Studies have found that regular exposure to traffic noise raises blood pressure and may increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, and that nighttime traffic noise interrupts sleep and impairs physical performance in the morning. While you can’t reroute the highway or move to the sticks, you can make a concerted effort to close windows, turn off the TV and the stereo, put on a fan or other white noise machine, and create as much serenity in your bedroom as possible before you go to bed. If there’s no way to block out the sounds of cars whizzing by, consider using earplugs.

adapted from wholeliving.com, Oct. 2011

Too frazzled to focus at work? Meditation may help hone your attention — even if you’re new to the practice. In a University of Pennsylvania study, a group of 17 beginners showed great improvements in focus after meditating for a half-hour, five times a week for eight weeks. Regular meditation also enhanced their ability to manage tasks and stay alert while working. To ease into a practice, find a quiet place every day, and simply focus on following your breath. “Even if you’re doing five minutes, three times a day, it can help a lot in getting your body accustomed to slowing down,” says Vandita Kate Marchesiello, director of the Kripalu Yoga Teachers Association. For more guidance, she recommends picking up a meditation book, CD, or DVD, or attending a local class.

adapted from wholeliving.com, Oct. 2011

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As the temperature drops, your superficial venous circulation slows down, meaning your body has to work harder to get blood from your feet back to your heart. To help your venous circulatory system and keep varicose veins at bay, Dr. Luis Navarro of the Vein Treatment Center in New York City suggests getting your feet 6 to 12 inches above your heart at least once a day. Tonight, try a yoga pose that raises your legs against a wall, or lie on the couch with your feet resting on a stack of pillows. Cup of hot tea (or hot toddy) optional.

adapted from Wholeliving.com, Oct. 2011

woman sun salutation yoga surya namaskar pose

A kundalini awakening is when energy flows freely upward through the chakras and leads to an expanded state of consciousness. But is it safe?

According to Tantra, kundalini energy rests like a coiled serpent at the base of the spine. When this dormant energy flows freely upward through the seven chakras (energy centers) and leads to an expanded state of consciousness, it’s known as a kundalini awakening.

For some, the experience can be blissful and filled with feelings of love and a sense of the interconnectedness of all things. For others, it can feel more like a bad drug trip, or even a psychotic break, where practitioners go through altered sleep cycles, changes in identity, or depression. This discrepancy has led many Westerners to fear the coiled serpent resting in their spine, ready to strike.

Meditation teacher Sally Kempton had such an awakening in her late 20s, and while she acknowledges that the experience may be scary for those who are without an experienced teacher to guide them, she believes that awakenings are a gift from the universe. “In our tradition, we honor and respect kundalini,” she says. “Her energy is trying to awaken you, expand you, and put you in touch with your own deep energy, which is a fundamentally benign process.”

However, according to Kempton and Stuart Sovatsky, a psychotherapist specializing in spiritual work, kundalini awakenings are rare in Western students because hatha yoga is practiced in a less spontaneous way today. “People are trying to hold the poses in a certain way, as opposed to doing poses that release energy blocks specific to their body,” says Sovatsky.

Still, many teachers caution against attempts to induce an awakening through intense pranayama or other methods. Instead, it should occur spontaneously, when the body is ready. In Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein explains why: “If you don’t first open the central channels of the nervous system, raising the serpent power along the axial pathway is not only impossible but also very dangerous to attempt, for instead of entering the central channel (sushumna nadi) it is likely to force itself in to the ida or the pingala nadi, on either side of the central channel, causing immense havoc in the body and mind.”

Kundalini reminds us that consciousness is far vaster than most of us have ever imagined, which can seem overwhelming and disorienting. But Sovatsky says that people who have a psychotic break from an awakening usually come from a troubled family background, face high levels of stress, and don’t have enough emotional support. Still, both Sovatsky and Kempton recommend that anyone who is fearful in the midst of such an awakening should seek support from a therapist (such as a transpersonal psychologist) or a teacher who has gone through it herself.

adapted from Yoga Journal by By Nora Isaacs

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new light on yoga

From loincloths to leotards, yoga has come a long way in 5,000 years. But is yoga as we know it really that old?

According to yoga scholars, even the yoga postures—the basic vocabulary of modern hatha yoga—have evolved and proliferated over time. In fact, only a handful of these now-familiar postures are described in the ancient texts. Patanjali’s second-century Yoga Sutra mentions no poses at all, other than the seated meditation posture. (The Sanskrit word “asana” literally means “seat.”) The fourteenth-century Hatha Yoga Pradipika—the ultimate classical hatha yoga manual—lists only 15 asanas (most of them variations of the cross-legged sitting position), for which it gives very sketchy instructions. The seventeenth-century Gheranda Samhita, another such manual, lists only 32. Conspicuously missing are the standing poses—Triangle, Warrior, etc.—and Sun Salutations that form the backbone of most contemporary systems.

Other venerable texts on hatha yoga eschew mention of asanas altogether, focusing instead on the subtle energy systems and chakras that the poses both reflect and influence. The modern emphases on precision of alignment, physical fitness, and therapeutic effects are purely twentieth-century innovations.

Rumors abound about lost, ancient texts that describe asanas in detail—the Ashtanga vinyasa system taught by Pattabhi Jois, for example, is allegedly based on a palm-leaf manuscript called the Yoga Korunta that Jois’s teacher, renowned yoga master T. Krishnamacharya, unearthed in a Calcutta library. But this manuscript has reportedly been eaten by ants; not even a copy of it exists. In fact, there’s no objective evidence that such a document ever existed. In all his voluminous writings on yoga—which contain extensive bibliographies of all the texts that have influenced his work—Krishnamacharya himself never mentions or quotes from it. Many of Krishnamacharya’s other teachings are based on an ancient text called the Yoga Rahasya—but this text too had been lost for centuries, until it was dictated to Krishnamacharya in a trance by the ghost of an ancestor who had been dead nearly a thousand years (a method of textual reclamation that will satisfy devotees, but not scholars).

In general, the textual documentation of hatha yoga is scanty and obscure, and delving into its murky history can be as frustrating as trying to snorkel in the mud-brown Ganges. Given the paucity of historical evidence, yoga students are left to take the antiquity of the asanas on faith, like fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Earth was created in seven days.

Not only is there no clear textual history, but there’s not even a clear teacher-student lineage that indicates systematized oral teachings handed down over generations. In Zen Buddhism, for example, students can chant a lineage of teachers stretching back for centuries, with each Zen master certified by the one preceding. No such unbroken chain of transmission exists in hatha yoga. For generations, hatha yoga was a rather obscure and occult corner of the yoga realm, viewed with disdain by mainstream practitioners, kept alive by a smattering of isolated ascetics in caves and Hindu maths (monasteries). It appears to have existed for centuries in seed form, lying dormant and surfacing again and again. In the twentieth century, it had almost died out in India. According to his biography, Krishnamacharya had to go all the way to Tibet to find a living master.

Given this lack of a clear historical lineage, how do we know what is “traditional” in hatha yoga? Where did our modern proliferation of poses and practices come from? Are they a twentieth-century invention? Or have they been handed down intact, from generation to generation, as part of an oral tradition that never made it into print?

The Mysore Palace

I found myself pondering these questions afresh recently after I came across a dense little book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace (South Asia Books, 1996) by a Sanskrit scholar and hatha yoga student named Norman Sjoman. The book presents the first English translation of a yoga manual from the 1800s, which includes instructions for and illustrations of 122 postures—making it by far the most elaborate text on asanas in existence before the twentieth century. Entitled the Sritattvanidhi (pronounced “shree-tot-van-EE-dee”), the exquisitely illustrated manual was written by a prince in the Mysore Palace—a member of the same royal family that, a century later, would become the patron of yoga master Krishnamacharya and his world-famous students, B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois.

Sjoman first unearthed the Sritattvanidhi in the mid-1980s, as he was doing research in the private library of the Maharaja of Mysore. Dating from the early 1800s—the height of Mysore’s fame as a center of Indian arts, spirituality, and culture—the Sritattvanidhi was a compendium of classical information about a wide variety of subjects: deities, music, meditation, games, yoga, and natural history. It was compiled by Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar, a renowned patron of education and the arts. Installed as a puppet Maharaja at age 5 by the British colonialists—and deposed by them for incompetence at the age of 36—Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar devoted the rest of his life to studying and recording the classical wisdom of India.

At the time Sjoman discovered the manuscript, he had spent almost 20 years studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy with pundits in Pune and Mysore. But his academic interests were balanced by years of study with hatha yoga masters Iyengar and Jois. As a yoga student, Sjoman was most intrigued by the section of the manuscript dealing with hatha yoga.

Sjoman knew that the Mysore Palace had long been a hub of yoga: Two of the most popular styles of yoga today—Iyengar and Ashtanga, whose precision and athleticism have profoundly influenced all contemporary yoga—have their roots there. From around 1930 until the late 1940s, the Maharaja of Mysore sponsored a yoga school in the palace, run by Krishnamacharya—and the young Iyengar and Jois were both among his students. The Maharaja funded Krishnamacharya and his yoga protégés to travel all over India giving yoga demonstrations, thereby encouraging an enormous popular revival of yoga. It was the Maharaja who paid for the now well-known 1930s film of Iyengar and Jois as teenagers demonstrating asanas—the earliest footage of yogis in action.

But as the Sritattvanidhi proves, the Mysore royal family’s enthusiasm for yoga went back at least a century earlier. The Sritattvanidhi includes instructions for 122 yoga poses, illustrated by stylized drawings of an Indian man in a topknot and loincloth. Most of these poses—which include handstands, backbends, foot-behind-the-head poses, Lotus variations, and rope exercises—are familiar to modern practitioners (although most of the Sanskrit names are different from the ones they are known by today). But they are far more elaborate than anything depicted in other pre-twentieth-century texts. The Sritattvanidhi, as Norman Sjoman instantly realized, was a missing link in the fragmented history of hatha yoga.

“This is the first textual evidence we have of a flourishing, well-developed asana system existing before the twentieth century—and in academic systems, textual evidence is what counts,” says Sjoman. “The manuscript points to tremendous yogic activity going on in that time period—and having that much textual documentation indicates a practice tradition at least 50 to 100 years older.”

