I'm enjoying a good book by Tim Parks at the moment, 'Teach us to sit still: a sceptics guide to health and healing'. It's a brilliantly honest account of a middle-aged academic's journey to overcoming chronic health issues through relaxation and meditation. I highly recommend it, a good read (perhaps skipping the literary references if not your thing) with amazing descriptions of what it is to struggle with the process of meditation. And he really is a sceptic so one I'll be passing it on to a couple of people who might be able to relate!
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There are many inspiring stories of how practicing yoga has helped to support people with serious health problems back to full health. Here is a wonderful account of an NBA basketball player struck down with a serious kidney condition which resulted in a kidney transplant, and how his dedicated practice of yoga helped save his life and his career as a professional athlete...
Read more in this inspiring post by Trevor Kearney... Back to homepage > I'm biased I know, but I think most people could benefit from yoga practice! I work with a lot of mums, especially in my private yoga therapy work, where women come to me without much time or space for themselves, and have a range of physical, mental and emotional issues such as stiffness, aches on one side from carrying children on one hip, stress through the shoulders, poor sleep, over-eating, worrying, and an over-active mind that refuses to slow down at the end of the day.
These are common complaints but particularly so for mums whose days aren't their own anymore and who struggle to find time to take care of themselves. Yoga doesn't have to be a weekly class, although this is often the best way to ensure you actually make it on to your mat at least once a week and spend a good hour doing a full yoga practice. Yoga can also be fitted in to your busy schedule, requiring perhaps as little as 15-20 minutes a day to help keep you physically, mentally and emotionally supported. Think of how you might tend to a garden - keeping it tended to little and often is as good, if not better, than a big session every now and again to keep it all under control. A practice that is customised for you is ideal, incorporating some physical postures to help energise the body, stretch and release tension, strengthen the posture to help alleviate aches and pains. Plus perhaps some breathing work to settle the mind and restore balance, and perhaps even meditation if interested (which has well known stress-relieving and healthful attributes). All of these practices will help you create and maintain some well-earned space for yourself, and can be fitted in to those small pockets of time once the kids have gone to bed, when they are napping, when they are watching tv, or before you go to bed. In my group classes I always encourage students to try some yoga practice at home if they are interested. Part-way through the term, I'll often offer them a small handout with a short practice to try for themselves at home. Sometimes students keep it up and come back weeks or months later reporting how much more benefit they get from yoga once they have started regular practice at home. Of course a daily healthful practice doesn't just have to be yoga, there are other things that you might find you enjoy that keep you motivated to continue with it. But what better way to nurture your health and wellbeing than by giving yourself the gift of a short yoga practice a few times a week to help maintain balance and health in your life. Yoga practitioners often ascribe ancient traditions to the practice of yoga. And it is true, there is an ancient tradition of yoga well documented over thousands of years.
BUT - the physical practice of yoga perhaps isn't as ancient as we think. In any typical western yoga class, we do yoga postures, putting outselves in all sorts of twists, bends and sometimes inversions. We stay there, trying to focus on our breathing and settle our minds. But this is a curious thing... The history of modern physical yoga postures isn't perhaps what we think. Possibly only originating from 100 years ago when gymnastics and yoga met in India. It is true, some of the postures can be found in a text dating from around the 14th Century, but many of the postures we practice in a class today are perhaps relatively modern. Some claim that the Yogis noticed how popular gymnastics was and how appealing the physical form was and cleverly incorporated some of the ideas blending them with yoga practices to encourage people to give it a go. Interesting, and there is some credible evidence to suggest it is true. But does it really make any difference if it is 100 or 10,000 years old? Surely what matters is that if you give it a go, it should leave you feeling better and over time help support your health and life. It should stand on its own two-feet. Does it need the justification of some ancient authenticity? Mark Singleton authored the book "Yoga Body. The origins of modern posture practice" by Oxford University Press. It depicts the rising of the physical form of yoga that we see in most yoga classes in the west. And it tries to provide some context about where it came from. He provides compelling explainations challenging some of the apparent myths of where this ancient and timeless practice originates. A good blog post providing more context about Mark's book and modern yoga practice is here. But hopefully it doesn't matter if it is authentically ancient or not. Yoga can still be experienced through your posture practice without the addition of romantic origins. Your practice should help you develop strength and stability, physically and mentally, and connect with yourself and the world around you. Over time you should start to notice that you are more compassionate, more self-aware and less selfish that will ultimately benefit those around you. Your practice helps you develop space for self-enquiry. Yes and along the way you may find yourself fitter, stronger, leaner and more toned. So maybe a yoga class isn't an ancient tradition, but it sure does help you feel better about things and is a great support in life. Yoga is more popular than ever before but people are noticing (including Radio 4 who broadcast 'Corporate Karma' last week) how some of the traditional values and teachings of yoga are being left behind in its popularity.
