Practicing Yoga Mindfully (Rerun)

by Nina

Raindrops and Reflections by Nina Zolotow

Although it’s a rather new concept, approaching yoga poses as a mindfulness practice is a very powerful tool for improving your physical and mental health. Whether you are trying to change your eating habits, reduce your stress, or heal from disease, learning to listen to your body is crucial. In his wonderful book Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn points out what happens if we simply operate in automatic-pilot mode:

"One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse or lose control of as a result of being the automatic-pilot mode is our own body. We may be barely in touch with our body, unaware of how it is feeling most of the time. As a consequence we can be insensitive to how our body is being affected by the environment, by our actions, and even by our own thoughts and emotions. If we are unaware of these connections, we might easily feel that our body is out of control and we will have no idea why."

Kabat-Zinn goes on to say that physical symptoms are the messages your body is giving you that allow you to know how it is doing and what its needs are.

"When we are more in touch with our body as a result of paying attention to it systematically, we will be far more attuned to what it is telling us and better equipped to respond appropriately. Learning to listen to your own body is vital is improving your health and the quality of your life."

And one of the best ways to pay attention to your body systematically is to bring mindfulness into your asana practice. I, myself, have learned to recognize certain physical symptoms that tell me when I’m overstressed (for example, a burning feeling in my chest). When I experience those sensations, I know it’s time for me to scale back temporarily and practice the yoga poses that calm me down. In my interview with Elizabeth (see Meditation and Healthy Eating) about mindfulness and eating, she talked about learning, from both meditation and asana practice, to recognize when she was actually hungry versus thirsty or had low potassium and that has helped her lose and keep off 50 pounds.

So how you make your asana practice a mindfulness practice? Kabat-Zinn writes:

"We practice the yoga with the same attitude that we bring to sitting meditation or body scan. We do it without striving and without forcing. We practice accepting our body as we find it, in the present, from one moment to the next. While stretching or lifting or balancing, we learn to work at our limits, maintaining moment-to-moment awareness. We are patient with ourselves. As we carefully move up to our limits in a stretch, for instance, we practice breathing at that limit, dwelling in the creative space between not challenging the body at all and pushing it to far."

If that’s not enough—or if you have fallen into a rut with your practice that’s putting you in automatic-pilot mode, I have some specific suggestions:

1. Practice yoga at home. Practicing on your own, without the distraction of the teacher telling you what to do you or other people in the room, forces you to pay more attention to your own experience of being in the poses.
2. Pick a single physical sensation to follow throughout your entire practice, whether it is the quality of your breath in every single pose, the even distribution of weight on your feet—the balls as well as the heels—in every pose, or even something more arcane.
3. Change your routine. If you do practice at home and are in stuck in rut, try doing something different. Practice on the left side first instead of the right. How does that feel? Or, do all your twisting poses, even all the standing the poses, without turning your head. Twist from your spine only and leave your head looking down at the floor. Notice how hard that is, and how different your neck feels.
4. Try using props if you never have. See what difference it makes. Or, if you use props regularly, try a different height (lower or higher) or try practicing without props for once and see what a difference that makes.
5. Try holding poses for longer periods of time than you usually do. Notice the resistance that comes up in your body (as well as your mind).

Anyone who has additional suggestions, please chime in!

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Practicing Yoga for Your Health

by Nina

Hygeia, Goddess of Health by Peter Paul Rubens

One of the reasons, I wrote about body image yesterday in The Body You Want—besides the fact that I was feeling a bit rant-y, I guess—is that I knew I was going to write today’s post about practicing yoga for health benefits. And I wanted to have a way to clearly distinguish between practicing yoga asanas for health benefits and practicing yoga to “get the body you want.” This topic was on my mind because we received the following question from one of our readers:

"I’m a well aged yoga practitioner in my 70’s. One of the most incongruent aspects of yoga, especially in the western world, seems to come about from the tendency of practitioners to ‘use’ yoga for achieving something physical … more flexibility, greater range of motion and on and on. In a different way, as Ram so kindly reminds us, yoga offers the means to grow spiritually. To me these two aspects of yoga … achieving a desirable state of physical being through asana and cultivating spiritual growth through meditation, mindfulness and intentional study of yoga tradition appear to be at odds with each other.

