red zone” since mid October. On December 29, 171 residents were currently infected.
Kentucky’s public health departments have played a vital role during the pandemic, not only with trying to mitigate transmission through aggressive contact tracing, but by providing crucial information to their communities about the level of spread.
Johnson County Public Health Department, like most in the commonwealth, has posted daily coronavirus updates on its Facebook page for months, including the number of new and active cases. And, like many other departments, staff have endured periodic vitriol from some residents who baselessly claim health staff are embellishing the seriousness of the disease.
Castle contended with this rancor and did her best to stamp it out by assuring people from her own Facebook page, “we are trying to be as transparent as we can be. We’re not trying to deceive anyone.”
She hopes that all these months of putting her face out there has helped to personalize the department and its mission, which is to inform and protect Johnson County residents.
“I feel like in the time that we’re in, and I can’t be person-to-person, we’re actually maybe doing something that’s beneficial to everyone in our community, and that’s what we want to do,” Castle said.
This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 2:30 PM.