When you think of yoga do you immediately think about someone doing something rather bendy that looks impossible to most of us? About the pursuit of physical health? Or do you think about sitting in meditation? About having the stability to sit and connect with something beyond your everyday persona? Yoga is innovating itself in our modern, Western world. It is becoming accessible to many by appealing to the desire to be fitter and healthier. It is becoming big business for some with brands such as Bikram Yoga and Lulu Lemon making £millions for the shareholders. But in the quest for popularity and profit, are the compromises ever going to allow yoga's true value to shine through? Physical pursuits for fitness are everywhere. Even the smallest village has a keep fit class, probably even a yoga class at the village hall once a week. In cities there are numerous yoga centres all offering an array of quick benefits and fitness promises. We are appealing to what people want. Yoga provides this but it also has far more potential than offering a quick feeling of calm and energy before heading home after a days work. This is just the tip of a rather huge iceburg. The teachings do make you feel good, we can all experience that, but that isn't by any means it. The teachings are ancient and teach about a path which if followed diligently, with a true guide, can lead to an ultimate reward far beyond any material posession or physical health. Along the way you'll learn about yourself and the world you live in. Some call it a spiritual path, which is a draw to some and offputting to others. The initial feel-good feeling is the thing that captures most of us, and that keeps us coming back for more. The days I don't practice yoga I wish I had, I'm less comfortable and less settled, and less connected with myself and the people around me. Some of yoga's teachings (not taught in the majority of classes) can seem somewhat esoteric. You might be sitting and chanting, or humming, or huffing and puffing with your breath. For us rather reserved British this is all perhaps a little uncomfortable until you get used to it. So the physical form is something we can get more readily, and feel okay with, and then perhaps the rest will come once you start to enquire a little more deeply. I should make it clear that I'm by no means knocking the appeal of the physical fitness and health through yoga, far from it. Although I'm not a supporter of the movement to add yoga as an Olympic sport, competing for who is 'best' at it (which Bikram Choudhury is a keen supporter of) - the physical postures are essential to get many people interested. It is also essential to maintain fitness and health to be strong enough to meditate. But by focusing just on the physical form, it feels a little bit like sitting on a treasure chest full of gold coins, finding a single gold coin and being entirely happy with this, blissfully unaware of the riches right beneath you. Return to YogaSpace homepage This question is one that I get asked regularly. The responses are different for different people and of course, there isn't a right or wrong answer, yoga is different things to different people...
