Let’s talk about…..yoga. No, not just stretching in funny positions, but rather a 6,000 year old set of instructions of how to live life designed to create a healthy, strong, mindful existence.
I spent the weekend in the company of my mother and her retired friends, and their children. Regardless of our ages (which spanned 20s-70s), everyone had complaints about two things:
- The way their body felt and
- The way Western medicine was failing them
There I was in my yoga pants, my partially-purple hair, and my tank top that says, “part unicorn” and I couldn’t shut up about yoga. In 2014 I was in a massive car accident that I very fortunately walked away from, but I still ended up in physical therapy for months.
When I showed my list of PT exercises to my boss, she smirked and said “every single one of these are from yoga.”
Now, ten years later, everything in our world has continued down the path of mixing Western and Eastern knowledge when it comes to medicine.
There is an understanding in many healthcare settings that, when all else fails, yoga works.
Joseph LePage
So why Yoga?
As mentioned, yoga is not just the poses one does in a studio for $20 a head (known as Asanas). True yoga is a way of living where you keep your utmost physical, mental, and spiritual health as your primary guiding light in all decisions that you make. It is a way of life.
Mindful yoga practices support nervous system balance, stress reduction, pain management and more.
Yoga can also teach students to listen to their body, helping them to gain the skills to more easily
identify what factors aggravate their systems. For these reasons and more, yoga is loved by many. If you haven’t tried it, you may be missing out. Yoga has an endless amount of benefits including:
- Improved Quality of Sleep
- Improved Mental Health
- Increased Energy
- Increased Flexibility
- Building Strength
- Healing and prevention of illness/injury
There are different perspectives from which we can discuss how yoga supports health:
- Prevention and symptom relief
- Support for western medical treatment
- Balancing stability and ease
- Impacting various bodily systems and processes
Sounds like Greek? Let me rephrase.
Yoga, affects mental state and attitude, as well as physical well being.
And by these powers combined we have been able to, as humans, record almost miraculous recoveries from all sorts of ailments. Based on an extensive and ever-growing body of research and on qualitative reports, we can say that:
- Yoga has a very long list of symptoms it addresses, from low back pain to depression, headaches,
- chronic pain and much more.
- Yoga provides relief for a wide range of conditions that cause chronic pain (e.g. migraines, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and cancer).
Because yoga is a powerful antidote to stress and has a positive impact on strength, flexibility, balance and agility. It naturally serves a preventative role in conditions caused by a sedentary lifestyle and/or stress — conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, balance issues, and so on.
Yoga is adaptable to all sorts of needs. A person at risk for osteoporosis, for example, can emphasize practices to build bone and muscle strength.
Dr. Baxter Bell has summarized the general effects of asana practice into these categories:
- Strength
- Flexibility
- Balance
- Agility
- Posture
Here are examples of how these general benefits affect specific health conditions:
- Improving muscle strength can help with any condition that causes weakness (e.g. sarcopenia,
chronic fatigue syndrome, recovery from broken bones or other lack of use such as having been
bedridden as a result of illness or surgery). - Improving bone strength can help with osteoporosis and osteopenia.
- Improving flexibility can help with any condition that causes stiffness (e.g. osteoarthritis or Parkinson’s disease).
- Improving balance can help with any condition that impacts balance (e.g. frailty from aging and inactivity, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, peripheral neuropathy from diabetes, and poor eyesight.)
- Improving agility can help with any condition that affects nimbleness and response time, including any condition that affects balance and slowing of brain-body nerve conduction.)
- Improving posture helps with problems caused by poor physical alignment (e.g., carpal tunnel syndrome and back pain).
The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health
– Gretchen Reynolds (as shared by Nina Zolotow)
benefits. You get prolonged life, reduced disease risk—all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active.
Yoga’s impact on the nervous system is a key factor related to many other effects.
- Yoga reduces chronic stress, helping to prevent and/or manage stress-related diseases (e.g. heart
disease, hypertension, and digestive disorders). - Yoga is also an aid for other conditions that are caused or exacerbated by stress
(e.g. anxiety and depression). - Stress management helps reduce inflammation which may address inflammation-related problems
(e.g. most forms of arthritis and gastrointestinal conditions).
There are SO many other systems that yoga can help with, like your heart & lungs, your immune system, and hormonal imbalances.
Is this cultural appropriation?
It is always prudent to pay attention to your teachers and their level of respect for the source material they are sharing. For this reason, many students opt for a school that is mainly in India where yoga originated, although that in no way guarantees a school or teacher is ‘the best.’ Hence the reason for the different registration bodies who keep an eye on schools and their offerings.
However, having that said please know that the greatest yogis like Swami Vivekananda or T.K.V. Desikachar have always hoped for yoga being adopted around the world. The world profits from yoga tremendously. Yoga is not of a specific culture. It is the foundation and teaching of a better life and not something cultural or religious. It “just so happened to come from India”
Nikolai Manek – Yogamu
Suffice it to say that this wisdom has been around for millennia, and we are just now really beginning to use science to scratch the surface of what yoga is capable of.
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