Tag: hatha yoga

Wednesday Workout: Yoga Is Accessible

Posted on by Joy Held

 

There are five primary areas of practice to the Writer Wellness plan. Every other week I will post an idea for relaxation (Monday Meditation,) creative play (Tuesday Tickle,) fitness and exercise (Wednesday Workout,) journaling and misc. (Thursday Thought,) and nutrition (Friday Feast.)

The physical component of yoga is called “hatha yoga.” The word “hatha” is Sanskrit for physical. There are essentially 24 basic poses in yoga and many, many variations on them thus creating hundreds of poses all together. There are also ways to modify the basic poses so anyone can participate in some level of hatha yoga. This is where yoga therapy comes into play. All yoga is therapeutic in a sense because of the breathing, stretching and mental practices, but the physical acts of the poses, also called asanas, can be changed up slightly to make them accessible to some persons with disabilities.

Disclaimer alert: this article is not meant to replace the guidance of your health care practitioner. Always consult such persons before engaging in activity to be sure your condition warrants participation in an organized exercise regime of any kind.

That said, besides talking with your doctor first, here are three books to give you an idea of what might be available to you.

Recovery Yoga, A Practical Guide for Chronically Ill, Injured, and Post-Operative People, Sam Dworkis, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1997. This book covers breathing and movements in a variety of positions. Once you have understood any limitations your doctor recommends, you can choose exercises done sitting, standing, lying down, and on the floor. Dworkis is an Iyengar trained yoga teacher and the B.K.S. Iyengar tradition of hatha yoga originated the practice of modifying yoga poses through the use of props such as chairs and bolsters. His program is called Extension Yoga.

http://www.extensionyoga.com/

Yoga As Medicine, The Yogic Prescription For Health and Healing, Timothy McCall, M.D., Bantam, New York, 2007. McCall is a doctor and a yoga practitioner and the medical consultant for Yoga Journal Magazine. It includes practice routines and advice on using yoga to help with several conditions such as back pain, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis.

http://www.drmccall.com/

Yoga for Movement Disorders, Rebuilding Strength, Balance and Flexibility for Parkinson’s Disease and Dystonia, Renee Le Verrier, BS, RYT, Merit Publishing International, Florida, 2009. The author of this book suffers from Parkinson’s Disease and practices what she preaches. Every pose is prop assisted and the system is explained very clearly. The photos are very clear and the poses are adaptable to more than Parkinson’s. Highly recommended.

http://meritpublishing.com/

My book Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity includes chapters on yoga for writers. Basic poses like Triangle are shown modified in Writer Wellness for use by persons other than writers. Best wishes to you for continued health through movement. Have you found an interesting way to keep physically active?

Meanwhile, remember to look for a digital or print copy of Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity at Who Dares Wins Publishing, http://whodareswinspublishing.com.

And check out these great blogs for ideas to keep your writing and publishing healthy and prosperous.

http://writeitforward.wordpress.com/ Bob Mayer

http://jenniholbrooktalty.wordpress.com/ Jenni Holbrook

http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ Kristen Lamb

http://inspiration4writers.blogspot.com/ Inspiration for Writers, Inc.

http://pentopublish.blogspot.com/ Natalie Markey

Be well, write well.

Monday Meditation: Am I Meditating?

Posted on by Joy Held

There are five primary areas of practice to the Writer Wellness plan. Every other week I will post an idea for relaxation (Monday Meditation,) creative play (Tuesday Tickle,) fitness and exercise (Wednesday Workout,) journaling and misc. (Thursday Thought,) and nutrition (Friday Feast.)

“Success is never a destination—it’s a journey.”                                ~Satenig St. Marie,

Unless we have a homemade brain wave monitoring machine, we usually don’t have the means to measure our level of success with meditation in a scientific sense. We can feel certain changes and measure them to a degree. The average meditation journey should experience three specific measurable stages:

1.Tension-this is where we notice just how tight our jaw bones are, how sore our backs are and how busy our minds tend to be

2.Letting go-this is when we notice some of the tension releasing and our breathing is slowing down

3.THERE-this is when we become aware of very few things, less and less bothers us physically and mentally we realize our thoughts have slowed down, and we can control whether or not we want to follow monkey mind down its ragged path. We do not follow monkey mind.

These stages coincide with brain wave activity.

Tension = Beta (busy, busy, busy mind)

Letting go = Alpha (focused awareness on our breath and what it’s doing, fewer thoughts)

THERE = Theta (just about to cross the hazy boundary into slumber-ville)

Sleep isn’t meditation as I’ve said before, and theta is the gatekeeper of sleep so the goal is to remain relaxed and aware at the alpha level. Regardless of how messy the day has been, a successful meditation session need only give us a conscious pause from the issues we’re dealing with and that’s enough. Yep. It only takes a few minutes a day to meditate successfully. But what does a successful meditation practice “feel” like?

This brings up the question of goals. Should we have goals where meditation is concerned? Is it better to let things take their course and follow along? Like yoga, meditation is a blend of healthy balance. It’s right to set a goal to meditate for a specific amount of time each day. It’s right to practice particular habits like sitting still and watching breath flow. But it isn’t right to set expectations beyond the realm of the realistic. Why? Because unlike measuring the fact that our brain activity actually slows down during meditation, it creates more stress to attach a measurement or a benchmark for meditation. “If I don’t find perfect peace in my life in three months of meditating, I failed and will give up meditating.” Or “I should notice a major shift in my actions in a set period of time, and if I don’t I will stop meditating because it just isn’t for me.” These are normal examples of our “quick fix”, I-want-it-now mind sets and this doesn’t work with meditation. With meditation, the less you expect, the more you receive.

