Working on Long Term Back Pain

I've had an ongoing problem with back pain ever since a stupidly self-inflicted injury in my late teen years. The result was that I was taking some serious pain killers for about six months, and still have trouble sleeping through an entire night many years later. That may be coming to an end, though.

Several weeks back, I happened to be the only person who showed up for my yoga class. It's not a big class in the first place, and everybody else just ended up with something last minute happening. Rather than cancel, my teacher asked me if I was having trouble with anything specific, and I told her I had regular problems with back pain. She took me through a couple of poses to go after that problem in particular. At the time, I wasn't convinced that had been a good thing, because I had this nasty burning in my lower back by the end. I told my teacher that, and her response was that we'd probably really gotten into something that had been there for a while.

My back was then as bad as it's been since the original injury for about three days. I wasn't happy and was barely getting any sleep, but I also didn't call my teacher for help, in spite of my wife encouraging me to do so. I talked to her about it at my next class, and she suggested a couple of other poses I could work into my usual daily practice.

Here's the interesting part. After a couple of weeks of incorporating those other poses into my regular practice, I found myself walking and sitting differently, and sleeping through entire nights for the first time in ages. I had gotten rid of long term neck and shoulder pain after about two years of yoga, and this experience has turned out to be similar, though the process has been more subtle. It hasn't been a 100% solution, but I wouldn't expect one so quickly anyway. It'll be interesting to see if it turns out to be like the neck/shoulder problem, which has virtually disappeared over time except for occasional flare-ups due to stress.