"Question: Does the tendency to ‘use’ yoga (physically) actually impede our ability to comprehend the less tangible, more subtle and deeper spiritual aspects of yoga?"

To this reader, the use of yoga to achieve something “physical” seems incongruent with cultivating spiritual growth, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In fact, hatha yoga—the type of yoga we are all practicing when we do asanas—was originally developed as a way of fortifying the body for meditation. Hatha yogis believed that an unhealthy body or one that was in constant pain would impede the ability of the practitioner to sit for long periods of time, so various physical practices, including asana, pranayama, and cleansing practices, were introduced to support the good health of the practitioner. Here’s a quote from the Hatha Yoga Pradipka that describes the purpose of the asanas:

“The Âsanas are a means of gaining steadiness of position and help to gain success in contemplation, without any distraction of the mind. If the position be not comfortable, the slightest inconvenience will draw the mind away from the lakśya (aim), and so no peace of mind will be possible till the posture has ceased to cause pain by regular exercise.”

This why doing asana to support your health is not actually incongruent with the original aim of yoga. (But this is also why, as I said yesterday, doing asanas to improve your looks or to “get the body you want” is at odds with the true aim of yoga.)

However, the intention you bring to the your practice is essential for keeping your physical practice “yogic.” If you become obsessed with achieving good health (something you might not be able to achieve, anyway) or with any of the outward attributes that you associate with health (such as strength, flexibility, balance, and so on), then these obsessions may take over. At this point, if your practice is focused solely on the achievement of physical goals as an end in themselves, then you’ve lost your way. And surely an obsession with achieving perfect health is no way to find peace of mind, because, of course, you will ultimately fail.

So how can you practice for health without getting sidetracked by focusing on physical achievements? For me, the answer is in a text that is much older than the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Bhagavad Gita. The important message of the Gita, which Krishna explains several different ways to Arjuna, is that achieve equanimity you must surrender the fruits of your actions:

"Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.

Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.

Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires, be not moved in success or failure.

Yoga is evenness of mind—a peace that is ever the same."

In fact, in the very early days of the blog, we wrote some posts What We Need to Practice and Acceptance, Active Engagement, and the Bhagavad Gita that espoused this very philosophy as a way to achieve peace of mind as you practiced yoga for healthy aging. I wrote back then that daily yoga practice is no quick fix, and results are never guaranteed, because this is real life, people. So for your peace of mind, at the same time that you work toward staying healthy, you should try to let go of all thoughts of success or failure and simply focus on your practice. Then no matter what happens, you’ll be prepared to handle it. And this combination active engagement and acceptance is the yogic approach to practicing asana for your health.

Additionally, when you perform your asanas with this intention, what you do in the yoga room becomes “practice” for your life outside the yoga room. For this same yogic approach outside the yoga room allows you to cultivate equanimity in your daily life. No matter what work we have to do, whether it is raising children, going to a 9 to 5 job, being politically active, or helping a dying family member, practicing acceptance along with active engagement allows us to do what we need to do and be at peace with the results.

“In this wisdom, a man goes beyond what is well done and what is not well done.

Go thou therefore to wisdom:

Yoga is wisdom in work.” —Bhagavad Gita, trans. Juan Mascaro

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The Body You Want

by Nina

Janet, from the "Yoga for the Larger Woman" Calendar

“Around the same time, the thought hit me that I had been dragging this body around for all these past 50 years instead of really living in it. It came to me that I had not claimed this body, not moved into this body. I was renting it, but I didn’t live there. I didn’t want to live there—in the “undesirable” section of town.

