Health

Vedic Chant: Sound, Beauty, Healing

Elizabeth Health, Knowledge, Mantras , ,

Vedic ChantsIf you attended my yoga classes, you probably have had the experience of chanting a word or words in Sanskrit. The words I would have chosen for us to chant would have supported the focus for the class. For example, if we were focusing on the concept of “peace,” we would chant the Sanskrit word for peace, “shanti,” and allow that sound to help create a sense of peace in our bodies, our breath, our minds, and our hearts.

Because of my love of chanting and my desire to learn more, I spent ten days in May, 2013 in the 2nd module of a two year training in Santa Fe, New Mexico, focusing on Vedic Chant. The word “Vedic” comes from the noun “Veda,” meaning “knowledge” in the Sanskrit language. The Vedas, which are about 4,000 to 5,000 years old, are a collection of chants, poems, rituals, hymns, and mantras in Sanskrit passed generation to generation through chanting. What we chant from the Vedas is Vedic Chant, learned with attention to rhythm, meter, and pronunciation. The chants are pleasant to hear and chant. The sound of the chants has the potential to influence our entire system. Many of the chants are about Nature, health, and healing and can help bring about positive change for us.
 

Press to hear an example of a vedic chant.

 
In our ten days of Vedic Chant training, we chant a lot in small and large groups, receiving instruction and feedback from chanting teachers. We also study the Sanskrit language and the context and meaning of chants. When we finish the ten days, we chant and study on our own, seeking others who might also study Vedic Chant or requesting help from a teacher, often via Skype or phone.

I can’t tell you how many times I am asked why I am studying Vedic Chant or what I want to do with it. The answer to the first question is that I love the sound of the chants. I love the focus on Nature. I love that I am part of a group seeking to assure that Vedic Chant will continue to be passed on. I know the sound of the chants are special: they move energy; they support health; they heal.

The answer to the second question is that I hope to create a community of people who want to learn, experience, enjoy, and benefit from Vedic Chant. As I complete my training next year, I look forward to sharing my love of chant with you.

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Vulnerabilities

Elizabeth Health, Informational , ,

Santa Fe earth and skyThe greatest gifts of yoga for me have been the reduction of suffering in my life and the ability to experience joy. On a physical level, I have experienced pain from problems with my spine, which my yoga practices have helped me to manage so they do not debilitate me. But my greatest vulnerability has been a susceptibility to anxiety and depression. At its worst, I experienced panic attacks and debilitating depression.

After I began practicing yoga, about twenty years ago, I started noticing a change. As I continued with yoga, the panic attacks went away. At the time, this amazed me. Of course, now I know that yoga can induce the relaxation response, the body’s natural way of counteracting the stress response, which is at the heart of panic attacks. But while the panic attacks disappeared, I still experienced free-floating anxiety and cycles of depression.

Over the last ten years, as I have worked with my teachers, done a regular yoga practice, and studied the teachings of yoga, I have experienced a more profound healing. It is not that everything has disappeared. Instead, I have become more aware, and, with this awareness, I have had insights into the patterns of thinking that led me to feeling anxious and depressed. My teacher has taught me tools from yoga that helped me to move my mind to a more positive space when I was worried or felt myself in a negative or fearful spiral of thinking. As I have continued to study, my insights and understanding have grown, and so has my ability to make changes in old negative patterns and to create new positive patterns that support my life.

The teachings of yoga guide my life. The Yoga Sutra, yoga’s most important text, has helped me understand how the mind works, and that has helped me greatly with self-understanding and acceptance. As well as insight, the Yoga Sutra also gives me answers – how I can change from where I am to a place of greater clarity and peace, which ultimately is the source of joy.

We all have vulnerabilities. For some of us, it is a physical issue, like back pain or neck strain that reoccurs; for some it may be asthma, for others high blood pressure, migraines, anxiety, or an eating disorder. While yoga does not claim to cure all these maladies, it offers many tools to support our healing. As we practice regularly, over time, with the guidance of a teacher, we can find our suffering reduced and our hearts open to the joy that lies within us.