Potpourri Lineage

Unlike earlier texts such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Sritattvanidhi doesn’t focus on the meditative or philosophical aspects of yoga; it doesn’t chart the nadis and chakras (the channels and hubs of subtle energy); it doesn’t teach pranayama (breathing exercises) or bandhas (energy locks). It’s the first known yogic text devoted entirely to asana practice—a prototypical “yoga workout.”

Hatha yoga students may find this text of interest simply as a novelty—a relic of a “yoga boom” of two centuries ago. (Future generations may pore with equal fascination over “Buns of Steel” yoga videos.) But buried in Sjoman’s somewhat abstruse commentary are some claims that shed new light on the history of hatha yoga—and, in the process, may call into question some cherished myths.

According to Sjoman, the Sritattvanidhi—or the broader yoga tradition it reflects—appears to be one of the sources for the yoga techniques taught by Krishnamacharya and passed on by Iyengar and Jois. In fact, the manuscript is listed as a resource in the bibliography of Krishnamacharya’s very first book on yoga, which was published—under the patronage of the Maharaja of Mysore—in the early 1930s. The Sritattvanidhi depicts dozens of poses that are depicted in Light on Yoga and practiced as part of the Ashtanga vinyasa series, but that don’t show up in any older texts.

But while the Sritattvanidhi extends the written history of the asanas a hundred years further back than has previously been documented, it does not support the popular myth of a monolithic, unchanging tradition of yoga poses. Rather, Sjoman says that the yoga section of the Sritattvanidhi is itself clearly a compilation, drawing on techniques from a wide range of disparate traditions. In addition to variations on poses from earlier yogic texts, it includes such things as the rope exercises used by Indian wrestlers and the danda push-ups developed at the vyayamasalas, the indigenous Indian gymnasiums. (In the twentieth century, these push-ups begin to show up as Chaturanga Dandasana, part of the Sun Salutation). In the Sritattvanidhi, these physical techniques are for the first time given yogic names and symbolism and incorporated into the body of yogic knowledge. The text reflects a practice tradition that is dynamic, creative, and syncretistic, rather than fixed and static. It does not limit itself to the asana systems described in more ancient texts: Instead, it builds on them.

In turn, says Sjoman, Krishnamacharya drew on the Sritattvanidhi tradition and blended it with a number of other sources, as Sjoman discovered by reading the various books by Krishnamacharya in the Maharaja’s library. Krishnamacharya’s first writings, which cited the Sritattvanidhi as a source, also featured vinyasa (sequences of poses synchronized with the breath) that Krishnamacharya said he had learned from a yoga teacher in Tibet. Over time, these vinyasa were gradually systematized further—Krishnamacharya’s later writings more closely resemble the vinyasa forms taught by Pattabhi Jois. “Therefore it seems logical to assume that the form we find in the series of asanas with Pattabhi Jois was developed during Krishnamacharya’s period of teaching,” writes Sjoman. “It was not an inherited format.” To dedicated Ashtanga practitioners, this claim borders on the heretical.

Along the way, claims Sjoman, Krishnamacharya also seems to have incorporated into the yogic canon specific techniques drawn from British gymnastics. In addition to being a patron of yoga, the Mysore royal family was a great patron of gymnastics. In the early 1900s, they hired a British gymnast to teach the young princes. When Krishnamacharya was brought to the palace to start a yoga school in the 1920s, his schoolroom was the former palace gymnastics hall, complete with wall ropes and other gymnastic aids, which Krishnamacharya used as yoga props. He was also given access to the Western gymnastics manual written by the Mysore Palace gymnasts. This manual—excerpted in Sjoman’s book—gives detailed instructions and illustrations for physical maneuvers that Sjoman argues quickly found their way into Krishnamacharya’s teachings, and passed on to Iyengar and Jois: for example, lolasana, the cross-legged jumpback that helps link together the vinyasa in the Ashtanga series, and Iyengar’s technique of walking the hands backward down a wall into a back arch.

Modern hatha yoga draws on British gymnastics? The yoga of Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya influenced by a potpourri that included Indian wrestlers? These are claims guaranteed to send a frisson of horror up the limber spine of any yoga fundamentalist. But according to Sjoman, his book is meant not to debunk yoga—but to pay tribute to it as a dynamic, growing, and ever-changing art.

Krishnamacharya’s genius, says Sjoman, is that he was able to meld these different practices in the fire of yoga philosophy. “All those things are Indianized, brought into the purview of the yoga system,” Sjoman says. After all, he points out, Patanjali’s only requirement for asana was that it be “steady and comfortable.” “This is a functional definition of asana,” he says. “What makes something yoga is not what is done, but how it is done.”

This realization, he says, can be liberating, paving the way for a greater appreciation of the role of individual intuition and creativity in the development of yoga. “Krishnamacharya was a great innovator and experimenter—that’s one of the things that gets missed in the tendency of Indians to make hagiographies of their teachers and to look for ancient lineages,” Sjoman says. “The experimental and creative abilities of both Krishnamacharya and Iyengar are very much overlooked.”

Of course, Sjoman’s scholarship is just one perspective on the Mysore Palace lineage. His research and conclusions may be flawed; the information he has uncovered is open to multiple interpretations.

But his theories point to a reality that you don’t have to probe very deeply into yoga history to confirm: There really is no one monolithic yoga tradition.

Rather, yoga is like a twisted old banyan tree, whose hundreds of branches each support a full load of texts, teachers, and traditions—often influencing one another, just as often contradicting one another. (“Be celibate,” admonishes one scripture. “Get enlightened through sex,” urges another.) Like snapshots of a dance, different texts freeze and capture different aspects of a living, breathing, changing tradition.

This realization can be unsettling at first. If there’s no one way to do things—well, then how do we know if we’re doing them right? Some of us may long for a definitive archaeological discovery: say, a terra-cotta figure of a yogi in Triangle Pose, circa 600 B.C., that will tell us once and for all how far apart the feet should be.

But on another level it’s liberating to realize that yoga, like life itself, is infinitely creative, expressing itself in a multitude of forms, re-creating itself to meet the needs of different times and cultures. It’s liberating to realize that the yoga poses are not fossils—they’re alive and bursting with possibility.

That’s not to say that honoring tradition is unimportant. It’s vital to honor the common goal that has united yogis for centuries: the quest for awakening. For thousands of years, yogis have sought to contact directly the luminous source of all being; and for hatha yogis in particular, the vehicle for touching the infinite spirit has been the finite human body. Every time we step on the mat, we can honor tradition by “yoking”—the original meaning of the word “yoga”—our purpose with that of the ancient sages.

We can also honor the forms of yoga—the specific asanas—as probes for exploring our own particular forms, for testing the limits and stretching the possibilities of the bodies we have been given. In doing so, we can draw on the experience of yogis that have come before us—the wisdom that’s gradually accrued over time about working with the body’s subtle energies by means of physical practices. Without this heritage—whatever its sources—we’re left to reinvent afresh 5,000 years of innovation.

Yoga asks us to walk a razor’s edge, to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to a particular pose, while fully understanding that on another level, the pose is arbitrary and irrelevant. We can surrender to the poses the way we surrender to incarnation in general—letting ourselves pretend, for a while, that the game we are playing is real, that our bodies are who we really are. But if we cling to the form of the poses as ultimate truth, we miss the point. The poses were born from the practice of yogis who looked inside themselves—who experimented, who innovated, and who shared their discoveries with others. If we’re afraid to do the same, we lose the spirit of yoga.

Ultimately, the ancient texts agree on one thing: True yoga is found not in texts, but in the heart of the practitioner. The texts are just the footprints of the elephant, the droppings of the deer. The poses are just the ever-changing manifestations of our life energy; what matters is our devotion to awakening that energy and expressing it in physical form. Yoga is both old and new—it’s inconceivably ancient, and yet fresh every time we come to it.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Anne Cushman, coauthor of From Here to Nirvana: The Yoga Journal Guide to Spiritual India (Riverhead Books, 1998) and a recent writer-in-residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts.

 

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“A New Look” presents yoga as an evolutionary process and introduces the Yoga of Mind as a powerful approach to self-exploration. Mental yoga reveals the mind’s nature and its filters, and is an important part of physical yoga practice.

What is Yoga? There are as many answers to that question as there are people who do Yoga. This at first might appear confusing, for Yoga is often presented as if there were a true and fixed path to follow leading to a desired end. Enlightenment, samadhi, bliss, peace, higher realms of consciousness—these are the coins of the spiritual market place we are told we can collect with the proper practice and dedication.

To find the proper practice it is common to go back to the past, to tradition and authority. Perusing the past, however, there doesn’t appear to be any consensus for there were schools and counter-schools with recommendations running the gamut from demanding severe self-denial and austerities to others that held that only in experiencing life and sensuality to the fullest could true realization be achieved. The teachings of today are just as varied. One school says that all types of Yoga are contained within perfection of asanas, while others say that too much emphasis on the body keeps you limited to the gross material plane.

Tradition is important just as history is important —not as a vice to squeeze the present into, but rather as a stepping stone to grow from. It is necessary for all serious practitioners of Yoga to take from other people’s experience that which can be helpful to create a personal expression of Yoga. In the years that I have been exploring Yoga, an approach has taken form that has been continually revealing, renewing and exciting. The movement of Yoga involves among other things the continual living recreation of the question, “What is Yoga?” What follows is a brief introduction to the way I answer this question.

Yoga is a living process. The heart of Yoga does not lie in visible attainments; it lies in learning and exploring. Learning is a process, a movement, while attainments are static. One is internally learning about the whole field of life using the energy systems of one’s mind and body to find out how one works and how universal patterns express themselves through individuals. Yoga also involves the process of freeing one’s energy, moving out of the blocks and binds that limit one both physically and mentally. Freeing oneself is part of the process of self-knowledge for one’s binds limit the nature of the exploration, just as releasing them permits learning to occur.

The way freedom is usually talked about is freedom from something: freedom from pain, fear, death, aging, disease, from sorrow, attachment, and of course, from the ego or self which is viewed as the source of all problems. The bondage of flesh and the tyranny of mind as they endlessly create desire, are to be overcome through discipline. Yet anyone who tries to do this necessarily confronts the basic paradox that is a part of the spiritual quest: trying to free oneself from anything contains within it the seeds of the very bondage one is trying to escape. The desire to be desireless is another desire. The push to conquer one’s ego in the belief that ego loss will be the ultimate experience bringing perfection is self-centered activity. The desire for ego loss and perfection comes from the ego as does all desire.

