Yoga as Therapy?
You’d Better Believe It!!
From many years of studying and applying various therapies I've learned that sometimes we need more than words in order to heal. How we talk about ourselves, our lives and relationships, our problems and successes, will determine the story that we create about our lives. We often like the story we are living, but sometimes that story we are creating can be our worst nightmare.
Talk therapy is essentially a left brain activity but there is a crucial component that is missing from this left brain experience – the right brain! The right brain is responsible for our creativity and imagination. It's a tool for transcending the chatter of the right brain. Sometimes the right brain will be activated while undergoing hypnosis, relaxation and visualization techniques, or mindfulness therapy.
However, a shortcut to accessing this healing, calming, expanding relationship with the world is through the breath and the body. It's true - something as simple as breath awareness has the potential to shift not only the experience of your body, but your approach to life as well.
Being in your body – really connecting with your hips, your thighs, your arms, your jaw, your shoulders – can be both a scary and enlightening experience. Scary, because we lock tension and old memories in the cells of our bodies, which literally affects how we move in the world. Enlightening, because working through these blockages in the body will transform the mind - simultaneously.
Yoga, a centuries-old tradition, holds the potential to do just that.
I know from personal experience how transformative it can be.
To deal with stress and combat anxiety while I pursued my PhD and worked full-time I went to traditional talk therapy and experimented with taking natural supplements to energize my adrenal glands. My exercise of choice during these years was running on the beach. I thought it was calming to listen to the waves and breathe fresh air as I stretched my body. And for a time this worked for me - along with a glass of wine (or two) each night to relax.
But last December I hit a wall. A really thick wall. Everything about my life that wasn’t working or had eased to work was staring me in the face. I was thirty years old – a time of transition from one decade to the next. I had a choice – to continue to avoid the changes that I needed to make (and stay small within my life) or to begin to address, one by one, the areas that were in most need of repair.
A personal crisis can be a great motivator for change.
In January, I began doing hot yoga three times a week. Yoga became a high priority on my list. I was exhausted, exhilarated, sore, but calm. And also losing weight.
- I kicked drinking any and all forms of alcohol.
- I changed my eating habits.
- I began to monitor my thoughts and learned that the negative ones predominated.
- My body, my mind, my relationships were transformed. I was transformed.
- I credit the yoga practice as the sole reasons why my life is back on track.
- I learned about how I hold stress, pain, sadness and anger in areas of my body.
- I learned how hard it is to first find the pain, accept the pain, stop fighting the pain, and finally relax into the pain. Relaxing into the pain means not avoiding, not resisting, not distracting, but being in the present moment and being with the sensation. It means being with the sensation a little more each time.
- I began to learn in a authentic and non-intellectual way what it means to honor what greets us, to relax into sensations, to let go, and to breathe.
It’s an on-going process. Many times I want to avoid yoga but I ignore my mind and all the reasons it gives me for not going and go anyway. Other times I look forward to class all day.
Yoga as therapy? Absolutely.
If therapy means to grow into ourselves and into acceptance of ourselves and our lives, then yoga can be a healing path.
With Love,
Corinne
