Category Archives: personal yoga practice

Omtown Heroes

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

From Yoga Journal

In places without hospitals or high schools, without movie theaters or a McDonald’s, the dedicated gather—often in offbeat venues—to practice. Meet the American yogis who are bringing yoga home.

By Andrea Ferretti

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Cowboy Community

WHO CeCe Prince, Araya, Jamie Axelrod, Deb Phenicie,Marcia Suniga, Andrea Malmberg, Jagoe Reid
OMTOWN Lander, Wyoming
POPULATION 6,551

In the middle of Wyoming at the foot of the Wind River Mountains is a small but diverse town, which, residents say, is getting groovier by the day. Lander was once dependent on ranching and mining, but it is now the international headquarters for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), which means there’s a steady stream of young outdoorsy types and a growing interest in complementary healing, spirituality, and New Age thinking. “It’s probably more integrated than any other western town in Wyoming. You can go into Lander Bar and see a granola climber with long dreadlocks playing pool with a rancher in a hat, and they’re both throwing cowboy jokes around,” says local yoga teacher Araya (who uses no last name).

Jagoe Reid dreamed of upping the grooviness quotient with a yoga studio, but six months after its opening she found the rent too high and the turnout too low. Not to be deterred, Reid joined together with Araya and eventually created a co-op of seven teachers whose styles range from Ashtanga to Anusara to Iyengar Yoga.

For two years, the Limber Body, Limber Mind studio survived because the teachers donated their time and satisfied themselves with the rewards of connecting to their students. Now the studio is almost profitable. “Small towns take longer to warm up to new ideas,” Reid says. “But those who’ve made a commitment to build our sangha [community] are steadfast.”

 

I ♥ the Heartland

WHO Kathy Chinouth
OMTOWN Lena, Illinois
POPULATION 2,622

Lena, Illinois, is the sort of place where you leave the car running when you slip into the post office, and where the grocery store will take an IOU. But there’s not much in the way of entertainment; the old farm town has neither a movie theater nor a rec center. As a result, the gym is a popular hangout—so Kathy Chinouth turned it into a yoga hot spot.

“Most people thought it was all about putting their leg behind their head,” she says, recalling the response when she posted a sign offering yoga (free to gym members, $2 for nonmembers). “I just told them to come to class and see.” Six or seven people did.

Over time Chinouth, who studied with a teacher in a nearby town, has drawn devotees-including local farmers—she never expected. Modestly, she chalks it up to word of mouth; no one wants to be left out, she says. But it’s clear that Chinouth, 56, knows her community well and has made people comfortable with the unfamiliar. She dims the lights to help with self-consciousness; she has first-timers come early to learn the breathing; and perhaps most importantly, she urges students to try three classes before deciding what they think.

Plus, she’s a great role model. One farmer, who admitted he almost laughed out loud during his first class, later noticed that his arm was quivering in Side Plank Pose as Chinouth, nearly 20 years his senior, demonstrated the pose with ease—while talking. He was sold.

Now her hatha class is consistently filled, and her students brim with enthusiasm. Not long ago, in fact, after she confessed she wasn’t altogether happy teaching at the gym, her students called landlords and real estate agents in a quest to find her a better space. “I was hoping there would be interest,” she says, “but never in my dreams did I think there would be this much interest.”

 

Gotta Have Faith

WHO Betty Wooten with Wendy Wilson
OMTOWN Georgetown, Kentucky
POPULATION 19,158

The senior minister of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Georgetown, Kentucky, believes gays should have the right to marry, so he proudly displays a bumper sticker that reads, “Another person of faith voting against the marriage amendment.” That is no surprise to church member Betty Wooten, who says, “We always were a bunch of rebels.” But she was surprised—and scared—when the Reverend Wendy Wilson, an associate minister, asked her to teach yoga classes to members of the congregation. “My first reaction was, there’s no way I can do this,” Wooten says.

She was selling herself short. Although Wooten had discovered yoga just five years earlier, at the age of 56, it had had a dramatic effect on her life. After the death of her husband, she and her daughter, Vickie, went on a spa vacation to ease their grief. While there, the two stumbled into their first yoga class and have been smitten ever since. “Yoga did for us what it’s supposed to do,” she says. “I tell people that it saved my sanity and they think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.”

Vickie pursued a teacher training certificate, but Betty never considered teaching until she was asked to. After ample prodding by her daughter, Betty decided to face her self-doubt. Equipped with her husband’s old neckties for straps and limited wall space (they have to take down a large cross to do inversions), Betty began to teach—and found her calling as a yoga teacher. Now a loyal group meets at the church every Wednesday morning to chant Om, do pranayama, and practice flow yoga. Wooten is pleased with the class size—nine students. “If it gets any bigger, we’ll have to start ripping pews out of the sanctuary,” she quips.

 

Onward Christian Yoginis

WHO Cindy Senarighi, Robin Norsted
OMTOWN White Bear Lake, Minnesota
POPULATION 24,453

Cindy Senarighi remembers feeling wary about going to her first yoga class because the church she’d been attending warned against any practice that stilled the mind, thereby allowing “evil” to enter it. After trying a class, though, she realized that she had experienced a new kind of stillness, and instead of feeling further from God, she felt closer. Her friend Robin Norsted felt the same.