Thought then creates ideas of perfection from second-handed sources or from memory’s projections and strives toward their accomplishment which is more ego activity. This is another example of what I call the spiritual paradox. If freedom is looked at as a dimension of action rather than as an escape from something, as a living process instead of a goal, the spiritual paradox dissolves. The only real freedom is freedom in action. Freedom is responding totally to the challenges of the living moment.

The true spiritual quest is not “How do I become free?” but rather, “What is it that binds me?” The most important thing about questing or questioning is the nature of the quest or question. Asking “How do I become free?” automatically places you in the spiritual paradox, and even more important, is not answerable. For questing after freedom always involves ideas about what freedom consists of. The ideas I have, come from the state of not being free, and therefore involve projections of what it would be like not to have the problems that I have. Freedom here again is freedom from something—fear, jealousy, competitiveness whatever. The very ideas I have of freedom are limited by the state of my consciousness and as I try to force myself into the mold of the idea or ideal, I am limiting freedom right at the start. So I can never find out how to be free by seeking freedom. I can, however, find out the nature of what it is that limits my awareness and the scope of my responsiveness because that can be directly perceived.

The body’s potential responsiveness is limited by stiffness, lack of strength and endurance. The mind’s responsiveness is limited by the way it thinks about things. The ideas and beliefs through which you view the world necessarily keep you within the field of these thought structures. The way that you think about things totally influences not only the way you act, but the way you perceive.

If, for example, you think that thought is the villain preventing you from experiencing the “now” and therefore must be conquered through meditation, that mind-set influences everything you do. In intellectual circles there is the tendency to greatly value thought; in spiritual circles there is a tendency to judge thought negatively. The interesting thing is that both evaluations are just thought judging itself. Yoga is the process by which I find out the nature of my binds and keep in touch with those aspects of life that limit freedom. I have found that a synthesis of two traditional approaches of Yoga is the most direct route to this exploration. Hatha, the physical Yoga, and Jnana, the mental Yoga, both deal with discovering the limits that conditioning imposes. No conditioning is just physical or just mental. How we think is a part of how we feel and, of course, how we feel influences the thought process.

The term “conditioning” here refers to habits of the mind and body which are programmed in through experience. This includes genetic conditioning which is also programmed in through experience, although the experience is of a different order. Yoga then is the exploration of one’s total conditioning, Hatha Yoga using the body as the doorway, and Jnana Yoga using the mind. I am not presenting conditioning as a new villain to be conquered. Conditioning is part of the organizational principal of universal energy which builds patterns and systems that are the stuff of life. Conditioning is a fact which actually aids the movement of life, for without it there would be no life.

At the same time conditioning is a hindrance to freedom since habits also constrict by channeling the new into old patterns, by creating and reinforcing the tendency to go on automatic which limits awareness, and by creating attachments to familiar pleasures and securities which block real change. Freedom does not lie in negating or overcoming the fact of conditioning which is impossible, but rather in springing, in the living moment, from those patterns that limit the field of what is possible.

In Hatha Yoga what is possible in any posture is a function of your conditioning (including what you ate yesterday). If instead of trying to force yourself into the idealized final position, you use the posture to explore the limitations imposed by conditioning, there is automatically a relaxation in mind and body. The postures then become highly refined tools to approach the edge or limit that binds you. Awarely playing at the edge of conditioning changes the field of what is possible.

Yoga is a process of opening, of moving beyond the physical and conceptual limits of conditioning. Experience by its nature conditions, so that moving out of it is an endless process. There is no mastery of yoga since one can only master that which has an end. The concept of opening, however, can slyly become just another idealized goal to be achieved. Actually, awareness of the tendency of the very nature of thought to stop process is part of what Jnana Yoga is about.

A key to the process of opening that keeps you truly opened is what I call “playing the edge.” The body’s edge in Yoga is the place just before pain, but not pain itself. Pain tells you where the limits of physical conditioning lie. Since the edge moves from day to day and from breath to breath (not always forward), in order to be right there, moving with its often subtle changes, you must be very alert. This quality of alertness which is a meditative state is at the heart of Yoga. A great danger in Hatha Yoga is going on automatic so that the postures become mechanical exercises, bringing with them dullness, fatigue, and resistance to doing Yoga at all. Just as the mind is more elusive than the body, so the edge in Jnana Yoga is not as obvious as in Hatha.

The habits of mind that have accumulated over time continually reinforce themselves. Habits of mind are repetitive ways of thinking about things and of structuring the world in such mental patterns as beliefs, values, fears, hopes, ambitions, self images, images of others and of the universe itself. For instance, whether I view the universe as either basically benign, ma levolent or neutral (indifferent) seems to be an abstraction far removed from daily living that I might seldom overtly think about.

These world views, however, are the basis of common attitudes (idealism, cynicism, skepticism) which are patterns that color all perceptions by monitoring what comes in, and directly affect day to day life. How does one play the edge of thought? In Hatha Yoga, the Yoga is in the quality of attention to the physical system so that one learns to listen to what the messages of the body are saying. The muscles, tendons, nerves, glands, and organ systems have their own intelligence and information processing networks that can be tuned into and learned from. Playing on the edge physically sharpens the ability of the total organism to interpret and integrate this information.

Thought also manifests in systems which are set ways of thinking about a particular segment of one’s life. These systems are sometimes in harmony with each other but often not. Each role or pattern in one’s life has a thought structure or system that gives life to and perpetuates the behavior. Hatha Yoga stretches and strengthens one physically so that one has a stronger and more flexible body. Similarly Jnana Yoga stretches and strengthens one mentally so that one can use the structures that thought builds creatively and harmoniously, and yet not be bound by the limits that thought places on life. Mental edges are similar to physical edges in that they are marked by resistance to movement and opening. In the mind, fear is the indicator of resistance as pain is in the body.

Fear circumscribes the structure of personality or ego. The ways you think about yourself or the world are the basic building blocks of personality and they are very rigid. When these structures are challenged, fear arises. Fear often expresses itself through attack and defense as a means of alleviating the pain that fear brings. Attack and defense are a way of shoring up (protecting) the challenged structure and burying fear in what is called the unconscious, giving you the illusion of not being afraid. Fear is a great teacher since it is a key to finding out the nature, depth, and degree of your attachment to various thought structures. In Hatha Yoga, as you awarely play the edge of what is physically possible, your edge moves. What is possible has changed—you have changed. There is more flexibility, more openness in the tissue, and correspondingly more energy. As Jnana Yoga plays the edges of mental resistance, the very doing of this moves the edge, enlarging the limits of what is possible. This is really what expanding consciousness is all about.

A major difficulty in Jnana Yoga is that since your mental edges define the way you perceive, the very perception of where your edges or conditionings are is limited by your present perception: if I try to look at the way that I look at things, the way I do it is the way that I look at things. How I look at things at any given moment is me. Another problem of Jnana Yoga is that there is no set body of techniques corresponding to asanas to use to play your mental edges. In Hatha Yoga the asanas are necessary because in living you rarely challenge or even reach your physical edges.

You are, however, confronting your mental edges on a day to day basis whether you want to or not, so that mechanical technique is not necessary. In Hatha Yoga the demands of a given posture, the immediacy of the feedback of physical pain, the possibility of injury through carelessness, the proper use of breath, can aid in bringing forth the necessary attention. In Jnana Yoga, attention is also the key. To find out how thought works, it is necessary to pay attention to the forms it takes: words, sentences, images.

It is also very important to be aware of where your attention is at any given moment. Your attention at any moment is what you are at that moment and this directly reveals your conditioning. Being aware of the movement of attention is actually a meditative process that shifts consciousness. The resulting sense of distance and quality of detachment permit an objectivity that is not bound by the structures of thought. This objectivity is the source of newness and creativity, bringing a sense of awe that transcends the merely personal. It can also bring fear. Since we hold the world and ourselves together with thought, real objectivity can challenge the fabric of our lives bringing resistance and fear. This very fear is an indication of the existence of mental conditioning and paying attention to it (playing the edge of it) “stretches” it in a somewhat similar way as awarely playing the edge of pain stretches the body.

Although Jnana Yoga cannot be practiced in the ordinary sense, (“practice” usually means repetition toward the accumulation of desired habits), one may “practice” Jnana Yoga by simply sitting quietly, observing the inner panorama. An advantage of sitting quietly is temporary removal from external reactions that permits more ready access to thought. Sitting also allows what has been repressed by thought or inattention to bubble up. Since one’s mental edges display themselves in the relationships of daily life, with people, ideas, the physical environment, so the “practice” of Jnana Yoga can and does occur not only during formal sitting, but in all aspects of life.

One might mistake attention for continually trying to figure out what’s going on inside which can end up in paralysis or in removal from living. Attention is not an analytical process involving brain activity. It is a simple registering of what is happening so that there is no “figuring out” involved. Trying to be attentive does remove one from what is going on and therefore is not attention.

One does not do Jnana Yoga by trying to force attention to the structures of thought to find out what thought’s limits are. Since the edges are there, one does not have to seek them. A thought, although more elusive, is as much a fact as a bird or a tree, so all it takes to see it is objectively looking. The simplicity of Jnana Yoga is made difficult in that the brain is so conditioned by thought and so habit—bound in its mental structures that the shift of consciousness from thought to attention at first sounds mysterious.

When thought thinks about this shift either through reading about it or by remembering a previous occurrence of it, thought tries to bring about this shift. This is impossible as the shift does not occur within the field of thought. Yet this quality of attention, this shift in consciousness, is available at any instant, for one can be attentive even to the fact of one’s inattention. You only really learn Hatha Yoga by getting on the floor and doing it. You learn about Jana Yoga by doing it, too.

Even though the learning is not a mechanical accumulation of skills, you can learn about the nature of the mental processes, which are mechanical, that keep this shift in consciousness from happening. The very doing of this allows the shift to occur. Although I have presented Hatha and Jnana Yoga as separate, ultimately they are not, for each complements and completes the other. I have found that Jnana Yoga is not only helpful in doing Hatha Yoga, but necessary.