“That began to change though when I realized no amount of wishing, bargaining or promising will change the fact that this is my body and that it benefits me greatly to “step up” and partner with my abilities, instead of wishing that things were different.” —Janet Wieneke

Have you noticed lately that some yoga magazines and advertisements have begun to co-opt the positive messages of the body image community in their efforts to promote the same old body-negative stories and products? It seems there’s a very profound disconnect going on. Here’s an example (not telling where I saw this):

So, um, let’s see. What they are saying here is that you CAN have the body you want (which is not the body you have) but ONLY if you love the body you already have (while at the same time working on trying to get the one you want).

Not only is this a completely illogical and confusing statement, but the message is really non-yogic. I’ve been writing a lot about attachment lately (see Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves and Attachment (Raga), Depression, and Plan Z) and it seems to me that practicing asana to “get” the body you “want” is yet another form of attachment. In this case, you’re attached to an illusion that it is even possible to get another body. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t actually think you can get another body. (If I could really get the body I wanted instead of one that I have, that body would younger, taller, and that arthritis in my right hip would be gone overnight.)

Oh, wait, maybe what they are trying to say is that you can practice to make your own body look different, whether that means thinner, younger, or able to do showy yoga poses. But practicing asana to make your body look different means you’ve bought into an illusion that looking different—if that is even possible—will make you happier. (Yes, I know that this illusion is what sells magazines and products, which is why co-opting body positive messages to promote this illusion is so insidious.)

And the attachment to this illusion actually causes a lot of suffering. For one thing, always working on changing the way your body looks makes you feel shame over the your current appearance because you are, as Janet wrote, living in the “undesirable” section of town (see Yoga for Every Body for interview with her), and dissatisfaction with your current life, which you believe will be happier only after you change. And I even think it is possible that practicing to get a different body may interfere with your ability to be safe in your asana practice. Rather than tuning in to your body as it is now, always thinking about the body you want to have may cause you to go overboard and take physical risks that aren’t appropriate for you (boy, have I ever seen that in certain classes).

All of this is the complete opposite of cultivating santosha (the ability to be content with what we have or don’t have), which Patanjali tells us is what leads to true happiness (see The Second Branch of Yoga: The Niyamas).

Although I personally have never struggled with weight issues as did Janet W, whose wisdom I am quoting in this post, now that I’m older, I have put on some extra pounds and my body, of course, has become flabbier, wrinkled and spotted. I also have to face each day the fact that I no longer can do several of the poses I used to do (see Goodbye, Lotus Pose). Trying to change that with my asana practice is not only fruitless but is counterproductive. I actively enjoy practicing my asanas, and if I kept thinking about how I wanted a different body or if I could only do the poses I used to do while I was practicing, the deep appreciation and gratitude I have for the body I do have and for the beauty of my aliveness would be crushed (see Without Mirrors). So this is an issue for those of us who are aging as well as those younger people who struggle with body image issues.

(I’ll be writing tomorrow about practicing with a goal of becoming healthier, which I think is a whole different story, though also not without its own pitfalls.)

Yet I can certainly see the temptation for all of us to fall prey to this kind of thinking because we’re bombarded daily even by yoga magazines and certain yoga teachers with messages encouraging us to feel dissatisfied with our bodies and telling us to try to get the "body you want." I don’t know if this is happening because the yoga writers or teachers actually know they are selling out or whether they just aren’t bright enough to realize what they are doing. But, regardless, I feel it is vital for us, no matter our size or shape, age or race, to continue to get the message out that you can really only love the body you have after you let go of the fantasy of getting the body you want.

