Yoga Sequences Are Brain Aerobics

by Baxter

Do you like my brain? by Niki de Saint Phalle*

Brain Health is a topic we here at YFHA have addressed on numerous occasions. Research clearly points out that your mind like your body needs to be exercised regularly. I recently grabbed a flyer from my family doctor’s office that caught my eye. It was titled “The Power of Brain Aerobics: Maximize Your Memory.” As I read through it, I could not help but recall (good sign, eh?) the two excellent posts Ram did a while back on brain exercise  According to the group who published my flyer, the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation, there are three conditions your brain workout must meet in order for an activity to be considered “brain aerobics”:

• It needs to engage your attention
• It must break a routine activity in an unexpected, nontrivial way
• It must involve more than one of the senses

You can see that attending a regular yoga class or practicing yoga at home likely meets all three of the criteria. First, you are actively encouraged to bring your attention to the practice at hand, whether it is the physical poses, breathing patterns or meditation. Second, because you classes are likely changing each week (unless you do a style of yoga that repeats the same sequence week to week), there will be some familiar components of a practice, but an ever-changing sequence of poses, with a goal for each class that is a bit different from the previous week’s class, breaking the routine in a nontrivial way. And if you’re practicing at home, you can consciously try to add new poses or change up your sequences to keep things fresh. Finally, not only does the successful practice of yoga involve more than one of our senses (most obviously visual, tactile, auditory), but involves the mind taking in information and acting on it in the moment.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting my new Brain Health Sequence. If you are going to practice this sequence on a regular basis, it may be more challenging to meet the second requirement of breaking the routine activity in an unexpected way. You will have to find ways to creatively modify the sequence every few times you practice. So in this post, I’ll make several recommendations for how you can do can make this or any sequence more stimulating for your brain.

To re-iterate why we want to do these mental aerobics, Ram says:

“Mental fitness is exactly what it sounds like: keeping the brain and emotional health in a healthy state by performing mentally stimulating tasks. Mental exercises refer to a series of exercises that help you to be more alert, think rationally and logically, make sound and correct decisions and boost a declining memory.”

Here, here! Now for some ideas about how to apply these concepts to your brain health (and other) sequence:1. Each time you practice, pick one or two of the poses in the sequence and commit to learning the name of the pose in Sanskrit. We typically include the Sanskrit names of the poses in our sequences, so you can find the names right on the post. And if you want to know the Sanskrit name for a pose that is not included on the blog, there are many resources to help you with this, including my teacher Donald Moyer’s book Yoga: Awaking the Inner Body and Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar. Nicholai Bachman has a sweet little book and audio CD “The Language of Yoga” to assist in learning the most common yoga pose names, as well.

Note from Nina: Gosh, Baxter, you forgot to mention the second book I wrote with Rodney Yee, Moving Toward Balance—which has Sanskrit names for all the poses in the book! And, everyone, if you don’t have a yoga book on hand, Google or any internet search facility works very nicely for finding articles that include both English and Sanskrit pose names, such as those on Yoga Journal's site or even wikipedia.

2. Using your memory is a great mental exercise. So look over the sequence first and try to do it from memory. If you use the post while practicing, 30 minutes or so after you are done practicing, try to write out the sequence as accurately as you can.

3. A simple way to stimulate new nerve connections in the brain is by using the opposite or non-dominant hand/side for routine tasks. When it comes specifically to yoga asana, if you have a habit of doing the poses right side first, practice the same by starting on the left side before the right and vice versa. Or, as I do in class and at home, alternate which side you go to first in asymmetric poses.

4. Changing your daily habits and routines will allow mental stimulation to occur as well. So try practicing in a different room or space in your house. Something I often do is change the direction of practice by re-orienting my mat in my practice space to point in different directions. When you do this, notice what appears around you and how it feels to practice with the new orientation. Another way to change up a sequence is to tinker with it a bit by adding a new pose or substituting one pose for another 

5. Stimulate new neural network connections and brain growth by learning something new. I recommend that you have a yoga book at your mat and you take a few minutes to read a paragraph or two about yoga. Recently, I’ve been reading one sutra from Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, PhD’s new book The Secret of the Yoga Sutra, pronoucing the sutra to the best of my ability and memorizing the English translation. For your learning pleasure today, I share with you Sutra 1.2 and his translation:

yogascittavrittinirodhah: Complete mastery over the roaming tendencies of the mind is Yoga.

I will typically reread the sutra for several days in a row, and continue to practice saying the Sanskrit phrase out loud.