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Stress, Meditation, and the Heart

Elizabeth Advice, Health , ,

In a recent blog I wrote about stress and how yoga offers us the possibility of moving from a place of tension and constriction, when the stress response is activated, to a place of spaciousness, ease, and calm.

Most of us have heard of the litany of ailments that are stress-related – everything from asthma to high blood pressure to depression and anxiety to heart disease to irritable bowel to reduced immune function. Some of us may even experience a stress-related condition.

As heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States, the medical community has been looking at whether the practice of meditation can reduce the risk of death, heart attack, and stroke. The results of a study published this month in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes indicated that, indeed, it can. The heart disease study directed participants to meditate twice a day for twenty minutes and followed them for up to nine years. Study participants practicing a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation decreased their risk of death, heart attack, and stroke by 48%. For those participants who followed the meditation guidelines strictly the result was even more dramatic – risk was reduced by 66%. If you have a family history of heart disease, as I do, this is important and encouraging information.

While recognizing the benefits, the medical community is not yet able to explain how meditation works. But yoga, ancient as it is, has recognized the role the mind plays in what our physical body experiences. Meditation is about moving the mind from agitation to a focused state. When the mind become focused and quiet, the body relaxes, blood pressure is lowered, muscle tension releases, breathing is slowed, heart rate slows. And, as those of you who practice yoga most likely notice, the focus required to coordinate breath and movement in yoga postures, to do a breathing practice, to chant, all of these quiet and calm the mind as well. The whole practice is a meditation leading to a sense of well-being. Our whole system responds.

The focus, calm, and sense of well-being the yoga practice supports requires our attention and dedication. It requires that we have a “correct practice” which we follow consistently over a long period of time and with a positive attitude about our success. While it requires discipline, our yoga practice offers the possibility of a wonderful journey. A journey that is more than caring for our physical bodies.. In the quiet created in the mind by our practice, we have the space to see ourselves and our relationships more clearly, and to come to ultimately find a compassionate, “settled heart.”

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Stress Less: Stress-hardy

Elizabeth Advice, Health

“My back hurts.” “I can’t sleep.” “I cry.” “I smoke.” “I can’t focus.” “I grind my teeth.” “I get depressed.” “I freak out at my kids.” “I am tired all the time.” “I feel like I can’t breath.” “My shoulders and neck are tense.” “My stomach hurts.”

These are some of the responses that students in my Exercise and Stress Management class at HACC would give me when I asked them how they felt when they were “stressed.” I am sure we can all identify with some of these symptoms, and probably could add to the list.

When we feel stressed, a whole series of physiological responses are triggered, known as the fight or flight response, or stress response. If this response were triggered because we needed to flee an attacking bear, then the stress hormones would be dissipated. But, for the most part, in modern life, we are not fleeing an immediate threat to our life. Instead we face overwhelming, never-ending lists of responsibilities and obligations, the challenge of finding, keeping, or losing a job, abusive situations, illness, worries about the future, and on and on.

No matter the cause, the HACC students in my Stress Management class had one thing in common: they were suffering – they felt as if they had no space. Whatever they perceived as stress was closing in on them.

Think about it for a minute. When we are on vacation or feeling relaxed, just enjoying ourselves, we feel a sense of spaciousness. We are not holding tension in our body, our breathing feels easy, worries are not roosting in our mind, and we may even experience contentment. This “easiness” is what I mean when I say “spaciousness.”

One of the goals of yoga is to come to a place of spaciousness in our bodies, breath, minds, and emotions. The most common observation my yoga students make at the end of class, is that they feel calm, balanced, peaceful. Some degree of spaciousness has returned to them as a result of the practice they did.

An appropriate yoga practice done regularly and over time can help us create space within ourselves and our lives. Because we have a greater sense of spaciousness we grow to see the stresses in our lives more clearly. That clarity helps us to make better decisions. Our physiological response to the stress we experience is lower. We become more stress-hardy.