Over the next few months, we will be adding more things to our website for you to enjoy, including more articles, videos and other information.

Our first new feature is an interview with Michael Wohl, the President of bodywisdom media. In this interview he offers some insights into yoga and health in general.

CLICK TO READ INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WOHL

What are some of the psychological benefits of yoga - tell me about stress reduction and how yoga can be a great stress reducer?

Yoga can be approached on a number of levels that approach the issue of stress reduction on different ways.

1) Asanas - when people think of yoga in the U.S. they are often meaning one sliver of yoga, the postures. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, the postures affect the body on a multitude of levels: Muscularly, neurologically (including the autonomic nervous system - ie heart rate, breathing rates, etc), the endocrine system and all physiological systems. So when stress affects these systems physically, the asanas act as a counterbalance to undo this stress through a variety of mechanisms.

2) Pranayama - breath awareness/control. When people are stressed, there is a profound affect on most systems of the body. One of the most interesting is the pulmonary. What makes the pulmonary system especially interesting and unique to yogis is that it is part of the autonomic nervous system (ie. involuntary) that we can have complete voluntary control. When one does yoga, one become intimately aware of all the nuances of the breath. Just as Eskimos have so many words for snow, yoga practitioners learn to recognize the myriad of breathing patterns we have and what the underlying mental state that is causing a particular state. Stress, for instance, might involuntarily cause shallow breathing in the upper, front chest. Countering this by voluntarily breathing more into the belly and back will counter the stress induced shallow breathing and thereby reduce stress (eliciting the relaxation response and strengthening the parasympathetic nervous system).

3) Meditation - The fundamental goal in yoga is to still the fluctuations of mind. The postures and breathing techniques prepare the body for meditation, where we sit, release our physical tension, relax the breath and begin to still our thoughts. Just like snow in toy snow globes settle to the ground when it is still, our endless thoughts (with all of its stresses, tasks, doings, plans and worries of the future) settle down when we sit to meditate. During our harried lives we misidentify these thoughts as some fundamental way as part of our selves rather just something ephemeral and illusionary. When these thoughts settle out, our truer nature begins to emerge, a clarity of consciousness. When this happens, we naturally loose our stress because we loose this misidentification. We see that so much of the stress in our lives we either make up in our thoughts or exaggerate in a way that causes tremendous, unnecessary, unhealthy stress in our lives.

In summary, there are so many different ways of even noticing we are stressed. We might feel tension in our shoulders, irritability in our mind or a tightness of breath. Yoga allows us to identify and gives us the tools to counter these stresses on our mind/body. The question of psychological benefits as distinct from physical benefits is somewhat anachronistic (ie Cartesian mind set of the ghost in the machine, akin to the Newtonian vs Quantum world view). Modern cognitive science research recognizes that the delineation between psychological and physical stresses is an incomplete way of approaching the human being. Rather, viewing the totality of the human being as a single system where consciousness arises out of the underlying physical conditions making up the body is a much more comprehensive and accurate view of humans.

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