By Joanne DagatoThe practice of yoga is more than 5,000 years old, and it’s more popular now than ever. Yoga can help us become fully focused on the body, breath and mind. It refreshes us. it helps us move from distress to de-stress. Yoga is not a set of exercises but a state of mind. Yoga includes physical exercises that seek to relax and still the body, breath to focus the mind, relaxation to quiet the body and mind, chanting to arouse and then calm the emotions, and mediation to center the spirit.
Most doctors will only treat the disease but Yoga can treat the whole person. When there are mental, emotional or imbalances, the stress will tend to appear in the weakest organ of the physical body. yoga also massages all organs of the body. Yoga is perhaps the only exercise that can work on through your internal organs in a thorough manner, including those that hardly get externally stimulated during our entire lifetime. You can assist in the healing of your own body, because once you learn the techniques, you can use them for the rest of your life.
Moving muscles slowly will relax and loosen them, allowing better blood and lymph flow to restore the body and renew energy. Lymph fluid is filled with white blood cells that go to areas of the body that need repair. Because the lymph doesn’t have a dynamic pump behind it, like the heart for blood, we can assist the flow through deep breathing and stretching.
Yoga means Union, it unites the body, breath, mind and spirit. It is very important to learn how to breath in Yoga. The breath will bring intuition to your postures. good breathing is reassuring, soothing and healing. Breathing will help you hold the yoga postures.
Practicing yogic breathing makes the heart beat slow down, respiration steadies and blood pressure decreases. Most of us never take a deep breath all day long. Relaxation techniques are considered deeply healing on many level. Pranayama, like mediation, also has profound effects. Both assist the mental and emotional response of the person to the health condition, You can detach from the disease and go to a higher level of existence. Most of us breathe very shallowly into the lungs and don’t give much thought to how we breathe. Yoga breathing exercises, called Pranayama, focus the attention on the breath and teach us how to better use our lungs.
With Yoga, as in life, we need a base from which to move. Each yoga posture has specific structural and functional effects. By lacing pressure on the organs, the poses massage and help tone them. by stretching the muscles it bring fresh blood to that area. Blood circulation improves and the lungs respond with a more efficient breath. Increased oxygen reaches the tissues and every cell, tissue, organ and system reaps the benefits.
Many poses act on the endocrine glands by bathing them with fresh blood, which carries oxygen and vital nutrients to help with the overall functioning. Other postures and well as breathing can regulate the nervous system.
Yoga helps clean blood of waste material (through lymphatic stimulation), and trains us to loosen muscles and joints that are ignored in our day-to-day lives. Routines like sun salutation get the blood flowing as we warm up and free our body to experience the new stresses we will face. The practice also gets us to handle the weight of our body more effectively, which builds bone and muscle strength so we are more resilient to the frailty that afflicts many. This is why power yoga practitoners have great bodies.
The stretching of yoga aims to expand, not strain. Straining blocks your ability to listen to what the body is telling you. See what your body can do. I call it a soft face, No frowning, clenching your jaw and holding your breath are signs that you need to back off the pose a little. As we age, it becomes increasingly difficult to do certain things such as; climbing the stairs, getting out of a chair. But practicing Yoga gives us the ability to continue to do these things into our old age.
As a whole body system, yoga develops body awareness and places emphasis on alignment. This means that the whereabouts of each body part (feet, knees, hips, spine, shoulder, head) affect all the others. We have limited mobility in our backs because in the normal day to day activities we have limited range of motion. We may bend a little to the front but not to the sides and certainly no back bending. This is a huge cause of “pulling our backs out”. This is where Yoga is so important. We are only as young as our spine is flexible. By flexing our spine by turning and back bending, we help our spine stay young.
The driving force of yoga is aimed at the monumental, life-changing discovery of who and what you actually are. This is precisely how yoga works, how it makes you feel good. Yoga helps you experience the truth. The truth- which, you discover is goodness. The implications of knowing the truth is massive. Thus Yoga gives you the strength to unravel the truth with which you will begin to live with security, confidence and inner psychological peace. Such great are the benefits and properties of Yoga. Yoga changes your life.
Yoga acts positively in maintaining the health of the human body. One of the most prominent benefits of Yoga is the ability to be young once again. Apart from revitalizing the mind, Yoga rejuvenates the body as well. People, who constantly practice Yoga, have found immense benefits from it and feel better than what they felt in their younger years. There is a very famous concept in Yoga philosophy. According to it, a person’s age is determined by the flexibility of his spine, not the number of years he has lived.
Yoga helps in slowing down the aging process, by providing elasticity to the spine, firming up the skin, removing tension from the body, strengthening the abdominal muscles, eliminating the likelihood of a double chin, improving the quality of loose arm muscles, correcting poor posture and so on. Thus, of the numerous benefits of Yoga, anti-ageing is an important one. All you need is patience (remember, there is no one day benefit policy!!) and the determination (you need to be strong willed to practice every day) to practice Yoga.
