Hello Daphna
This is my personal experience with body inversion.
I’m 58. Much of my working life, from 14 on, has involved the moving of various loads by various methods. All these methods required my body.
Recreational pursuits, some of them epic failures, coupled with work have left me well worn and a bit rickety.
Two years ago I went to work on my spine.
As I saw it, I wanted to invert my body, suspended by hips or feet and decompress the spine. (I hang from my hips.) While inverted and decompressed, I wanted to flex the supporting muscle around the spine. By strengthening in this way, I reasoned that the discs should be held apart better and would relieve some of the grinding that load and gravity caused. It worked!
After two years of inversion and some other methods of decompression I am transformed. Decompression and strengthening is a daily discipline. It for me, is relief, but a cure that fails when I fail to do the work.
How to do it without spending money?
Get creative and find a way to invert your upper body. Very slightly at first and very briefly. (My relief did not come without some pain, so go easy.) Breathe. It may sound like oogly-boogly, but learn to breathe.
After you have found that you can stay in this position for a minute or so without to much pain, try flexing your torso while inverted.
Inversion tables typically hang you by your feet. This will decompress everything from the ankles up. This can be good, but hanging loose like this for too long can cause problems, especially when first starting out. I feel it’s important to engage as many muscle groups as possible when inverted. Engage, release. Treat it like an exercise repetition.
I would suggest a spotter for any first attempts at inversion. If like most of us, you don’t spend much time upside down, it takes some getting used to. Slow and steady wins the race!
Hope thats not TMI or too far off your question, but I hope you can find some relief regardless. ☮️