Understanding Healing Yoga; Spirituality and Sensory Awareness.
The way I help people experience spirituality in different modalities is through breath movement and imagination exercises also known as meditation or relaxation. I also offer these exercises in an effort to provide a sensory experience.
Healing Yoga Technique Spotlight: Yoga Nidra for Early Summer Yoga
As we enter the Early Summer season, you may notice more and more emphasis on the latter, restorative part of classes. You may experience a slightly longer Savasanah, additional supported or yin shapes toward the end of practice, or funny breaths like radiator, straw and left nostril breathing [sitkari, sitali and chandra bedhana respectively]. The intention behind this shifting emphasis is to support rest after exertion or movement and to nurture your connection to a spacious sense of the world inside and out.
Yoga With Chronic Pain
"Yoga has been shown to decrease disability among people with pain, but it is not known how... yoga is a promising means to improving resilience and clinical outcomes for people with chronic pain." In Resilient to pain: A model of how yoga may decrease interference among people experiencing chronic pain,” the authors refer to many embodied correlates of stress: the HPAAxis (hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis), stress hormones, etc.
Luckily, we don't need to know how yoga works to start practicing and receiving benefits, even when we have pain. According to the National Institute of Health's information page, "Chronic pain persists. Pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, even years."
What make a Badlands Healing Yoga Practice different?
“Your guide comes with a plan and your guide will alter the plan depending on what you choose to share. Classes are very intentionally small, so we can offer at least one technique - posture, breath, flow, image, meditation - chosen for each person. It may be something the guide had already planned for that they surmise would be just the ticket or they might replace part of their plan to illuminate something helpful for you. Modifications will be offered and alternatives suggested along with the reminder that everything is optional and questions are encouraged. “
What is Healing Yoga
“The mechanisms that allow yoga to remove these obstacles to healing, transforming us and our very desires slowly, over time, are what make yoga different than a “work out.” Together they have enormous transformative capacity.”
Practicing with Pain: why avoidance may hurt more
“[D]efinitely listen to your body and its signals. If you have pain in a movement or in a posture, breathe, withdraw from the edge where the pain arose and rest for a moment.
And then, re-approach. Slowly, mindfully. Notice where you get the first hint of a suggestion of the painful feeling and stay there — don’t go further. Breathe and notice. 9 times out of 10, you’ll feel the suggestion of pain fade away. If this happens, go a little more towards where you felt it before in the same manner: slowly, mindfully noticing the first hint of a suggestion of pain, and stay. Breathe and notice. You may feel that fade away. Rinse and repeat, stopping to rest, of course, as needed.
Often a repetition of just three times inside your pain free range of motion will allow you to go back to the once painful movement with no pain.
There are many reasons for this phenomenon…”