Yoga increases the mental competence in a person, making him/her feel younger. It possesses the power to fight the internal as well as the external diseases and dangers. This is the key to help an individual to live longer. There are various types of Yoga, of which Hatha Yoga basically aims at making people live long. Some of the anti-ageing properties of Yoga are long life, increased resistance to diseases, increased vitality, and rejuvenation of glands, looking young, improvement in vision and hearing and many other mental and emotional benefits.
Remember, there is no magic potion that can extend the longevity of life. If there is any key to longer healthy life, it has to be Yoga. One can successfully extend the period of life by constantly following Yogic practices. Even the tiniest detailing of ageing, such as gray hair can be dealt with Yoga. By practicing inverted Yoga postures, you can turn back gray hair to its natural color. These practices also delay the onset of gray hair, thereby making a person look younger. Even people with the inability to get up on their own, can enjoy replenished flexibility and freedom from joint pain, by practicing Yoga. Doing yoga cultivates a balance between the flexibility and strength of the muscles of the body, often the real culprit in back pain. Most people are tight in key areas affecting the spine, for example in the hips and shoulders. A system such as yoga, which releases the tension in the muscles, should improve back pain. While the emphasis is on stretching and flexibility, yoga also develops muscle strength.
The effects on children practicing yoga are great. Yoga helps make the children more flexible and coordinated. It helps increase self esteem in children as they gain control over their minds and bodies. It helps children learn self-discipline with the help of certain poses, which make them breath and think in certain ways. It helps children control stress and relax. It helps them calm down and focus in their studies in a better way. Yoga helps develop their creativity and imagination. They become more aware of their surroundings and their instincts are sharpened. Children practicing yoga eat better and choose healthier foods over junk food. Children develop better emotional responses and compassion, teamwork and leadership skills. Yoga improves their digestion power and strengthens their immune system. Hyper active children practicing yoga, learn to direct their extra energy and build stronger concentration power. Yoga has also proven to be beneficial for children suffering from down syndrome, cerebral palsy and autism. Yoga induces a person to discipline his body, breathing and thoughts. Therefore, many children learn to discipline themselves without any adult controlling them.
Meditation and relaxation helps heal the body and re-energizes the body. It allows you to be refreshed and brings your body, mind and spirit back into balance. This should be at least 20 minutes. While in mediation whenever your thoughts stray, bring them back to your body. A good relaxation practice would be to put a small object like a pebble between your eyebrows while lying down in corpse pose. This way you can concentrate on that object and not on what needs to be done today. Tense up an area of the body like your toes and then relax them. Go to the next part like your right leg and then relax it and continue this exercise until you get to the face. Practice breathing slowly (4 seconds on the inhalation and 8 seconds on the exhalation). You kind of take a mental holiday and become less preoccupied with the little worries of day-to-day life.
By Dr. Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500
By Dr. Rita Khanna
The shoulder is the most movable joint in the body. However, it is an unstable joint because of its range of motion. It is made up of three bones, which are connected by muscles, ligaments, and tendons. The round end of the upper arm bone (humerus) fits into a shallow groove on the shoulder blade (scapula). The shoulder is a ball-and-socket joint. It is easily subjected to injury because the ball of the upper arm is larger than the shoulder socket that holds it. Generally ,the socket is a little bigger than the size of the ball, so that the ball can fit inside the socket and easily move around. One way of visualizing this joint is to think of a golf ball on a tee. The exercise of moving the shoulder up and down, forward and backward, arms rotation in a circular motion, or hinge out and up away from the body are very important to keep the shoulder mobile.
The exercises below are a boon for frozen shoulder and neck pain. These help you to restore full, pain-free range of motion and functions of your shoulder. The good thing about these exercises is that these involve easy and slow stretching movements, which also help you to focus on your body. This focus will help you to pay attention to your body and any pain that may come from the stretching. It helps to warm up your shoulders and their smooth movement. It is important to be careful, patient, and persistent. Initially, do these exercises multiple times a day – by connecting body, breath, and mind. These will bring positive energy into the shoulders.
These exercises can be done standing or sitting. You may sit in a sofa or chair if unable to sit on the ground in Vajrasana.
2. Keep both the hands on the respective shoulders; right hand on the right shoulder and left hand on the left shoulder. Still keeping the hands on the shoulders, rotate the arms, initially, clockwise for 8-10 times; and then counter clockwise for 8-10 times. Deeply inhale when the elbows move forward, and exhale when the elbows move backwards. Start out with very small circles; and then make the circles bigger and bigger as your shoulder becomes free.
4. Now sit back in Vajrasana. Inhale and raise your arms up over the head; press the palms together as hard as you can; then keep pressing them and bring them down in front of the chest, while exhaling. Repeat eight to ten times.
behind the neck. Take your left hand from down behind the back. Try to hold your hands in a hook shape, and pull them in the opposite direction. The upper elbow should remain exactly on the back side of the head, so that it gives complete exercise to the cervical spine. Inhale deeply when you pull the hands.
elbows and place hands as close as you can in a prayer position. Keep the hands near the nose. Do normal breathing. Now, start with the left arm. Repeat 3-5 times each side.
Courtesy: Dr. Rita Khanna’s Yogashaastra Studio.
By Sharon Thiel
By Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500
By Elaine Stillwell
By Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500
By Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500
By Dr. Rita Khanna 
By Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500