“The years I’ve spent wishing I looked different, acted different, was different—all a waste of time but apparently held the lesson/s I needed to learn. I never felt that yoga was available to me, a fat person. Yoga was the domain of the lithe and “enlightened.” While I think that is still the predominant thought, I KNOW yoga is available to anyone willing to let go of their “cerebral” inner voice and listen to the wisdom of their own body. It’s a tough sell, especially if you’re fat, but it is so worth the effort.” —Janet Wieneke

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Heart Health and Yoga: An Overview

by Nina

The Heart by Henri Matisse*

After three years of blogging, even I, the Editor-in-Chief, can't remember everything that’s on our blog. So because someone close to me has developed heart disease and I want to be able to help him, I’ve been—hahaha—reading through my own blog today. At the same time that I’m trying to see which topics we’ve covered so far (nothing on stents that I can see—paging Dr. Baxter Bell!), I’m also trying to get up to speed on some background information by re-reading some of our older posts. So it occurred to me that while I was educating myself on the topic of yoga and heart health, I should share what I find out with you all. After all, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that heart disease is the leading cause of death of in the U.S.

In Shari’s post Yoga for Heart Conditions, she provides an excellent overview of what heart disease is and how yoga can help. She says that she believes that:

“yoga can be so effective for the management of heart disease because it is a holistic health approach that takes into account all of the varied systems of the body —in yoga, the body is part of a greater whole. Yoga is also accessible to all who want to practice, no matter what their physical ability may be. And yoga’s powerful stress management tools, including learning to slow down and breathe deeply, have many beneficial effects on heart health. Several scientific studies have now demonstrated conclusively that learning to breath deeply decreases blood pressure and slows down heart rate by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (Relaxation Response) and slowing down the sympathetic nervous system (Fight or Flight Response). And once you learn to become mindful of your breath and of how your body can feel when it is in a relaxed state as opposed to a hyper-arousal state, then conscious, healthy eating is a natural sequel of the yogic approach to health. Finally, learning to move your body (which nourishes all the musculoskeletal, respiratory, lymphatic, and circulatory systems) will help improve heart health.”

In Baxter’s post About Yoga for Heart Health, he wrote about how yoga practices help to maintain or improve circulation in the cardiovascular system, which is essential for heart health. He concludes that post by saying:

"Yoga, therefore, can be said to improve circulation by improving blood flow and the return of lymphatic fluids to the heart, reversing the impact of chronic stress on circulation, lowering blood pressure, slowing down or reversing atherosclerosis, improving the heart rhythm and improving overall heart health."

In Baxter’s post Cortisol and Good Health, he focuses in particular on the relationship between chronic stress and health problems, including heart disease. He says:

"But if you are either under constant stress, or your mind is prone to brooding about the past or anxious musings about the future or even negative assessments about the present moment, your adrenals interpret this as an actual stressful event occurring right now, and cortisol gets released into your system. So cortisol levels remain high in the blood stream for greater periods of time, which can result in swelling of the gland itself, and an increased chance of the following negative effects: loss of immunity secondary to shrinkage of lymph glands, increased risk of stomach ulcers, increased risk of hypertension, heart disease and other vascular disorders, excess sugar in the blood stream and more chance of developing diabetes."

While we in the yoga community all know that yoga can help to improve circulation and reduce stress (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga), Baxter also recently posted Yoga and Heart Health: Newest Study about a scientific meta-analysis study Effects of yoga on cardiovascular disease risk factors: A systematic review and meta-analysis, which concluded:

"This meta-analysis revealed evidence for clinically important effects of yoga on most biological cardiovascular disease risk factors. Despite methodological drawbacks of the included studies, yoga can be considered as an ancillary intervention for the general population and for patients with increased risk of cardiovascular disease."

Baxter has even designed two different yoga sequences for heart health, both short and accessible practices.

The Inverted Heart Health Sequence includes inverted poses because they can have several immediate and long-term influences on your heart and circulatory system. Inversions put your body in a position to take advantage of gravity to assist in venous return to your heart—you flip upside down and gravity pulls the blood back toward your heart and head! They can also have a quieting effect on your nervous system, encouraging a shift from Fight or Flight mode to Rest and Digest mode. Your heart muscle needs both exercise and rest, so a good combination of effort and relaxation in your practice will give your heart a more balanced experience.