To answer the question of what successful meditation feels like, beyond the physical and mental releases (which may not feel gigantic, but they occur,) the positive results of regular meditation show themselves in our everyday actions. We are more patient. We smile more. We laugh bigger. We appreciate little things more. We share more. We hold the door more often. We focus better on other projects when our brains are challenged. We are healthier. We are brave. We trust more. We think the best first. We are less critical of ourselves and others. We are more accepting. We are more loving. We are more truthful. We are more understanding. We are more creative. We are more of who we were meant to be.

But it’s a long journey worth every step. Do you have any meditation stories to share from your journey?

Meanwhile, remember to look for a digital or print copy of Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity at Who Dares Wins Publishing, http://whodareswinspublishing.com.

And check out these great blogs for ideas to keep your writing and publishing healthy and prosperous.

http://writeitforward.wordpress.com/ Bob Mayer

http://jenniholbrooktalty.wordpress.com/ Jenni Holbrook

http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ Kristen Lamb

http://inspiration4writers.blogspot.com/ Inspiration for Writers, Inc.

http://pentopublish.blogspot.com/ Natalie Markey

Be well, write well.

Monday Meditation: Lessons In Living

Posted on by Joy Held

 

There are five primary areas of practice to the Writer Wellness plan. Every other week I will post an idea for relaxation (Monday Meditation,) creative play (Tuesday Tickle,) fitness and exercise (Wednesday Workout,) journaling and misc. (Thursday Thought,) and nutrition (Friday Feast.)

We are each living our daily lives as we would like to experience our deaths.

“Whoa! Hold on,” you’re saying. “I don’t like to think about dying. I’ll deal with it when it happens.”

It happens a little to everyone every day. Awareness of that tiny fact creates a huge relief in those who notice it. Yoga has a particular gift in this area. It’s a pose called ‘Savasana’ which is Sanskrit for ‘corpse pose.’ The end of every decent hatha yoga class is spent in this one pose for up to 20 minutes. My students call it “the present at the end of the yoga workout party” because with practice ‘Savasana’ is truly a gift on many levels. One of those levels is the practice of our death.

“Okay, too morbid for me. Next blog, please.” 

That’s the normal reaction to a discussion of death. But this is a discussion of the appreciation of life.

I was raised in a ballet school and had to perform on stage quite a bit. Recitals, “The Nutcracker”, and benefit performances used to make me nervous. As a young dancer, I sometimes got so ill I couldn’t go on with the show. Nowadays that’s called “performance anxiety” and the study of it has shown that sufficient preparation and practice of an activity completely alleviates the stress caused by having to perform in front of an audience. I taught myself to practice more often and rehearse my dances in my mind over and over by visualizing the movements night after night before falling asleep. When it came time to perform, no sick stomach or sweats, just a great experience for me and the audience. The dedicated repetition in the studio and in my mind gave me the confidence to perform without tension and without worrying about the expectations. I knew I was doing the best job I possibly could because I had practiced a lot. 

In his brilliant book The Inner Tradition of Yoga, A Guide to Yoga Philosophy for the Contemporary Practitioner, author and psychotherapist Michael Stone explores some of how ‘Savasana’ is an honest, stress-free practice of “life structured by death.” In a pure and simple sense we all make daily living choices that lead us along the path of how we will experience our endings. In the regular practice of corpse pose we gently, slowly, and gradually choose in a small way to live and pass peacefully and with respect toward our world and others. Relaxing deeply in the gift of corpse pose at the end of a good hatha session is an opportunity to make a tiny practice about how we would like to leave this existence. It’s normal to resist death but the miniscule and regular practice of accepting it peacefully builds a reserve in our mind. We can call on those peaceful reserves when faced with stressful expectations and the results will be better for all concerned.

According to Stone, “Yoga teaches us that the dance of all we perceive happens in front of awareness, not inside or behind it.” Yoga helps us practice the dance in front of the audience and with repetition we are not afraid. About the two arenas of life and death he adds, “The ‘practice of dying’ is a matter of learning to live the tension ‘in between’ these two dimensions of existence.” Corpse pose enables us to experience a small death with appreciation for living because after the pose we are graciously given the opportunity to stretch our arms and legs, take a deep breath, and go back to our world. The idea is to take the appreciations learned on the mat in corpse pose and practice those lessons in our lives off the mat.

Visit Michael Stone

http://centreofgravity.org/

Learning to appreciate corpse pose as more than a physical relaxation is learning gratitude for life. Don’t be afraid.

Meanwhile, remember to look for a digital or print copy of Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity at Who Dares Wins Publishing, http://whodareswinspublishing.com.

And check out these great blogs for ideas to keep your writing and publishing healthy and prosperous. 

http://writeitforward.wordpress.com/ Bob Mayer

http://jenniholbrooktalty.wordpress.com/ Jenni Holbrook 

http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ Kristen Lamb 

http://inspiration4writers.blogspot.com/ Inspiration for Writers, Inc.

http://pentopublish.blogspot.com/ Natalie Markey

 Be well, write well.