Stress Relief Through Yoga
“Physical
and mental stress accumulate. This can lead to fatigue, a drop in performance
level, and a feeling of anxiety. If not checked, stress creates more serious
problems and disease occurs.” ~Nischala
Joy Davi, The Healing Path of Yoga
“Health
is the consummated love affair among the organs of the body.” ~Plato
Yoga is enjoying a surge of
interest right now. The cover of the current issue of Time magazine shows
supermodel Christy Turlington in Kukkutasana (Rooster Pose). In the feature
article, “The Science of Yoga,” author Richard Corliss reports that “Oprah
Winfrey, arbiter of moral and literary betterment for millions of American
women, devoted a whole show to the benefits of yoga earlier this month…” Why
are people coming in droves to Yoga classes? The reasons given by my new
students include a desire to relieve stress, to gain greater flexibility and
strength, to avoid invasive surgery, to heal back problems, to find peace of
mind, to learn how to relax. And, according to the testimonials aired on
“Oprah!” from everyday yogis and yoginis, the evidence is abundant that yoga
delivers: “I lost weight; I quit smoking; I conquered my fear of flying; I can
sleep again; it saved my marriage; it improved my daughter’s grades and
attitude.”
Evidence may be the
wrong word, given the scientific community’s skepticism towards claims of
Yoga’s health benefits, due to the lack of double-blind research studies to
validate them. Americans need to not only feel and experience the benefits,
they must know why it works. Yet the stampede is growing: “…Americans rush from
their high-pressure jobs and tune in to the authoritatively mellow voice of an
instructor…. These Type A strivers want to become Type B seekers, to lose their
blues in an asana (pose), to graduate from distress to de-stress. Fifteen
million Americans include some form of yoga in their fitness regimen- twice as
many as did five years ago,” writes Corliss. The half-spoken hope is that yoga
is America’s answer to stress, and thereby to soaring medical costs. “We know
that a high percentage of the maladies that people suffer from have at least
some component of stress in them, if they’re not overtly caused by stress,”
says Dr. Timothy McCall, an internist and author of Examining Your
Doctor: A Patient’s Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care.
Stress is an almost
universal complaint in our society. Stress is the experience of feeling
inadequate to the demands of a situation, whether it is balancing three bags of
groceries while digging car keys out of your pocket, talking with an angry
customer, or juggling your bills to find the money to pay for a new furnace.
Although normally triggered by external stimuli, stress is actually the
experience of disharmony among the internal systems of the body: hunger is
denied in order to attain a trim figure; anger is squashed for the sake of
customer service. Stress is the result of conflicting impulses: the conscious
mind commands us to persevere despite fear or aversion; conversely, a strong
emotional desire struggles against the rational deduction that action would
lead to harm, i.e., one’s commitment to customer service dictates that anger
not be expressed. These tensions consume a lot of energy. Besides these daily
stresses, we often carry past hurts and traumas in our body, where these
subconscious memories reside as tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, restricted
breathing or a halting gait.
Yoga is a vast system of
psycho-physical practices and theories which originated in India. Countless
yogis have added their experience and insights to this system: eminent among
living practitioners who have defined the contemporary practice of yoga is
B.K.S. Iyengar. “Yoga is,” states
Iyengar, “a timeless pragmatic science evolved over thousands of years dealing
with the physical, moral, mental and spiritual well-being of man as a whole.”
There are many kinds of yoga, but it is Hatha Yoga you are most likely to
encounter at the gym, the YMCA or the local yoga center. Hatha Yoga is a
generic term that refers to the practice of yoga ‘asanas,’ or physical
postures; Iyengar, Ashtanga, Kripalu, Kundalini, Bikram Yoga are all
‘proprietary’ variations of Hatha Yoga. Hatha yoga is the logical starting
point for the beginning student, especially if the goal is stress relief. In a
typical Hatha Yoga class one learns basic, classical yoga postures such as
forward bends, twists, balancing on one leg, breathing techniques, inversions
(any posture where the hips are higher than the heart), and relaxation.
Yoga develops full,
undivided attention on the present moment: this relaxed focus of the mind,
heart and body on a given posture is profoundly quieting. Rather than a
mechanical, mindless form of exercise, yoga is an experiential, experimental
experience of the whole of oneself in the moment. The quiet and intense focus
on stretching, moving, balancing and breathing have a calming effect on the
whole person: blood pressure lowers; breathing deepens and slows; thoughts and
emotions gear down and soften. A systematic process of tension and release,
yoga can be thought of as self-massage, consciously tensing the different parts
of the body so that the muscles will subsequently release. After the relaxation
period which ends all yoga classes, called Savasana, many a student reports
that, for the first time she/he knows what real relaxation feels like: deep
relaxation is a completely new experience.
Yoga is not magic; it
requires persistent and patient practice. This is not to say one must practice
long hours every day: a twenty minute session daily, or at least several times
a week, will greatly reduce stress. The best news is that the benefits of
regular yoga practice accumulate very much like compound interest: a small
investment of time and effort, on a regular basis, accrues rewards of calm
strength, stamina, poise and vitality far exceeding the investment.
-Joseph Roberson, published in Art of WellBeing 1999