The Cardiovascular Heart Health Sequence includes:

• Dynamic Yoga Sequences. Linked sequence of poses that move fairly quickly, such as Sun Salutations, gradually warm up your body and your cardiovascular system, both strengthening and stretching the muscles and connective tissue that your body’s blood vessels pass through, both exercising your heart and encouraging more efficient flow through the piping of your system.
• Static Poses. Poses that you hold for longer periods increase what is known as the “work load” of your heart, providing a different kind of exercise and challenge for your heart. Those with high blood pressure and diabetes will have to approach these poses with  caution and work into the holds very gradually, preferably under the guidance of an experienced teacher. 
• Gentle Inversions and Restorative Poses. These poses quiet and rest your cardiovascular system and your heart, which is equally important to testing and stressing your system. They allow your heart and nervous system to quiet, and as a result can nicely lower your blood pressure, heart rate and breathing rate.
• Pranayama and Meditation Practices. These practices support the effects of the inversions and restorative poses.

If chronic stress is a problem, see The Relaxation Response and Yoga for an overview of how yoga helps with stress and a list of techniques to choose from. We also have many posts on insomnia (see Five Tips for Better Sleep, for example). Finally, if you’re struggling with poor eating habits, see Yoga for Healthy Eating. 

I'll be giving my loved one private lessons, starting with initial lessons on managing the stress related to realizing you have the disease and coping with surgery and recovery, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about yoga for heart disease as I learn more about it myself.

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Attachment (Raga), Depression, and Plan Z

by Nina

Plan E

Did you read my recent post about attachment Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves? Because I’m starting to feel I’m going to be exploring this topic for some time. For one thing, just a couple of days someone close to me found out that he has heart disease, and I know this means he’s going to have to let go of some of his plans/dreams for his future. I don’t know how this is going to play out, but I know it will be painful for him because he was particularly “attached” to his vision of how he should live his life. Also, I know that Jill is going to write something very interesting about her attachment to her appearance. (Jill and I are having a very interesting time exploring the overlap between Buddhism and yoga philosophy.)

But for today I simply want to clarify something about my previous post, because a conversation on Facebook made me realize that something I said may have been misleading and I really want to be clear that I do not see meditation or a even well-rounded yoga practice as a cure for depression. I’ll begin with the Facebook comments from the reader, Lynn Somerstein, and me, and then I’ll comment further. (The really wonderful thing about this Facebook discussion was not only that it made me think, but I also ended up chatting with Lynn, who is a psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a writer, privately. So now we’re friends and may even work on some projects together in the future!)

Lynn: Although I read your blog regularly and gladly, I think today's post is a dangerous oversimplification of what depression is, does, and how it should be treated. People who are depressed often are unable to meditate-- instead they focus on all that they feel is wrong and they experience this as meditation, rather than a symptom of their illness. Depressed people need therapeutic help.

Nina: Sorry if you thought this was about depression. It is not. The person in question is getting professional help and medication. I always recommend that and consider yoga as a supplement only. However, I do think that part of recovering means being able to let go of certain things, and I know this from having gone through this myself (including therapy). I have written some about yoga for depression on the blog, which if you read those posts you will see that I never claim yoga can cure depression. –Nina

Lynn: Thanks Nina. Yoga and Psychotherapy together are a great help for depression and anxiety too. Thank you for answering my comment. I do read your every post. Namaste.

The post I was referring to about the limits of yoga for helping with depression was Yoga is a great thing, but..., in which I addressed the issue directly. The issue of problems that people with depression, anxiety, and other emotional or mental imbalances might have with so-called "relaxing" poses in When Relaxing Isn't Relaxing. Baxter also wrote a relevant post  Friday Q&A: Can Meditation Be Dangerous? about this.

