What is a mind-body injury?
In modern society we are easily alienated from our own bodies. Driven by deadlines, competition, or stress, as well as by a host of machines that speed us up and slump us forward – we are often unaware of how our thinking pushes us to compromise healthy posture. When this thinking becomes a learned habit, and overrides our natural alignment and healthy rhythms of rest and work, the body can harden. Natural resiliency and flexibility gets thrown off and forced to work at less than optimal design. Wear and tear results, and over time, leads to injury.
Traumatic experiences leave even deeper impacts on our psychology, and become embedded in the physical body in complex and difficult to unwind ways. Inappropriate or dysfunctional behaviors can emerge, including a drive towards addictions as a coping skill. Through engaging the mind together with the body (and the breath as a clear bridge), the Yoga approach hosts some powerful tools to address these deep seated injuries.
Managing Pain
In moving through a systematic exploration of the body like yoga, a deeper listening is developed. This heightened awareness is combined with precise alignment, stretching and relaxation to bring compromised areas back into optimum coordination. Both local and distributed compression or tension can be addressed. If these are the source of early pain signals, a Yoga program can be very effective at relieving the problem.
More chronic pain has deeper impacts on both mental health, and a range of physical functions. Here again, Yoga can be a powerful tool in managing both aspects: bringing a sense of empowerment and well-being, and increasing circulation and the body’s own healing systems to work most efficiently. Not all pain can be completely diminished, but Yoga can offer some unique insights and tools to manage complex and chronic pain.
Moving from “outer structure” to “inner structure”
In moving through a yoga series, we learn first to understand structural alignment, and come into contact with the outer muscles that hold that alignment. As a student progresses, deeper understandings emerge of more complex and subtle energies of our posture, balance and freedom of movement. The depth of this work is one of the keys of Yoga therapeutics: linking an expanding awareness with strength and relaxation.
Healthy Aging
Breathing well – a central feature of learning Yoga – becomes increasingly valuable as we age. Not only is full breathing the body’s most important way of detoxifying, but it can be the central pathway to calming the mind and engaging deeper relaxation. At some point, our joints are subject to compromise, and the Yoga skills of breath work and meditation take on a central role. Strengthening our balance is another vital skill as we grow older. Developing a understanding of yogic techniques becomes to serve us through out our whole life.