| Yoga is for you Part 3 of 3 By Regina Zamora Cowell |
| 15. Yoga can ease your pain. According to several studies, asana, meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When you relive your pain, your mood improves, you're more inclined to be active, and you don't need as much medication. 16. Yoga can help you make changes in your life. In fact, that might be its greatest strength. Tapas, the Sanskrit word for "heat," is the fire, the discipline that fuels yoga practice and that regular practice builds. The tapas you develop can be extended to the rest of your life to overcome inertia and change dysfunctional habits. You may find that without making a particular effort to change things, you start to eat better, exercise more, or finally quit smoking after years of failed attempts. 17. Good yoga teachers can do wonders for your health. Exceptional ones do more than guide you through the postures. They can adjust your posture, gauge when you should go deeper in poses or back off, deliver hard truths with compassion, help you relax, and enhance and personalize your practice. A respectful relationship with a teacher goes a long way toward promoting your health. 18. If your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, maybe it's time to try yoga. Studies of people with asthma, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown yoga helped them lower their dosage of medication and sometimes get off them entirely. The benefits of taking few drugs? You'll spend less money, and you're less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug interactions. 19. Yoga and meditation build awareness. And the more aware you are, the easier it is to break free of destructive emotions like anger. Studies suggest that chronic anger and hostility are as strongly linked to heart attacks as are smoking, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol. Yoga appears to reduce anger by increasing feelings of compassion and interconnection and by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from the drama of your own life, to remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can still react quickly when you need to ? and there's evidence that yoga speeds reaction time ? but you can take that split second to choose a more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others. 20. Love may not conquer all, but it certainly can aid in healing. Cultivating the emotional support of friends, family, and community has been demonstrated repeatedly to improve health and healing. A regular yoga practice helps develop friendliness, compassion, and greater equanimity. Along with yogic philosophy's emphasis on avoiding harm to others, telling the truth and taking only what you need, this may improve many of your relationships. 21. The basics of yoga -- asana, pranayama, and meditation -- all work to improve your health, but there's more in the yoga toolbox. Consider chanting. It tends to prolong exhalation, which shifts the balance toward the parasympathetic nervous system. When done in a group, chanting can be a particularly powerful physical and emotional experience. A recent study from Sweden's Karolinska Institute suggests that humming sounds -- like those made while chanting Om -- open the sinuses and facilitate drainage. 22. Karma yoga (service to others) is integral to yogic philosophy. And while you may not be inclined to serve others, your health might improve if you do. A study at the University of Michigan found that older people who volunteered a little less than an hour per week were three times as likely to be alive seven years later. Serving others can give meaning to your life, and your problems may not seem so daunting when you see what other people are dealing with. 23. If you contemplate an image in your mind's eye, as you do in yoga midra and other practices, you can effect change in your body. Several studies have found that guided imagery reduced postoperative pain, decreased the frequency of headaches, and improved the quality of life for people with cancer and HIV. 24. In much of conventional medicine, most patients are passive recipients of care. In yoga, it's what you do for yourself that matters. Yoga gives you the tools to help you change, and you might start to feel better the first time you try practicing. You may also notice that the more you commit to practice, the more you benefit. This results in three things: you get involved in your own care, you discover that your involvement gives you the power to effect change, and seeing that you can effect change gives you hope. And hope itself can be healing. Just believing you will get better can make you better. Unfortunately, many conventional scientists believe that if something works by eliciting the placebo effect, it doesn't count. But most patients just want to get better, so if chanting a mantra -- like you might do at the beginning or end of yoga class or throughout a meditation or in the course of your day -- facilitates healing, even if it just has a placebo effect, why not do it? |
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| Practicing yoga has been found to be good for one's health, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Learn from the expert, Gina Zamora Cowell, a long-time yoga instructor at Yoga Coop of Madison. |
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