Hatha Yoga is a miniature universe containing within it in its own form all of the problems of so-called ordinary life: ambition, image making, the subtle or not so subtle intrusion of comparison and competition, the pleasures of accomplishment, the dislike of regression, the frustrations of not having expectations met, and of course, the potentially ever-recurring specter of fear. Fear of aging, of dying, of one’s own sloth and laziness, of not measuring up to standards, of not making it (whatever “it” is) —these and other aspects of life display themselves in Hatha Yoga in a particularly direct and poignant way. Awareness of the structures of thought that come out of physical exploring is an integral part of the process of exploring the body. In exploring mental conditioning you find that psychological tightness conditions and tightens the body.

The common phrase “up tight” is ordinarily used to describe a mental state. When you are up tight you can notice how the body is also physically tightening. These habitual body tensions that over years bring about stiffness are the repository of internalized mental states. Opening up in physical Yoga opens you up mentally and opening up mentally aids in the opening of the body. I look upon Hatha and Jnana Yoga as two sides of a coin, as mirror images of each other. They are different routes of exploring what it is to be a human being.

Many features of other traditional approaches to Yoga such as Karma Yoga (the yoga of action in the world) and Raja Yoga (which is Patanjali’s specific combination of different Yogas) are incorporated in this approach. Tantric Yoga, which traditionally is a blending or merging of the male and female, can involve an edge playing in relationship which reveals other aspects of conditioning.

Bhakti or the devotional aspects of Yoga that involve a surrender to what is, comes out of a deep seeing of how the universe works. Serious people within an historical epoch have always re-examined and redefined the thrust of importance—which later becomes tradition, to be redefined again as times and the movement of consciousness evolve. The way I have answered the question “What is Yoga?” is in one sense not traditional. Yoga has always been a synthesis of personal experience and tradition—a blend of the new and the old. Indeed, an integral part of the tradition of Yoga is to be continually reinterpreting what Yoga is. It is this flexibility at the heart of Yoga which has allowed Yoga to be meaningful for thousands of years.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad.

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yoga and menopausal hormones

Menopausal hormone shifts can rearrange your body and mind in unnerving ways. Let yoga bring you back into balance.

Clients at Kay Lee’s hair salon in Studio City, California, have gotten used to seeing its owner standing on her hands in a corner of the room. Lee, who’s 51, has been practicing yoga since she was in her early 20s. But she began a more dedicated practice about six years ago, when she realized she needed help managing the symptoms of perimenopause. “I was around lots of older women at the salon, and we would all talk about the changes we were going through,” she says. “Watching them go through their menopause, I realized I needed to find a good way to cope with it.” 

Like many other women, Lee suspected that menopause might bring unpleasant symptoms. But when, in her 40s, she began experiencing perimenopause—a constellation of premenopausal changes that often includes hot flashes, insomnia, anxiety, irregular periods, heavy bleeding, forgetfulness, and fatigue—she discovered that she was unprepared. 

For Lee, the symptoms that hit hardest were irritability and mood swings. She’d grown accustomed to juggling midlife responsibilities: running her business and household, tending to her marriage, raising two children. But her emotions sometimes flared out of control as she moved into perimenopause. The worst episodes occurred during her two-hour freeway commute from her home in Ojai, California, to the salon, and back again—a drive that grew more frustrating the deeper into perimenopause she got. “Road rage,” she says ruefully. “I would have a lot of road rage.” 

Between the aggression, sleepless nights, and hot flashes, Lee decided she needed help. She knew women from the salon who were using hormone therapy, typically a combination of the female hormones estrogen and progesterone, but Lee wanted a more natural approach. She had taken classes sporadically in the past with Ojai yoga teacher Suza Francina, author of Yoga and the Wisdom of Menopause. Now that Lee needed help with the menopausal transition, she started going to Francina’s classes two to three times a week. She also began taking breaks during her busy workday to spend at least a few minutes doing yoga. 

Fog-free zone

After several weeks of regular practice, Lee felt much better: Her moods stabilized, and her thinking became sharper. Even her PMS symptoms improved. Longtime yogis, of course, know that the practice can bring benefits like calmness, mental clarity, strength, and focus to people of any age. But for women experiencing the physical, mental, and emotional throes of the menopausal years, yoga’s gifts are particularly welcome. 

“Menopause is like going through puberty, only in reverse,” Francina says. “By replenishing energy and soothing the nervous system, yoga goes to the root of a wide range of symptoms,” she says. Yoga teachers like Francina aren’t the only people who think that yoga can help. Because hormone therapy can raise the risk of heart disease, stroke, blood clots, and breast cancer, medical researchers have been searching for gentler ways to ease women through the menopausal transition. Although the research is still in its early stages, several studies have pointed to important ways that yoga can make a difference. 

In 2005 Beth Cohen, an internist at both the University of California, San Francisco, and San Francisco VA Medical Center, studied the effects of yoga on hot flashes in a small pilot study of 14 women. The women in the study took part in a weekly 90-minute yoga class designed around eight restorative poses. They also practiced for one hour at home three days a week. After eight weeks, the frequency of the women’s hot flashes decreased by 30 percent and their severity diminished by 34 percent. Cohen suspects that the results may be due to yoga’s ability to calm the sympathetic nervous system, although she can’t yet be certain, because researchers don’t fully understand what causes hot flashes. 

Cohen says that the study also revealed some unexpected findings, such as improved sleep among the participants. But since the study didn’t include a control group, it’s hard to say whether some of the response can’t be chalked up to the placebo effect. Last year, however, researchers in Bangalore, India, examined how yoga affected menopausal symptoms in a larger group of 120 women, this time with a comparison group. Half the women took yoga classes five days a week for an hour a day, while the others did supervised gentle exercise. After eight weeks, the yoga group had substantially fewer menopausal symptoms—hot flashes, memory problems, and sleep disturbances—as well as lower scores on a measure of perceived stress. There’s also evidence that yoga can do more than just ease bothersome symptoms. Kim Innes, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies, reviewed the medical literature about ways that yoga (and other mind-body practices, including tai chi) may affect the physiological and neuropsychological processes that contribute to the increase in heart disease risk for postmenopausal women. 

The hormonal changes that occur during menopause, particularly the sharp drop in estrogen, can lead to numerous health changes that make women much more vulnerable to heart disease and other chronic conditions. For instance, menopause itself is associated with a rise in insulin resistance and other adverse changes, including high blood pressure. Insulin resistance is a precursor to diabetes, in which the body becomes less sensitive to insulin, in turn causing blood-sugar levels to rise. In addition the menopausal transition is associated with increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system and related deterioration in both mood and sleep. All of these factors are interrelated, and all raise the risk for heart disease. 

Yoga, Innes says, has been shown to counter these risk factors. “I wasn’t expecting to see such a widespread effect on so many parameters,” she says. “But the more you look, the more you see that so many of these are related to stress. And the thing that’s startling is how quickly these beneficial changes can occur, even over the course of six weeks or less.” 

Restoratives to the Rescue

No single sequence will provide surefire relief for every woman, says Elise Browning Miller, an Iyengar Yoga teacher in Palo Alto, California, who teaches workshops on yoga for menopause. Browning Miller and other teachers agree on a few general principles for practicing during menopause. 

Women who are experiencing a lot of emotional turmoil may find standing poses like Prasarita Padottanasana (Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend) to be grounding and stabilizing, says Browning Miller. If heavy bleeding is a problem, inversions such as Salamba Sarvangasana (Supported Shoulderstand) can help reduce bleeding, she says. 

For postmenopausal women who want to maintain strong bones and prevent the wrist fractures common among this group, Miller recommends practicing asanas that put weight on the hands and forearms. These include poses such as a supported version of Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose), using a strap around the elbows or putting the forearms on the floor. Resting the head on the floor or on a block during the pose can also help ease emotional upset. 

But for many women during this time, restorative poses are the most crucial asanas of all. “When your body is going through changes, you need more rest,” Francina says. “No aspect of yoga is more important during this time than to take time every day to practice at least one restorative pose. This is a time for a peaceful, deep approach, with plenty of props so you can enjoy staying in poses longer.” 

Life Support

As for how often to practice, the consensus is at least twice a week: “Enough that you let it spill into your life,” Miller says. “There’s something about twice a week that has a multiplicative effect.” 

Lee says that she can’t imagine her life these days without yoga. She practices at the beginning or end of her day for at least 20 minutes, focusing on restorative poses. And she continues to attend classes at Francina’s studio two or three days a week. The benefits go beyond the physical. Because her mother died at 52, Lee hasn’t had an up-close role model to show her how to move gracefully into the next stage of her life. The women in her yoga classes, some of whom are in their 80s, have helped to fill that void. “Yoga gave me a support group of women who are my elders,” Lee says. “When we practice together, I feel really supported.” 

At Lee’s salon, she says, the topics of perimenopause and menopause come up all the time. When women come in for a haircut but wind up telling Lee that they’re fatigued or having mood swings, she passes on yoga tips that might help them feel better. In addition to having her mat at the salon, she also keeps a block, a strap, and a bolster on hand. “I’ve shown so many clients Viparita Karani,” she says. “They initially come for a beauty treatment. I try to remind them that beauty comes from inner balance and health.” 

At Rest in Transition

 

Make restorative poses the core of your practice during the menopausal transition, says yoga teacher and author Suza Francina. “I call these the essential poses for crossing the menopausal bridge. They will carry you to the next phase of your life.” Francina recommends staying in the first two poses for 10 minutes or longer, and the third for 5 minutes or longer.

Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose), supported Sit on your mat in front of a bolster placed lengthwise behind you. Loop a strap behind your back at your sacrum. Bring it forward around your hips and over your shins, and secure it under your feet so that it encircles the lower part of your body. Place the soles of your feet together and put a folded blanket or block beneath each of your outer thighs. Lie back with your spine centered on the bolster and with your arms out to the sides, palms up.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose), supported Place a bolster or two folded blankets on your mat, and lie back over them so that they support your back rib cage but allow your upper back and shoulders to reach toward the floor. Place the soles of your feet together, cross your shins, or bend the knees and keep feet flat on the floor. More-experienced yogis can practice with the legs straight and the feet on a block. Let your arms rest out to the sides or stretch them overhead with elbows bent and palms facing up.

Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose), supported Place a bolster or two folded blankets about six inches away from the wall (the exact distance depends on your leg flexibility and comfort). Sit sideways on the bolster, with the side of your hip touching the wall. With the bolster under your bottom, lower yourself back and swivel around so that your torso is perpendicular to the wall and your legs are extended up it. Let your arms rest out to the sides, palms up. In the beginning, stay about 5 minutes, and gradually increase the time to 10 minutes or longer.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Katherine Griffin, a former editor at Yoga Journal, is a San Francisco Bay Area writer.

Expert yoga pose

Are you looking for reasons to start practicing? Here are ways yoga improves your health—reasons enough to roll out the mat and get started.

If you’re a passionate yoga practitioner, you’ve probably noticed the ways yoga works—maybe you’re sleeping better or getting fewer colds or just feeling more relaxed and at ease. But if you’ve ever tried telling a newbie how it works, you might find that explanations like “It increases the flow of prana” or “It brings energy up your spine” fall on deaf or skeptical ears.

As it happens, Western science is starting to provide some concrete clues as to how yoga works to improve health, heal aches and pains, and keep sickness at bay. Once you understand them, you’ll have even more motivation to step onto your mat, and you probably won’t feel so tongue-tied the next time someone wants Western proof.

I myself have experienced yoga’s healing power in a very real way. Weeks before a trip to India in 2002 to investigate yoga therapy, I developed numbness and tingling in my right hand. After first considering scary things like a brain tumor and multiple sclerosis, I figured out that the cause of the symptoms was thoracic outlet syndrome, a nerve blockage in my neck and chest.

Despite the uncomfortable symptoms, I realized how useful my condition could be during my trip. While visiting various yoga therapy centers, I would submit myself for evaluation and treatment by the various experts I’d arranged to observe. I could try their suggestions and see what worked for me. While this wasn’t exactly a controlled scientific experiment, I knew that such hands-on learning could teach me things I might not otherwise understand.

My experiment proved illuminating. At the Vivekananda ashram just outside of Bangalore, S. Nagarathna, M.D., recommended breathing exercises in which I imagined bringing prana (vital energy) into my right upper chest. Other therapy included asana, pranayama, meditation, chanting, lectures on philosophy, and various kriya (internal cleansing practices). At the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai and from A.G. Mohan and his wife, Indra, who practice just outside of Chennai, I was told to stop practicing Headstand and Shoulderstand in favor of gentle asana coordinated with the breath. In Pune, S.V. Karandikar, a medical doctor, recommended practices with ropes and belts to put traction on my spine and exercises that taught me to use my shoulder blades to open my upper back.

Thanks to the techniques I learned in India, advice from teachers in the United States, and my own exploration, my chest is more flexible than it was, my posture has improved, and for more than a year, I’ve been free of symptoms.

My experience inspired me to pore over the scientific studies I’d collected in India as well as the West to identify and explain how yoga can both prevent disease and help you recover from it. Here is what I found.

Flex Time

1 Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you probably won’t be able to touch your toes, never mind do a backbend. But if you stick with it, you’ll notice a gradual loosening, and eventually, seemingly impossible poses will become possible. You’ll also probably notice that aches and pains start to disappear. That’s no coincidence. Tight hips can strain the knee joint due to improper alignment of the thigh and shinbones. Tight hamstrings can lead to a flattening of the lumbar spine, which can cause back pain. And inflexibility in muscles and connective tissue, such as fascia and ligaments, can cause poor posture.

 

Strength Test
2 Strong muscles do more than look good. They also protect us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in elderly people. And when you build strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility. If you just went to the gym and lifted weights, you might build strength at the expense of flexibility.

Standing Orders

3 Your head is like a bowling ball—big, round, and heavy. When it’s balanced directly over an erect spine, it takes much less work for your neck and back muscles to support it. Move it several inches forward, however, and you start to strain those muscles. Hold up that forward-leaning bowling ball for eight or 12 hours a day and it’s no wonder you’re tired. And fatigue might not be your only problem. Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine.

 

Joint Account
4 Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or mitigate disability by “squeezing and soaking” areas of cartilage that normally aren’t used. Joint cartilage is like a sponge; it receives fresh nutrients only when its fluid is squeezed out and a new supply can be soaked up. Without proper sustenance, neglected areas of cartilage can eventually wear out, exposing the underlying bone like worn-out brake pads.

Spinal Rap
5 Spinal disks—the shock absorbers between the vertebrae that can herniate and compress nerves—crave movement. That’s the only way they get their nutrients. If you’ve got a well-balanced asana practice with plenty of backbends, forward bends, and twists, you’ll help keep your disks supple.

Bone Zone
6 It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift your own weight. And some, like Downward- and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures. In an unpublished study conducted at California State University, Los Angeles, yoga practice increased bone density in the vertebrae. Yoga’s ability to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol (see Number 11) may help keep calcium in the bones.

Flow Chart
7 Yoga gets your blood flowing. More specifically, the relaxation exercises you learn in yoga can help your circulation, especially in your hands and feet. Yoga also gets more oxygen to your cells, which function better as a result. Twisting poses are thought to wring out venous blood from internal organs and allow oxygenated blood to flow in once the twist is released. Inverted poses, such as Headstand, Handstand, and Shoulderstand, encourage venous blood from the legs and pelvis to flow back to the heart, where it can be pumped to the lungs to be freshly oxygenated. This can help if you have swelling in your legs from heart or kidney problems. Yoga also boosts levels of hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the tissues. And it thins the blood by making platelets less sticky and by cutting the level of clot-promoting proteins in the blood. This can lead to a decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the cause of these killers.

Lymph Lesson
8 When you contract and stretch muscles, move organs around, and come in and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of lymph (a viscous fluid rich in immune cells). This helps the lymphatic system fight infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste products of cellular functioning.

Heart Start
9 When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you lower your risk of heart attack and can relieve depression. While not all yoga is aerobic, if you do it vigorously or take flow or Ashtanga classes, it can boost your heart rate into the aerobic range. But even yoga exercises that don’t get your heart rate up that high can improve cardiovascular conditioning. Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise—all reflections of improved aerobic conditioning. One study found that subjects who were taught only pranayama could do more exercise with less oxygen.

Pressure Drop
10 If you’ve got high blood pressure, you might benefit from yoga. Two studies of people with hypertension, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, compared the effects of Savasana (Corpse Pose) with simply lying on a couch. After three months, Savasana was associated with a 26-point drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number) and a 15-point drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number—and the higher the initial blood pressure, the bigger the drop.

Worry Thwarts
11 Yoga lowers cortisol levels. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider this. Normally, the adrenal glands secrete cortisol in response to an acute crisis, which temporarily boosts immune function. If your cortisol levels stay high even after the crisis, they can compromise the immune system. Temporary boosts of cortisol help with long-term memory, but chronically high levels undermine memory and may lead to permanent changes in the brain. Additionally, excessive cortisol has been linked with major depression, osteoporosis (it extracts calcium and other minerals from bones and interferes with the laying down of new bone), high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. In rats, high cortisol levels lead to what researchers call “food-seeking behavior” (the kind that drives you to eat when you’re upset, angry, or stressed). The body takes those extra calories and distributes them as fat in the abdomen, contributing to weight gain and the risk of diabetes and heart attack.

Happy Hour

12 Feeling sad? Sit in Lotus. Better yet, rise up into a backbend or soar royally into King Dancer Pose. While it’s not as simple as that, one study found that a consistent yoga practice improved depression and led to a significant increase in serotonin levels and a decrease in the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol. At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Ph.D., found that the left prefrontal cortex showed heightened activity in meditators, a finding that has been correlated with greater levels of happiness and better immune function. More dramatic left-sided activation was found in dedicated, long-term practitioners.

 

Weighty Matters
13 Move more, eat less—that’s the adage of many a dieter. Yoga can help on both fronts. A regular practice gets you moving and burns calories, and the spiritual and emotional dimensions of your practice may encourage you to address any eating and weight problems on a deeper level. Yoga may also inspire you to become a more conscious eater.

Low Show
14 Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and boosts HDL (“good”) cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the effects of insulin. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney failure, and blindness.

Brain Waves

15 An important component of yoga is focusing on the present. Studies have found that regular yoga practice improves coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who practice Transcendental Meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better—probably because they’re less distracted by their thoughts, which can play over and over like an endless tape loop.

 

Nerve Center
16 Yoga encourages you to relax, slow your breath, and focus on the present, shifting the balance from the sympathetic nervous system (or the fight-or-flight response) to the parasympathetic nervous system. The latter is calming and restorative; it lowers breathing and heart rates, decreases blood pressure, and increases blood flow to the intestines and reproductive organs—comprising what Herbert Benson, M.D., calls the relaxation response.

Space Place
17 Regularly practicing yoga increases proprioception (the ability to feel what your body is doing and where it is in space) and improves balance. People with bad posture or dysfunctional movement patterns usually have poor proprioception, which has been linked to knee problems and back pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing home or never entering one at all. For the rest of us, postures like Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.

Control Center
18 Some advanced yogis can control their bodies in extraordinary ways, many of which are mediated by the nervous system. Scientists have monitored yogis who could induce unusual heart rhythms, generate specific brain-wave patterns, and, using a meditation technique, raise the temperature of their hands by 15 degrees Fahrenheit. If they can use yoga to do that, perhaps you could learn to improve blood flow to your pelvis if you’re trying to get pregnant or induce relaxation when you’re having trouble falling asleep.

Loose Limbs
19 Do you ever notice yourself holding the telephone or a steering wheel with a death grip or scrunching your face when staring at a computer screen? These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue, and soreness in the wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, which can increase stress and worsen your mood. As you practice yoga, you begin to notice where you hold tension: It might be in your tongue, your eyes, or the muscles of your face and neck. If you simply tune in, you may be able to release some tension in the tongue and eyes. With bigger muscles like the quadriceps, trapezius, and buttocks, it may take years of practice to learn how to relax them.

Chill Pill
20 Stimulation is good, but too much of it taxes the nervous system. Yoga can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life. Restorative asana, yoga nidra (a form of guided relaxation), Savasana, pranayama, and meditation encourage pratyahara, a turning inward of the senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system. Another by-product of a regular yoga practice, studies suggest, is better sleep—which means you’ll be less tired and stressed and less likely to have accidents.

