Moving Into Healing—Pt. 3, Yoga
We’re back into the Moving Into Healing series, after a bit of a detour in the blog to talk about some anxiety myths. If you’ve missed Parts 1 or 2 in this series, highlighting Body Awareness and Dance, they can be found earlier in the blog.
Yoga As A Joining Force
If you go to a yoga class, you’ll eventually hear someone say that yoga means “union”. Or you’ll hear that yoga means “to yoke”. Originally, yoga was written about in Sanskrit, so folks are doing their best to find language that works to describe a joining or connection of some sort. A joining/union/yoking together of body-mind-breath-self-the divine-consciousness-all kinds of things. Yoga (which includes the physical postures but also can include a whole lot more in the way of philosophy and a code of ethics) is a tool than can be used for those connections.
Yoga AS A VEhicle for MINd and Body AWareness
The physical practice of yoga includes moving the body into different postures, often syncing breath with movement and a focused awareness. The benefits of yoga could fill the entire rest of this page—increasing flexibility, improving balance, as a tool for reducing back pain and arthritis pain, improving strength, and on and on. A quick search will show you well-documented research that backs up these claims. All of these benefits are wonderful and worthwhile. But, as a therapist and a coach, I’ve got a little bit of extra interest in how looking at how yoga serves so many functions to help with the concerns and goals that my clients bring to me: reducing anxiety, improving mood, staying calm during stressful situations, desiring clarity and confidence, improving focus, quieting the mind, feeling at home in one’s own body, and so much more. The physical postures of yoga, plus the breathing practices and mindfulness aspects of it, all can play a powerful and helpful role in moving towards each one of those goals above. If you have concerns about health or injury issues, check with your primary care physician before starting any physical activity. But yoga can often be modified to support many different body concerns and needs.
Your Body Is Speaking. Yoga as An Opportunity to Listen.
Sometimes we come to an activity with our wish list of desired outcomes and benefits in hand—I’d like some reduced anxiety and increased clarity from my yoga today, please. But yoga can also be a fascinating and profound tool for building body awareness and connecting with what are bodies and minds already know and need for us to understand. To do some serious listening to our bodies and selves. I started practicing yoga in 1995 and was captivated by the effects of it on my body, mind and emotions. When I later became a therapist, I wanted to dig deeper into how yoga and mental health can intersect. Someone had told me about Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy, as way to combine yoga with dialogue and insight. After trying a few sessions out as a client, I was even more interested and signed up to complete their entire professional training program in 2006.
Into Awareness through the doorway of the body
At the start of this blog series about movement, in the Body Awareness post, we established that the body and mind are not separate entities meant to live apart but are intricately and always connected. This gives us an amazing opportunity to find multiple pathways into exploring ourselves and our experiences. We can start “top-down” and observe our thinking, noting how it influences our sensations, our emotions, and our behaviors. This can be really fruitful and insightful exploration. But we can also explore from a “bottom-up” perspective and start at the physical level—being finely attuned to what is happening physically in the moment that then gives rise to the connections to our emotions, thoughts, and experiences. A practice of yoga can serve this purpose and is one of the primary aims of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy in particular. A Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy session also includes client centered dialogue to facilitate this awareness and then integrate the experience and wisdom that arises in a client into their life off the mat. There’s a whole lot more to it so if you’d like to learn more about the process or see some demonstrations of it, head over to the PRYT website.
Start right where you are
There are a bunch of ways to try this pathway out for yourself. Yoga classes are available in many places, both in-person and online. There are a bunch of different approaches and styles of yoga that you can try out to see what speaks to you. There are resources like DVDs, books and streaming media, available for free at most public libraries. Working with an individual yoga therapist can provide individual, guided support. And you can start with the principles of this idea, right now, right where you are. Can you take 2 minutes to close your eyes, take a few, deep breaths and just check in with your body. Notice sensations without judgment—just exploring what feels tight or hot or clenched or stuck or heavy or cold or any of the things. Just notice for a second. And then respond, gently to your body’s need. Does that right leg that’s been crunched up under you need to shake or stretch out? Have you been working on a computer for a while and might want to move your wrists and neck in a gentle fashion that feels good to you? Can you try to be present to those small changes in movement and notice how the experience of that connects to your overall awareness? Do you suddenly realize you’ve been sitting in one way so long that you didn’t realize your foot fell asleep? Is it hard to be in touch with your body? Again, no judgment, just observations. Can you bring a kind curiosity to yourself to try observing your experience of your body, mind, emotions or experience without judgment?
Settle the mind by engaging the body
Meditation can be invaluable for increasing awareness, focus and developing insight. But anyone who has sat down and tried to do it will know that it’s not easy. The nature of the mind is to wander—jumping from thing to thing—and our habits of how we now engage with technology only make that tendency stronger and stronger. So, it’s not a big surprise that we when we sit down and close our eyes to meditate that our attention is bouncing off the walls like a room full of 6 year olds with an endless supply of birthday cake and soda. Yoga is often used in conjunction with meditation because engaging the body first can ease the way for the mind to focus and settle. This is true for lots of kinds of physical activities—engaging the body helps the mind to settle. It’s one part of the reason why physical activity can be helpful for mood regulation, focus and all kinds of good stuff. Yoga is one possibility on this track.
Working with a maryland therapist, INFORMED BY YOGA
If you are interested in talking more about Moving Into Healing, please reach out and contact me. We can set up a brief call to discuss options that might be useful to you. You can find out more all the services in my practice as a Maryland therapist here, including mindfulness-based therapy.