After this discussion I contacted Lynn privately to ask if I could use her comments in a post and she agreed. After she agreed, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to add to her comments. By then, she had read my articles, and she sent me the following comment by email:

I agree, as you wrote in "Relaxing Isn't" that opening your eyes can help. For those who simply don't profit from meditation using a simple movement that can be connected with the breath, like walking or swimming, for example, may work better; as the body and breath unite, the mind quiets.

So, yes, just to be completely clear: I do not believe that meditation or yoga alone can cure depression, and anyone who is suffering from this illness should seek help from a professional. And thank you, Lynn, for helping me realize I needed to clarify this.

However, yoga can be a wonderful supplement in the recovery process, as the asana practice (like walking or swimming) can help get you out of your head and into your body, and sometimes certain asanas can energize or calm you (depending on which you need). See Tamasic and Rajasic Depression. Patricia Walden, a senior Iyengar yoga teacher, who herself suffers from depression, teaches workshops on yoga for depression, and you can find out more about her work in Yoga As Medicine by Timothy McCall (Patricia was Timothy’s first main teacher, and he did his teacher training with her). I have taken her workshop several times, and have been very inspired by her work. I still believe, however, that for some people, part of the process of recovering from depression (and maybe this is an essential part of therapy, but I can't speak to that) includes letting go of certain attachments, including the agenda you had for your life. And before you can move on to that step, you need to be ready to admit that attachment, as Patanjali says, IS an affliction.

2.3 avidya asmita raga dvesha abhinevesha klesah


The five afflictions (klesas) which disturb the equilibrium of consciousness are: ignorance or lack of wisdom, ego, pride of the ego or the sense of ‘I,’ attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death and clinging to life. —Yoga Sutras, translation by Edwin Bryant 

To end on a lighter note, I’ll tell you a little story about letting go of plans that I’ll call “Plan Z.” On Sunday my companion and I went into New York City for lunch and a walk around Alphabet City (so many wonderful community gardens there!), and our plan was to take the PATH train home in the mid-afternoon and then do some work we needed to finish. Let’s call that Plan A. Well, it turned out the PATH was completely closed down due to a fire in the tunnel. So Plan B was splurge on a taxi (we weren’t going very far from home, and if there had been a way to walk across the Hudson river, we could just have walked). After a long time trying to flag one down and failing (Other people who couldn’t take the train? People leaving from the Climate March? Both?), we moved on to Plan C, which was calling Uber and/or a car service. Uber was surge pricing, which offended my companion, and we couldn't get through to the car service, so we came up with Plan D, which was to take a ferry to a certain city in New Jersey, and then walk home from there. Our backup plan for that was to go to Penn Station and take a train to Newark, but we knew by now that Penn Station was going to be super crowded. (My companion joked that Plan Z was that we would drink the entire bottle of artisan cucumber vodka we had purchased as a gift for someone and spend the night in Washington Square. Obviously, we weren’t going to do this, but it was a joke that we kept making that cheered us up, and also allowed us to discuss the whole concept of staying calm while letting go of plans in a light-hearted way—okay, maybe black humor—but we like that stuff.)

We decided to walk on the High Line (the beautiful elevated park) to make the most of our walk to the ferry, but we were rushing a bit because it was getting later and later, and the ferries stopped at seven. When we finally made it to the ferry terminal we found that the ferries to the city we wanted to go to didn’t run on weekends, so we made a snap decision to take the ferry to Hoboken instead, and figured from there we could either take the light rail train or walk. We called this Plan E. Plan F was if we couldn’t get on that ferry, we’d go to Penn Station. Long story short-ish, we got the second ferry to Hoboken (some other people had the same idea about how to escape from Manhattan) and then had nice dinner in an outdoor restaurant. Refreshed after our rest and meal, we were able to walk the rest of the way home. 

Obviously, this “escape from Manhattan” could have been very stressful (we had reasons why we needed to get back home that night) but our joking about all our plans and backup plans and how we had to keep letting go of them, helped us stay calm and even enjoy many aspects of our adventure. There were people playing bagpipes below the High Line at one point—why?