mind and body – Page 3 – Yoga 4 Healthful Living

Vulnerabilities

Elizabeth Health, Informational January 30, 2013February 5, 2021joy, mind and body, stress

Santa Fe earth and sky The 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.

Stress, Meditation, and the Heart

Elizabeth Advice, Health November 30, 2012February 5, 2021healing, mind and body, stress

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.”