Yoga for fitness? People take to physical activity for the challenges that are supposed to help keep us supple and healthy. Yoga can provide a range of challenges, some intense and others more relaxing depending on the yoga practice. The movements can help you feel better in yourself (as long as you work within your own limits and progress sensibly), can strengthen you and keep you suitably supple. However here is definitely more to it than a regular fitness regime, otherwise why not go to the gym? Yoga for stiffness? Yoga is notorious for its bendiness and many people believe they need to be bendy to do yoga. Not so! The bendy poses are not in the majority, and many postures are completely accesible for stiff people too and over time the stiffness will ease up so yes, great to help improve stiffness. Yoga for posture improvement? Yoga is perfect for strengthening and improving posture. After all, the physical postures or asana were originally designed to keep the body strong and stable to enable hours of meditation by the yogi. So the benefits of practising yoga asana can support our modern day posture needs too. Yoga for relaxation? Stretching and limbering up the body can help encourage the body to let go of tension. Along side this, focusing our minds on body and breath work can help relax our minds from the tensions of daily grind. Yoga can help us ease up on tension and encourage the body, and the breath, and even the mind, to relax. Yoga for stress-relief? It is well known that the work in yoga leaves people feeling calm and with a pervasive sense of well-being. Some people report this also from running, swimming, eating chocolate... Yoga definitely helps both release stress, and also to have the ability to recognise it earlier. By taking the time to listen to our bodies and minds, and recognising the signs of stress early, and by understanding what the causes are, we can begin a deeper pattern of change to prevent stress-related problems. Yoga for healing? Yoga is known for its therapeutic help, and I work with a lot of private yoga students who will testify to this. For a variety of reasons, they find a regular yoga practice helps improve their bodies and also helps them with much more besides. Movement and good breathing can help heal the body and mind and encourage repair, renewal and strength. Yoga can be as gentle or as strong as is needed to ensure it is beneficial to whoever is practicing it. I work with people recovering from sometimes serious illness who physically are very limited. But there is always something you can do that will gradually lead to greater ability and hopefully progress you back to health either physically, mentally or more often than not, both! Yoga for spirituality? Yoga has the ability to calm down and settle an overactive body and mind. We can stop worrying, still the incessant chit chat of the mind and move towards creating a refreshing calm, a reprieve to help us handle every day life. This in turn can lend itself to meditation and contemplation of what spirituality might mean to us. By accessing a still and settled mind we can experience the world from a different perspective and perhaps notice things we hadn't noticed before, bringing us closer to who we really are. Yoga to support personal change The philosophy and psychology of yoga has many teachings on how we perpetuate our habits, good and bad. It teaches how we can reflect on them, what their triggers and patterns are, how to know ourselves well enough that we can ultimately move towards changing them and ourselves. Yoga practice is a starting point for personal change and development. As I told a private student today, one of the joys of yoga is that it is sooo efficient. It can do all this and more in a relatively short practice, the more you practice, more the of these benefits you can get. So why do we practice yoga? Is it so we can become a little bendier than we were before? Or perhaps there is more purpose than this? Back to homepage 1,000s of people get injured each year practicing yoga or taking yoga classes. Surprising perhaps when the reputation is that it is supposed to be safer than many physical activities that have more obvious associations with injury. With doctors referring people to yoga classes with health issues, what is going on here?
Yoga is usually low impact and if done with attention and with good and appropriate instruction should and can be safe, even for less able bodies and those with serious health conditions. But not all yoga classes are suitable for everyone, you have to find the right yoga for you. And once there, perhaps the safe perception of yoga leads people into a false sense of security and usual self-restraint is forgotten just because they are in a yoga class? I have worked with students who have come from other yoga classes after sustaining injury, and have myself been injured from a well-intentioned adjustment from an enthusiastic teacher that left me in pain for a week. (He encouraged me to go that bit further into a twist by placing a hand to my back and gently pushing, I immediately knew I had pulled something and needless to say, haven't returned to his class.) Students who come to my group classes tell me of existing health issues in the initial health form they fill in. Most are happy to listen to advice and modify what they do to accomodate their issue, erring on the side of caution, especially at first. Very occassionally the student still wants to have a go even with advice recommending them not to, sometimes they get away with it, sometimes you see problems starting to arise. As a recent New York Times article comments: Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody. This only makes the problem more difficult, as the safe