Immune Boon
21 Asana and pranayama probably improve immune function, but, so far, meditation has the strongest scientific support in this area. It appears to have a beneficial effect on the functioning of the immune system, boosting it when needed (for example, raising antibody levels in response to a vaccine) and lowering it when needed (for instance, mitigating an inappropriately aggressive immune function in an autoimmune disease like psoriasis).

Breathing Room
22 Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet taught a yogic technique known as “complete breathing” to people with lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After one month, their average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly, as did the oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other things you’d rather not take into your lungs.

Poop Scoop
23 Ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation—all of these can be exacerbated by stress. So if you stress less, you’ll suffer less. Yoga, like any physical exercise, can ease constipation—and theoretically lower the risk of colon cancer—because moving the body facilitates more rapid transport of food and waste products through the bowels. And, although it has not been studied scientifically, yogis suspect that twisting poses may be beneficial in getting waste to move through the system.

Peace of Mind
24 Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind, according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. In other words, it slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress is implicated in so many health problems—from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—if you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll be likely to live longer and healthier.

Divine Sign
25 Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. If you handle this negatively—take drugs, overeat, work too hard, sleep around—you may pay the price in poorer health physically, mentally, and spiritually. If you take a positive approach and practice yoga, you’ll sense, initially in brief glimpses and later in more sustained views, that you’re worthwhile or, as yogic philosophy teaches, that you are a manifestation of the Divine. If you practice regularly with an intention of self-examination and betterment—not just as a substitute for an aerobics class—you can access a different side of yourself. You’ll experience feelings of gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, as well as a sense that you’re part of something bigger. While better health is not the goal of spirituality, it’s often a by-product, as documented by repeated scientific studies.

Pain Drain
26 Yoga can ease your pain. According to several studies, asana, meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain in people with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When you relieve your pain, your mood improves, you’re more inclined to be active, and you don’t need as much medication.

Heat Treatment
27 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.

Guru Gifts
28 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.

Drug Free
29 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 (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown that yoga helped them lower their dosage of medications and sometimes get off them entirely. The benefits of taking fewer drugs? You’ll spend less money, and you’re less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug interactions.

Hostile Makeover
30 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.

Good Relations
31 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.

Sound System
32 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.

Vision Quest
33 If you contemplate an image in your mind’s eye, as you do in yoga nidra 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.

Clean Machine
34 Kriyas, or cleansing practices, are another element of yoga. They include everything from rapid breathing exercises to elaborate internal cleansings of the intestines. Jala neti, which entails a gentle lavage of the nasal passages with salt water, removes pollen and viruses from the nose, keeps mucus from building up, and helps drains the sinuses.

Karma Concept
35 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.

Healing Hope
36 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.

Connective Tissue
37 As you read all the ways yoga improves your health, you probably noticed a lot of overlap. That’s because they’re intensely interwoven. Change your posture and you change the way you breathe. Change your breathing and you change your nervous system. This is one of the great lessons of yoga: Everything is connected—your hipbone to your anklebone, you to your community, your community to the world. This interconnection is vital to understanding yoga. This holistic system simultaneously taps into many mechanisms that have additive and even multiplicative effects. This synergy may be the most important way of all that yoga heals.

Placebo Power
38 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’s just a placebo effect, why not do it?

Adapted from Yoga Journal by Timothy McCall, M.D., is Yoga Journal’s medical editor and a board-certified specialist in internal medicine. His book Yoga as Medicine will be released in fall 2005. Check with your health care provider before following any of the recommendations given in this article.

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Yoga offers the inner harmony and body awareness required to achieve a healthier approach to eating. All that, and a leaner, stronger body too.

Lanita Varshell is a round, vibrant woman with a zest for life, a joyful smile, a gentle voice, and a passion for teaching yoga to women with weight issues. But Varshell wasn’t always this spirited or committed to yoga. Six years ago, she was incapacitated by fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and could barely care for her two young children. Pain and exhaustion forced her to quit her full-time job. At 5 feet 3 1/2 inches and 240 pounds, she was a self-described “couch potato.”

“I’d been obsessed with dieting since I was 10 years old,” Varshell, now 43, says. “I had a history of joining gyms, then quitting. I’d diet, lose 20 or 30 pounds, then gain 40 or 50 back.” Though she’d heard about a gentle yoga class in her area, she procrastinated for six months. When she finally got the courage to attend, the experience touched her on a deep level. “Doing the poses brought tears to my eyes. For the first time in my life, I made a loving connection with my body,” she says. “Before that, my body was always my curse.”

In the years since, Varshell has lost 30 pounds as a direct result of practicing yoga. Increased body awareness has changed her eating habits, and the inner quiet has helped her explore emotional issues she once buried by eating. “Yoga helps you love yourself regardless of extra weight or imperfections,” she states. “I’ve let go of dieting—’die-eating’ to me—and now focus on health. If I keep on the yoga path, weight loss will continue to happen slowly and naturally. Healing weight challenges through yoga is like taking the scenic route instead of the main highway. It’s slower, but much more enjoyable and lasting.”

Although still challenged with fibromyalgia, Varshell’s health and energy have dramatically improved, and she runs her own yoga studio, A Gentle Way Yoga, in San Diego and La Mesa, California, where she teaches very gentle yoga, chair yoga for seniors, traditional hatha yoga, and yoga for super-sized people. Her yoga audiotape, A Gentle Way, disseminates her “gently-does-it” message. Many of her students attribute weight loss to their yoga practice, though Varshell reports that these students don’t obsess about weight as they once did, even if they are still carrying extra pounds. “Now body/mind/spirit health is their—and my—primary focus,” she says. “We’ve become committed to finding out what it means to be healthy—not just thin. Yoga has taught us to appreciate our bodies at any size.”

Varshell’s story inspires me, because I too struggle with my weight. Like her, I think yoga is a wonderful, holistic way to approach the underlying causes of excess fat, which are often a complex mix of physical, emotional, and spiritual issues. Of course, most people associate yoga with skinny, ultra-flexible yogis, not well-padded bodies with Buddha bellies. That’s a shame, because people of girth need yoga as much as—or more than—anyone. For those who, like me, have a tough time with overeating, junk food addiction, unwanted pounds, and the shame that accompanies being less than svelte, yoga offers the peace of mind and body awareness required to achieve a healthier approach to eating. All that, and a leaner, stronger body too.

As my weight has crept higher over the past three years, my self-esteem has sunk lower, leaving me feeling depressed, inferior, and weak-willed. As I increasingly relied on food to bolster me through stressful or unhappy times, I lost confidence in my body, which seemed to betray me. My arches hurt, my back ached, I panted going up steps, I broke my foot. I knew yoga had helped me feel strong and relaxed in the past, but I was too humiliated to do it in such bad shape.

Finally, a few months ago, I started watching gentle yoga videos at home. I remember sobbing on the floor when my barely healed foot couldn’t hold me in Downward-Facing Dog, so I quit. Weeks passed, and a friend invited me to a beginning yoga class. I went, determined not to expect miracles. After one class, something inside me shifted. Next thing I knew, I’d signed up for private sessions with the yoga teacher to work on modifying poses. At the same time, I started making dietary changes. After a month of doing yoga three or four times a week, my flexibility was returning, and I was ecstatic the day I held Tree Pose while balanced on my weak foot.

I’d been so excited about my new strength—which improves weekly—that I paid little attention to the scale, although I dropped a trouser size in a month. Part of my 15-pound weight loss resulted from all those fruits and veggies, but the experience taught me that yoga and other weight-loss measures are perfect partners. Making any lifestyle change is achingly slow, so what better way to practice patience than through yoga?

Keep in mind that achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight has benefits other than appearance, since excess body fat puts you at serious risk for a number of health problems. If your body fat percentage is greater than 30 percent for women or 25 percent for men, your risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and colon or breast cancer increases. So in addition to helping you feel better about yourself—which is crucial for those working to lose weight—yoga can inspire your commitment to better health. Besides putting me in touch with my body, yoga has made physical activity easier and more enjoyable. I’m motivated to add more cardiovascular exercise into my routine, thereby accelerating my weight loss and helping me reduce the likelihood of developing more health problems.

Emotional Evolution

There are many reasons why people feel powerless over food and gain weight. I use food as emotional comfort or to calm my anxiety. Sometimes eating seems the easiest way to feed unfulfilled inner hunger. Often, people rely on fast food to speed them through their too-fast lives. Many simply ignore their bodies’ needs for nutrition and exercise. Regardless of the cause, yoga is an antidote for food oblivion—it slows us down so we experience the body and commune with the spirit.

If there are emotionally based reasons why a person eats unwisely, it may be that yoga—especially the relaxation—opens a channel for clearing those emotions. Varshell relates a student’s discovery after shedding 20 pounds: “This woman realized through yoga how many emotions she stored in her body. She usually stuffed those feelings with food,” she explains. “I’m convinced if you don’t allow yourself to release emotions, they’ll come out as rage, disease, depression, or excess weight.”

Brian Vandoske, 36, of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who has lost 40 pounds since he committed himself to yoga five years ago, believes he keeps it off because yoga nourishes his spirit. “The soul is a major piece of the puzzle for people struggling with weight,” he says. “Those of us with extra pounds can go to Weight Watchers and deal with the nutrition issue, but we haven’t dealt with the soul.

“Anybody who takes on yoga winds up facing the inner issues as to why they’re overweight,” Vandoske continues. “Since my father passed away when I was 6, I’ve used food as a security blanket.” Working with a yoga therapist gave him tools to cope with that loss and his mother’s death five years ago. “Now if I feel depressed, I go to the cushion and meditate. I’ve also developed a network of people to talk to,” he adds. Every week he drives 50 miles to Milwaukee to a class taught by a yoga instructor who supports his efforts. “The diet industry has set up millions of Americans to fail,” Vandoske says. “Fortunately you can never fail in yoga, which emphasizes accepting your body as it is.”

