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April 4, 2011.  As an adult I started yoga because I got hit by a car. It was part of my physical therapy.  I love the physical part of yoga. And for a long long time that was all I knew.  And I'll tell you I still love sweating and moving and breathing.  I have never gotten "past that" nor do I want to evolve to a point where I can't enjoy the movement.  

As a more experienced yogi I eventually found out from my teacher Shiva Rea that Yoga is for the Mind.  Who knew? (Well ok if you did, I didn't)

So how does this work exactly if the practice is so physical? Well scientists agree that the best form of exercise is that which involves learning complex movement, including balance and coordination.  That sounds like yoga.  Western science also goes on to say that MOVEMENT provides physiological release that we need to bring our body back into balance while at the SAME time it is also good for our brain where moving helps form more connections between the neurons in our brain.  Other benefits of learning coordinated movements which in yoga we call Vinyasa Krama include: improved mental well-being; increased neurotransmitters; mood regulation; anxiety control; ability to handle stress better; better socialization; ability to better process more information; enhanced attentiveness and improved ability to choose appropriate responses. 

Of all those benefits and ways yoga helps the mind I like appropriateness the best.  I struggled for a long time as an overly sensitive person in appreciating how not to over-react to what others did or said.  Yoga calms my mind and makes me better able to not take things personally (Rule #2 in Miguel Ruiz book The Four Agreements).  I make better decisions when the noise in my brain quiets after practicing yoga.  I need the yoga to impact the ventromedial portion of the frontal lobe of my brain!

Studies show we have too much brain power.  We easily catastrophize and react rather than respond.  When I am on the mat learning, following, trying out a sequence of physical poses and coordinating my breath into that movement I somehow learn how to sequence the thoughts in my mind when not in a pose.  And it's true the primary motor cortex and cerebellum which coordinate physical movement also coordinate movement of thought.  In yogic practice we have then 3 movements:  physical movement (and inside that isometric movement as well as action) and pranic movement (breathing on purpose) and also thought movement.  One impacts the other and managing one fluidly teaches us how to sequence the other.  So that's the scoop, just as we order physical movements in something like Sun Salutation A or Dancing Warrior 1 (which we practiced tonight) we learn how to best order the sequence of our thoughts for thinking our best lives ever. Love yourself, love your day, love your life! Silvia 

Sun Salutation Series A – Overview

Start standing at attention, bringing awareness to your body and posture.  Feet rooting down, inner edges of feet together, lift sternum upward, pull belly in (abdominal lock called uddiyana banda), tilt pelvis pointing tailbone down slightly, knee caps pulling up, inner thigh spinning outward, engage quads and press leg bones down, pull shoulders back relax them away from ears sliding shoulder blades down the back, head centered, ears over shoulders, neck neutral, gaze soft and relaxed

Dancing Warrior 1

INHALE -- Eka Pada Adho Mukha Svanasana (1 Leg Downward Dog)

EXHALE -- Place foot down, prepare foundation for Vira I

INHALE -- Virabhadrasana I (Warrior 1)

EXHALE -- Chaturanga Dandasana

INHALE -- Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (Upward Facing Dog)

EXHALE -- Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog) (Repeat #1-5, left side)

*DW courtesy of my teacher Shiva Rea

FEBRUARY 6, 2010:  As Americans we spend a lot of time thinking about physical digestion (what we eat, when we eat, what we're not going to eat, how many calories stuff has) but what about Mental Digestion.  When we have poor mental digestion we experience stuff like poor sleep, obsessive worry, lethargy, impatience, fatigue, anger and an annoying degree of anxiety.  How does this happen?   

1. Being too sedentary keeps us in our heads, leading to overall mental stuckness. We need to move and breath, like we do in yoga.

2. Watching others move like on dancing with the stars doesn't help our mental constipation.  We still need to move and breath.  

Two articles that support this:

(1) Well, health experts say that sitting is deadly.  "Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods - even if you exercise regularly - could be bad for your health. ANd it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place - just the overall number of hours it occurs.  Several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals says Elin Elblom Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences as reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.  

(2) In the January 29th, 2010 issue of the The Week, page 23 an article suggests "TV can kill you.  Watching too much television may shorten your life by years. Australian researchesrs tracked the medical conditions of 8,800 healhty adults for several years; the more television the participants watched, the more likely they were to have died during hte years examined.  On average, for every hour per day spent watching TV, a subject was 18% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease, 9% more likely to succumb to cancer, and 11% more likely to die of any cause.  The culprit is the inactivity TV promotes.  Prolonged watching of TV equals a lot of sitting, which invariablly means there's an absence of muscle movement, study author David Dunstan tells CNN.com.  Long, unnatural periods of doing nothing physically, he says, clearly lead to premature death.  The antidote is to just get up and move, he adds. The more you move, the greater the health benefits likely to be."  

Our mental digestion is relieved by using the breath led poses in vinyasa yoga to help us circulate our energies, both physically and mentally.  Otherwise our minds feel both WIRED and TIRED.  We have this need to burn off excess energy that's pent up from sitting too much and we also need to breath and refresh our brains.  Remember as John Doulillard, Director of LifeSpa School of Ayurveda in Boulder, Colorado says, "everyone thinkgs that when you can't sleep, you have too much energy, but usually people have too little energy: they are TOO exhausted to get to sleep."   Please stay with your commitment to yoga and let your life be free of all constipation, mental or otherwise!  Peace and light, Silvia