perception of yoga, compounded by large classes with teachers who have taken perhaps as little as only a month of training could be a recipe for the injured contingent to grow. One Bristol yoga class disclaimer left me rather nervous and must be signed before participating - stating that: 'wrongful death could occur due to negligence', blimey. Of course disclaimers are extreme, and I signed the same disclaimer when I went sky-diving, but I kind of expected it then somehow... Perhaps it is a good reminder to us that ultimately we are responsible for our own bodies and should remain so at all times, even when we are sky-diving or in a yoga class. As yoga teachers, we are often working with people who aren't strong and fit when they begin. People who may have been sitting at a desk all day before they come to class and have associated weaknesses, stiffnesses and perhaps susceptibilities waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves. A student new to my class will often hear the instruction, go for all the easiest options offered today to see how your body responds over the next day or two. Even after understanding existing health concerns you never know whether an old sciatic problem will feel aggravated or a back problem might rear its head and complain. Working carefully initially, with safe instruction and supervision gets you started more safely. And it is one of the many reasons why regular practice is key. To come intermittently may mean that you feel you can work harder than you should, you managed to do this last time so you should be able to do it today, even though you haven't practiced in 3 weeks. Regular practice with a developmental approach and a well-trained teacher will open up doors for you that will be safe and in the long more rewarding than the thrill of having survived an extreme experience. Preparing you for the extreme experience if that is what you are seeking. Enjoy yoga, take care and practice safely until you are confident that you can stretch yourself beyond your usual boundaries. Find stability first before you reach too far. Having done some recent work on yoga for the older age group (culminating in yoga suitable for those with hip replacements which is on the more extreme end of the scale of things to consider), and also having discussed it with some of the over 55s in my current group classes, it seemed that it would be good to put on a class especially for over 55s. Not because they aren't just as capable in many cases of working well in a mainstream class, but more to give that feeling of familiarity of the mix of people in the room.
As bodies get older, the impressions of life manifest themselves differently on different people. Knees, back problems, stiffnesses are different from person to person. Some people are strong and fit in their older years, others less so. The class will be a chance to offer a range of adaptations suitable to the people who attend the class and will be a safe and comfortable place to practice yoga. Beyond our physical limitations, Ramaswami has also taught on yoga for the three stages of life and the type of yoga practices that would be recommended at different stages. The first stage, the early years and childhood where the body is still growing and the mind is still maturing so a focus on asana (postures) is the emphasis. The middle years where we are adults, working, raising families and having busy and full lives, where we maintain our health through asana and progress our pranayama (breath control) practice. Then the later years, when we are more reflective, the body is left with impressions of our lives, here the focus moves towards maintaining health through asana, pranayama along with developing meditation and reflection. The stages of life supported by the different limbs or petals of yoga. More on yoga and the stages of life are in this excellent book Yoga for the Three Stages of Life, Srivatsa Ramaswami. Anyway, the new class, Yoga for Over 55s, will be starting on September 14th and will be from 11.15am until 12.15pm. Beginners very welcome! Saturday was a lovely afternoon where a group of us explored how yoga can help our posture in every day life. The 3 hour workshop explored our own individual postures, how life has imprinted on us over the years perhaps with our shoulders hunched from rounding over a computer screen, or our bodies become more uneven from left to right as we carry children or heavy bags over the years always preferring one side over the other.
Some postures of course we are born with, but for many of us it reflects how we carry ourselves and our individual strengths and weaknesses. Have you ever noticed how body builder may have rounded shoulders as the over-strengthened abdominal muscles don't have the appropriate back strength to maintain a well balanced posture? Interesting imprints of life! Yoga was traditionally applied to help strengthen the body so that the student could then go on to sit for long period in meditation without the body aching or distracting and with the mind calm and ready to meditate. So many yoga asana are directly aimed at improving our own posture, whether our goal is to meditate or not. Yoga can help us notice our posture, developing awareness in our lives of our habits and patterns, and exercises that can help compensate and strengthen or stretch us appropriately to rebalance our bodies. Just 15 minutes a day can help have a significant impact on our own posture and help us all stand tall. Last Sunday was a great opportunity to take a few hours to explore ways to improve how we handle stress in our lives. Stressful life is a given for most of us. We're busy, our lives are full, our jobs, kids, families, homes, obligations keep us pretty much flat out.