Body awareness, an integral part of yoga, is crucial to weight loss. When I feel low, I crave an “out-of-body experience,” which I achieve by numbing myself with M&Ms. But when I’m in touch with myself through yoga, it’s easier to stay in the present, and I feel less need to escape. That’s why Genia Pauli Haddon, the ample-bodied cocreator of the Yoga for Round Bodies videos, calls yoga “coming home to yourself.”

“I never imagined myself doing yoga,” confesses the instructor from Scotland, Connecticut. “I believed yoga was for skinny, human-pretzel types.” However, Haddon’s friend, Linda DeMarco, convinced her to try it. Soon they developed instructions for many postures to allow for the reality of a big belly, heavy thighs, and large breasts. And, without trying, they both lost weight. “Years ago, I gave up on diets and pills and accepted that I would always be heavy, so it was a surprise to find that because I loved doing yoga, I was losing weight,” says Haddon.

“I think the pounds came off because I was in harmony with myself,” she continues. “Through yoga I experienced simply being. Then, anything not in harmony naturally fell by the wayside. The change occurred not just in how much I weigh, but in my attitudes. I learned to be more patient by staying with a yoga posture. And I have a greater capacity to be with myself emotionally, even through painful times. As I learned to stay present through yoga, I used food less as a substitute way of feeling better. However, I didn’t become a ‘skinny-mini.’ I’m still a short, round woman. And I like my body, largely as a result of my experience on the yoga mat.”

Varshell echoes those sentiments. “Whether or not I ever wear size six or eight is no longer important to me,” she says. “Long ago, I hated myself when I weighed 150, so I kept eating until I hit 180. I still hated myself at 180, so I progressed to 240. I knew I was headed to 300 pounds if I didn’t change my perception that weight determined how successful or loved I was. I was waiting to live life until I was the right size. Now getting my body, mind, and spirit in harmony is a spiritual journey.”

Even soul journeys, however, can be bumpy. It can take a lot of courage for a substantial-sized person to try yoga. “Years ago, I bought a ‘beginning’ yoga video in which this toothpick of a woman demonstrated the Wheel,” says Sherry Kreis, a size 20 woman from Denver. “I took one look at her bending over backwards with her little hip bones sticking out, and thought, ‘My body will never do that.’ I was so intimidated that I never even watched the rest of the tape.”

However, a year ago, Kreis started yoga at the urging of her friend Kate Chapman Sharpe, another woman trying to lose 30 pounds, and the two have stuck with it together. “It took guts to walk into that first class,” Sharpe says. “Because the teacher had a soft voice I couldn’t hear from the back of the gym, I realized I was going to have to stand in front and let go of my inhibitions about somebody looking at my butt. So, I told myself, ‘It doesn’t matter what I look like. What matters is I’m trying.’ ”

Over the months, as Sharpe and Kreis toned their bodies, they’ve realized there are yoga benefits beyond how you look in your jeans. “Last year my husband suffered a stroke and heart attack,” says Sharpe. “Without yogic breathing, I couldn’t have remained level-headed.” She’s reaped other rewards as well. “When I began yoga, my teacher said smoking wouldn’t interfere with my yoga, but yoga would interfere with my smoking. I’m finally at the point where I’m willing to quit,” she vows. “I think yoga might eventually interfere with my love of chocolate and rich food in much the same way.”

Relationships with Food

When you practice yoga, you develop a deeper relationship with your body, which eventually translates into more controlled eating. After a yoga class, you feel better, because your soul is happy, your energy is moving, your mind is clear, and you’re tuned in to yourself, says Suzanne Deason, a Marin County, California, teacher who developed the video Yoga Conditioning for Weight Loss. “In this relaxed state, you’re more likely to fix something nourishing rather than grab the first food you crave,” she notes. Deason remembers one woman who attended class five times a week, eventually losing 35 pounds. “She told me that yoga helped her body feel so much better that she stopped eating foods that weren’t good for her,” she says.

And yoga works where diets often fail. “Yoga—unlike dieting—is not about depriving yourself to look a certain way,” Varshell observes. “Instead, it helps you enjoy every movement and savor every bite of food you take. Yoga is about going deep inside and discovering who you are right now. Yoga helps you accept yourself at any size, looking lovingly and realistically at how you got where you are today, without blame or shame.”

However, shunning diets doesn’t excuse a person from eating well, Varshell points out. “We all must take responsibility for our food choices,” she says. “To feel good, you need to implement balanced, healthy eating habits.” She distinguishes between being on a diet—a regimented program—with choosing good food. “A friend who’s dropped 20 pounds says yoga has helped her with ‘loving discipline,’ ” she explains. “We usually think of discipline, especially diets, as punishment. But the word ‘discipline’ is actually from the word disciple. In yoga we become disciples, people willingly, excitedly following a new way of doing something to enhance our way of life. By regularly practicing yoga, your habits and choices improve, and you begin living consciously.”

Yoga for All Shapes

Besides nurturing self-acceptance, yoga offers physiological benefits. “Yoga may not bring you to the point of burning off that last 10 pounds,” admits Deason, “but you do experience muscle toning. Standing poses in particular tone and trim your legs, hips, buttocks, and abdomen, while developing stability and strong muscles. Building the large muscle groups increases the muscle-to-fat ratio, which speeds weight loss since muscle burns calories quickly.”

In addition, yoga increases energy and circulation, which contribute to overall well-being. “Yogic breathing oxygenates your body, helping your metabolism function at a higher level,” Deason says. Vinyasa, with its fast-paced, continuous motion, raises the heart rate, though not to the extent of cardiovascular exercise. However, Deason warns that focusing solely on burning calories misses the point of yoga.

The cardinal rule in yoga is to honor your own ability, no matter what your weight is. Driving yourself too hard is an invitation to injury and discouragement. “Stay true to who you are, just tickling your personal edge—the place in a pose between what you can do easily and where it becomes more difficult than is safe,” says Haddon. “In yoga, you receive the full benefit by respecting your own level of comfort, ability, strength, and flexibility. You undercut the process if you start comparing yourself to somebody else.”

Gentle yoga is essential for someone of substantial size. “I teach people to work slowly and softly, so they succeed, rather than becoming more frustrated than before they started,” says Naomi Judith Offner, whose video Gentle Yoga with Naomi is a good guide for those of us with round bodies. “It’s when people fail at exercise—when they don’t feel comfortable in a class—that they go out and eat from frustration, stress, and anxiety.”

If you have difficulty bending, kneeling, or lying on the floor, start with very gentle yoga that can be done in a chair or in bed. Light stretches and attention to the breath leave you feeling deeply relaxed but invigorated. Once you’re comfortable with gentle movement, you can try other levels, using modifications and props. For instance, a series of asanas—including the classic Sun Salutation—can be done in a chair or with a chair for support, says Nischala Joy Devi, author of The Healing Path of Yoga (Harmony, 2000). “My goal is to help people benefit from yoga without injury or strained muscles,” says Devi. She also notes that size is not a measure of flexibility. “Many people with a few extra pounds are incredibly flexible,” she says. “Conversely, many thin people are quite stiff.”

Modify the Poses

No matter how well-meaning a thin yoga teacher is, she or he has probably never experienced yoga as a person of girth. That’s why it’s important for you to know your abilities and keep your practice safe—but just challenging enough—for you.

Common concerns for us heavy people include reaching arms above our heads, folding into a forward bend (and being able to breathe once we’re there!), sitting cross-legged, holding a pose for a length of time, and experiencing back and knee strain due to added weight around the middle. But in yoga there are always solutions. Place a bolster under the knees to alleviate back strain when lying down; when seated cross-legged on the floor, fold a blanket under your rear. If you can’t reach your arms around your knees to pull them to your chest when lying down, a belt will extend your reach.

“You don’t have to sacrifice a posture if your body doesn’t bend like a pretzel,” Haddon says. “But be sure to honor both the posture and your own body.” Her advice is to err on the side of caution. For instance, if your weight stresses your lower back, proceed slowly, with awareness. “If you gently and gradually work into postures such as Cobra and Boat, you can strengthen your back,” Haddon says.

Balancing poses require special attention. “People of substance run a greater risk of spinal injury in inverted balancing poses and should avoid them,” Haddon says. When a heavy person does Headstand, she or he needs considerably more muscle power to correct a slight wobble than a lean person needs to correct the same degree of imbalance, she explains. (Tree Pose, on the other hand, develops balance and is safe for full-sized bodies.) And take credit for your own strength. “It amuses me to think the weight I’m hoisting in Plank is equivalent to what those buff guys in the gym are bench-pressing,” says Sharpe.

Props can help you fully benefit from yoga, compensating for tight joints, limited flexibility, or arms that don’t reach around an expansive body. Vandoske considers himself the king of yoga props—he routinely packs a pair of blocks, two straps, two sandbags, a blanket, and a mat when he heads off to the studio. “Props get me to a level in a pose where I feel comfortable and can improve,” he says. “The key to success in yoga for anybody carrying extra weight is to modify. Accept where you are and don’t be afraid to experiment with modifications.”

Often, a pillow beneath the forehead can make it easier to settle into Child’s Pose, or a strap can help open the hips and hamstrings. Don’t worry whether modifications are kosher. “Yoga is about being comfortable,” says Devi. “The definition of asana in the Yoga Sutra is ‘a comfortable and steady pose.’ But the word used for ‘comfort’ is sukha, which also means ‘happiness.’ If what you do brings happiness, then you’re doing real yoga,” she adds.

“Yoga involves so much stretching,” says Sharpe. “There are downward stretches, side stretches, intellectual stretches, and emotional stretches.” Indeed, both processes—learning yoga and losing weight—require patience and perseverance. A yoga practice takes time to cultivate; likewise, unwanted pounds won’t disappear overnight.

Because it fuses spiritual with physical practice, yoga offers a path for self-discovery and self-acceptance. Through it, I’m more attuned to my needs and feel better physically and emotionally.

No, yoga won’t always keep me from noshing on nachos.

Yet I respect myself more than before I started yoga, and I’m more likely to acknowledge my successes: small ones like holding Downward-Facing Dog for four breaths instead of two, big ones like taking a meditation break instead of a cookie break.

In time, yoga can transform you and your body. With work and years of yogic practice, Varshell has overcome illness, improved her relationship to eating, polished her self-image, and shed pounds. “Now I see food as a way to love and nourish my body, rather than hide from my emotions,” she says. “Holding a pose long enough to feel muscle after muscle let go and melt into the floor touches me in a way that ice cream never could.”

adapted from Yoga Journal by Boulder, Colorado-based freelance writer Laurel Kallenbach wrote the feature on pilgrimage for our September/October 99 issue.

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yoga and knee issues

Yoga can be a source of knee pain or the ideal therapy. Here’s a primer on keeping the joint healthy on and off the mat.

The chorus of pops emanating from Kyle Ray’s knee was his first clue that his body wasn’t happy in Padmasana (Lotus Pose). It was the end of a relaxing yoga class in Louisville, Kentucky, and the teacher had instructed everyone to assume a seated position for some chanting. Sure, Ray’s knees had acted up on occasion, but he’d gotten himself into Lotus before and was confident he could do it again. He slowly nestled his left ankle into the crook of his hip. Then, grabbing his right calf, he used his arm strength to muscle the top leg into position.

“The noise was awful,” says Ray, 31. A second later, a quick, sharp pain shot through his knee. He gingerly unfolded his legs. After class, it was all he could do to hobble home and place an ice pack on the swelling joint. It took six months for him to be able to walk without pain. Although his knee pain did subside, Ray still frets about the stability of his knees and generally avoids knee-taxing postures like Virasana (Hero Pose).

There’s no doubt that yoga asks much of the knees. Done properly, asana practice can shore them up to prevent injuries and slow the progression of some musculoskeletal diseases, but practiced without mindfulness, it spells disaster for these joints. Clearly, there are just as many people who credit yoga with rehabilitating weak knees as there are determined yogis like Ray, who will themselves into complex poses and pay a big price for overdoing it. But in poses like Supta Virasana (Reclining Hero Pose), in which the knees can feel pushed to the edge, it’s sometimes hard to know if you’re helping or hurting them. So what’s a yoga practitioner who’s concerned about protecting the knees to do? Nothing can replace the guidance of an experienced teacher, but certain principles can guide you into a safe, beneficial practice.

Weak in the Knees

The knee marks the meeting place of three bones: the shinbone (tibia), the thighbone (femur), and the kneecap (patella). Two crescent-shaped pads of cartilage, each called a meniscus, sit between the shinbone and the thighbone and act as cushions between the bones and shock absorbers during movement. Two sets of ligaments—the cruciates and the collaterals—strap all three bones in place. The cruciates crisscross below the kneecap; the collaterals run alongside the outside of the kneecap. The leg’s substantial muscles help these ligaments keep the bones properly aligned.

Unfortunately, the knee’s mechanics are better suited to chasing animals for dinner than to sliding into second base, says Stephen Messier, professor of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “We weren’t designed to do the things we do with our bodies nowadays,” he explains. “The knee’s engineering isn’t the greatest.”

And it shows: Every year, nearly 11 million Americans complain to doctors about knee pain. Orthopedic surgeons operate more often on the knees than on any other body part; they performed more than 1.2 million such surgeries in 1996 alone (the latest year for which figures were kept).

Roughly 21 million Americans have osteoarthritis of the knee—a degenerative disease in which the cartilage gradually decays and fails to provide the shock-absorbent padding that cushions the bones. Many older people suffer from this painful arthritic condition; age is considered a risk factor, as are obesity and knee injuries.

For years, experts have touted leg strength as one of the best ways to ward off knee problems, including osteoarthritis. This is because the knee’s key muscular supports are the hamstrings—which run from the base of the pelvis down the back of the leg to just below the knee—and the quadriceps, the four muscles on the front of the thigh that (among other things) extend a bent leg. At the first sign of the disease, doctors often instruct their patients to build muscle tone and develop flexibility in the legs so as to delay cartilage deterioration and subdue pain.

But the findings of a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in April 2003 indicate that in some cases, building leg strength doesn’t slow the disease’s progression—in fact, it hastens it. Researchers tested 230 volunteers with osteoarthritis of the knee for quadriceps strength and knee alignment, and then retested them 18 months later. The results surprised the medical community: Many volunteers with strong quads also showed rapid cartilage deterioration. But there was a catch—many of those who had strong quads and experienced a rapid progression of the disease also had misaligned kneecaps, a small but significant impairment that intensifies pressure on the cartilage.

You don’t even have to suffer from osteoarthritis for misalignment to cause problems in your knees. In fact, Messier says, “misalignment can cause injury and osteoarthritis over long periods of time, especially if you have stronger muscles that are directing the forces improperly.” If the muscular contraction between the two sides of the knee isn’t balanced, the knee rotates as it bends, which makes the joint pull toward the stronger muscle. Over time, this wears down one meniscus faster than the other and eventually damages the bone the cartilage protects.

While the study points to the problems created by building uneven leg strength, Messier is concerned that its findings will be misinterpreted. “The last thing we want to do is discourage people from getting stronger,” he says. What the study actually highlights is the importance of evenly building the leg muscles to keep the joint properly aligned—a task for which yoga is perfect.

One of the Best Antidotes

Whether you’re out to guard against injury and disease or regain strength and flexibility after an injury, yoga can be a superb antidote to knee trouble. “Yoga is fantastic for the knees, especially for people recovering from damaged ligaments,” says Michael Salveson, who has worked on dozens of yoga students during his 33-year tenure as a Rolfer in Berkeley, California. “Yoga increases the stabilizing action of the leg’s big muscles.” When the inner and outer quadriceps are equally strong, he adds, they exert an equal pull on the ligaments, which keeps the kneecap in alignment.

Sandy Blaine is a good example. As a teenager, she enjoyed dance and gymnastics. By her early 20s, she’d dislocated both knees on several occasions. Searching for a low-impact way to stabilize her joints, Blaine tried Iyengar Yoga when she was 26. She was initially surprised by the discipline’s difficulty, yet what impressed her more was how remarkably good she felt afterward. Within six months of attending two to three Iyengar classes a week, Blaine found that her knee pain had vanished. Today, at 42, she still sounds as if she can’t believe her knees are pain-free, calling the result “an absolute miracle.”

“I was looking at a lifetime of being very constrained,” says Blaine, who is now an instructor at the Yoga Room in Berkeley and regularly conducts workshops on yoga and knee health. Regaining healthy knees “was an incredible relief,” she adds.

To evenly engage the leg muscles, Blaine does Utkatasana (Chair Pose) with her back against a wall. She focuses on lifting her toes and pressing down evenly through all four corners of her feet. Otherwise, the outer quadriceps do all the work and old patterns are reinforced, she explains. Another way Blaine works on equalizing muscle use is by balancing on one foot with her eyes closed. “Without the orientation of the eyes, your feet and ankles have to find a true alignment to come into balance,” she says.

Robust ligaments are also essential for healthy knees. Less elastic than muscles and tendons, ligaments can give a little and bounce back to their original shape. But trouble brews when they stretch too far: Like a rubber band that’s lost its snap, they lose their shape, leaving the joint loose. Salveson, who is also an instructor at the Rolf Institute in Boulder, Colorado, compares the microtears a ligament sustains in an injury to frays in a rope; when a few strands snap, the rope lengthens. After a torn ligament heals, one side may always be a little longer and, therefore, more susceptible to reinjury. “You can make it stronger,” he says, “but you can’t make it shorter.”

Knee experts are actually divided about whether ligaments can be strengthened. “We know that you can increase muscle and bone strength,” says Angela Smith, M.D., a clinical associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “Intuitively, we think that the other structures of the knee—ligaments and tendons—get stronger as well.”

Blane, for one, is convinced that years of Iyengar Yoga have toned her knee ligaments. “At first, my feet, ankles, and knees were so weak that the standing poses were sheer torture,” she says. “My ligaments and muscles were strong on the outer leg and weak on the inner leg, which pulled the knee joint to the side. Yoga helped me strengthen those weak areas. It taught me how not to go with the path of least resistance.” Her ligaments used to be so weak that she once dislocated her kneecap tripping on a curb. But since committing herself to a regular yoga practice, she hasn’t suffered a knee injury in years.

2 Start with your feet. Proper alignment through the feet is the key to building strength evenly in the ligaments on both sides of the knee; when all the ligaments are equally strong, the kneecap glides effortlessly up and down and the cartilage doesn’t get worn down. Separate your toes and press actively through the four corners of your feet in every pose, even inversions. If your feet are out of alignment, your knees are going to suffer.

3 Keep your knees in line. When moving into deep knee bends, such as Virabhadrasana II (Warrior Pose II) and Parsvakonasana (Side Angle Pose), first align your bent knee over your ankle, then draw your kneecap in line with your second toe. Maintain awareness in your back foot, pressing down evenly, while lifting up from the arch of your front foot. “If you let the arch drop, the knee falls inside the big toe, and you’re set up to suffer a number of different kinds of overuse and acute knee injuries,” says Angela Smith, a professor of orthopedic surgery.

4 Tune in to subtle signals. “Oftentimes, the knees don’t give immediate feedback,” explains Iyengar teacher Joni Yecalsik. “Only later do you realize you’ve gone too far. When it comes to the knees, the sensation that would normally proceed the red flag is the red flag.” If you feel achiness when you come out of a bent-knee pose, you may have worked too hard.

5 Build strength by balancing. Balancing poses, especially those that require moving through a bent standing leg, such as Garudasana (Eagle Pose), are especially beneficial. “Very dynamic balancing protects the knee against future injury by training the functional alignment, not just working the muscle,” Smith says.

6 Be prop-friendly. When it comes to seated asanas, nothing makes a tight knee happier than a bounty of props. In Virasana (Hero Pose), try raising your seat with blankets or a block. Anytime the knees are deeply bent, such as in Balasana (Child’s Pose) or Marichyasana III (Pose Dedicated to the Sage Marichi III), pressure can be relieved by placing a rolled-up washcloth as far into the knee pit as possible before bending the joint.

7 Warm up with hip openers. “If your big joints aren’t open, your small joints will always take the stress,” yoga instructor Sandy Blaine says. “Many people hurt their knees doing Lotus when their hips aren’t ready.” She recommends warming up with hip stretches like Baddha Konasana (Bound Angle Pose) and Gomukhasana (Cow Face Pose).

—C.G.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Catherine Guthrie, a writer and yoga teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, and a regular contributor to Yoga Journal.

 

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