I'm used to welcoming people into my weekly yoga classes who are exhausted and stressed out. We often keep going until we are exhausted, and only really stop when things get to a point where we actually can't go on, when our bodies tell us in no uncertain terms that we must stop. We all do it, but of course it takes it's toll. Research suggests that stress is one of the biggest contributors to ill health and an early demise from various related health conditions such as heart disease. So Sunday's yoga workshop on stress relief was a chance to explore some simple, easy to practrice yoga methods that can help us manage our lifestyles and keep stress levels lower. The aim was to teach them in a way that means they can be practiced daily or regularly at home. Short, regular practice of these methods can make a dramatic difference to our ability to deal with stress and having a few techniques that you can use at any time, even at work or when in the car stuck in traffic, can help reduce our stress levels. Simple breath techniques, body work or meditation for a few minutes every day can make a huge difference. The yoga workshop on stress relief at Bristol Yoga Space explored a few easy methods and gave handouts on how to practice them at home. Another workshop on stress relief will be held in early Autumn too. Keep an eye on the website for dates. France is embracing yoga and around 1.5 million have taken up the practice for therapeutic reasons according to Le Monde last week.
In a front page news article, "Le yoga intellectualise un peu la pratique de la gym". In a mainstream report, it goes on to say that in societies more and more dominated by stress, yoga represents an accessible way to better cope with modern life. Starting with the body, yoga works to relax and release daily tensions, and engages mental activity in a way gym work may not explictly do. Done well it fully engages the body and the mind, and the results leave the participant refreshed and more relaxed, re-energising rather than tiring the body, and this helps to support the body's systems to help maintain health. "More and more doctors are recommending that yoga is practiced 3 hours per week." And 3 hours per week suggests we are doing this at home too, supplementing the group yoga classes. Sounds good to me! If you've tried yoga, you may already have an idea about the health benefits it can bring, the calm state of mind it can develop, the concentration and self-disclipline it can foster. Finding the right teacher and the right style for you is essential and not everyone takes to it straight away. But it has stood the test of time and has so much to offer.
But can yoga also develop these qualities in children? And could it help them increase there prospects of making more of their time in school for learning? Yoga is being tried at Quarry Brae primary school near Glasgow who are trying it to find out and so far the results are really encouraging. The school is in a deprived area and many of the children show up to school without having a structured start to the day, often coming from unsetttled home environments. This can set the day off with a rocky start, and the disruption can spill over into the classroom where concentration and discipline can be challenging. They have been trying starting the day with some yoga techniques, using some physical postures, chanting, breathing, mudras to calm the children down, provide a sense of concentration and discipline and prepare the children much better for a day of group participation and learning. The children are responding well, enjoying the practices, noticing and commenting on how calm they feel and how it is helping them to concentrate and 'feel better'. One 11 year old comments: "I got hit in the face with a ball, usually I'd go up and start a fight with whoever did it but I don't any more. I used to have a quick temper and yoga has calmed that down." Many of the physical yoga postures were designed with children in mind. They often have playful names like 'downward facing dog' to help make them memorable and appealing. And practices such as jumping in and out of the postures help keep the young people engaged and challenged as they work through the practice. The school teachers are supportive and at least one has gone on to be trained as a yoga instructor and is bringing yoga practices in to her classes to help prepare the children for learning. It takes a specialist approach to help children get the best out of their yoga practice. But what this school has done seems to demonstrate something that should be explored and tried out further, both with children and with adults. Many of us are already embracing the benefits of yoga and gradually learning how to apply yoga to help us in our everyday lives. It has so much to offer from relaxation and calmness, to health and therapy to support and improve health problems, and can even bring a more connected, holistic and spiritual aspect to our everyday lives. Lots to explore. |
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