“We decided to explore an alternative format for people who wanted to experience the benefits of yoga but who were concerned that it would clash with their Christian faith,” says Senarighi, who is currently a seminary student. So they started a company called Yogadevotion and began teaching in churches with the goal of building healthy congregations. To that end, they give a portion of their proceeds to the health ministries of each church that offers the classes.

The style is hatha flow, with generous helpings of Christian spirituality added. At the beginning of class, rather than chanting Om, students are encouraged to silently invoke a favorite phrase from a hymn or scripture, or a Christian mantra such as “Yahweh,” the Hebrew name for God. In class, Yogadevotion students might imagine grabbing the hand of God for support during an intense Warrior Pose or resting in God’s presence during Child’s Pose. A typical class ends with “Peace be with you,” rather than “Namaste.”

Now seven years old, Yogadevotion has built a healthy following and employs 10 teachers in 20 churches in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs. Senarighi is delighted but not surprised. “Most people don’t have a problem incorporating their faith into the practice,” she says. “They learn that what’s at your center is what you’ll relate to in the practice. For Christians, that center is Christ.”

 

When Things Fall Apart

WHO Melissa Derbyshire
OMTOWN Port Clyde, Maine
POPULATION About 150

Since Melissa Derbyshire moved to Port Clyde eight years ago, she’s devoted herself to creating a stalwart yoga community in nearby Tenants Harbor. She finds that yoga helps people cope with the frigid weather and keeps them from going stir-crazy as winter’s chill drags into May. It also forges bonds; her students often sail and socialize together.

But she didn’t realize how caring her community could be until March 2003, when her son, 25-year-old Marine Brian Kennedy, became one of the first Americans to lose his life in the Iraq war. Soon after, her students gathered at her home, brought food, and held a small ceremony to honor Kennedy, planting a tree in his memory.

With 31 years of practice under her belt, Derbyshire finds herself leaning more on her yoga. “The practice gives you that inner strength,” she says. “Even when you’re falling apart, you discover you still have strength deep down.” And now more than ever she is conscious of motivating her students and herself to keep finding the value of yoga. “This has shown people what yoga can do, because it really does help in a crisis,” she says. “It gives me a chance to lead by example.”

 

Cold Mats, Warm Hearts

WHO Diane Ziegner
OMTOWN Talkeetna, Alaska
POPULATION 860

Seven years ago, Diane Ziegner, 43, went to a class at the local primary school and found a small group diligently following the instructions of Iyengar Yoga teacher Patricia Walden on a much-used video. “They were so enthusiastic,” she recalls, “but most of them had never had a hands-on adjustment. I thought to myself, These people need a teacher.”

“These people” are residents of the remote village of Talkeetna, where there are killer views of Mount McKinley, but you have to drive 60 miles for major grocery shopping. The physically active community of fishermen, dogsledders, skiers, and climbers supports a local radio station, a community theater, a float plane service to carry people into really remote spots, and now a yoga studio in a yurt.

Ziegner regularly commuted two hours each way for a teacher training program with Iyengar Yoga teacher Lynne Minton. Then in 1999 she began teaching at schools and churches, and by 2003 found a permanent home in the yurt she’s named Studio Z. Her corps of students, ranging from 16 to 60 years old, is close-knit, even though they don’t all get to class regularly. “If it’s 20 below here or the fish are running, people aren’t going to come,” she says. “But I know they love it. They always come back.”

 

Sunshine State Salutations

WHO Mary-Alice Herbert
OMTOWN Sugarloaf Key, Florida
POPULATION Less than 1,000

It’s a dream vacation—morning yoga on a white-sand beach, your gaze drifting toward distant islands floating on the pale turquoise water. When class begins, the sun is shining, but as you lie in Savasana, a breeze picks up and warm droplets of rain dot your body, leaving you calm and refreshed. For Sugarloaf Key locals this trip requires no splurging or travel—they just head to nearby Sugarloaf Lodge beach, where they can join guests of the lodge and Mary-Alice Herbert, a self-described late-life yogini and certified Integral Integrative Yoga therapist, who teaches twice a week.

The rapid and at times extreme weather changes inspire Herbert, 64, to teach on the beach, even though she has her own studio, called Sugarloaf Key Yoga, or SKY. The weather nudges students to remember that just like nature, their yoga practice, emotions, and lives are always in flux. “There are days when it’s hot and sticky and you don’t want to practice. And then a breeze comes and everything changes,” says Herbert, who grew up on the island.

With a handful of regular students in their 80s, a group of teacher trainees, and children who sometimes come to the beach class, Herbert often has to adapt her lessons on the fly. Her solution is simple: “I teach the postures according to my students’ ability. I have an enormous repertoire of modifications.”

Herbert hopes to teach at a prison and is encouraging one of her teacher trainees to teach yoga to hospice caregivers. “At 64, it’s good to feel like I’ve really got my shoulder to the edge of the world,” she says, “and I’m helping to shift it the other way.”

 

Yogis Without Borders

WHO Desiree Kleemann
OMTOWN Point Roberts, Washington
POPULATION 1,308

If you’re heading to the Madrona Yoga studio from anyplace else in Washington state, have your passport handy—you’ll have to cross the border twice to get there. Point Roberts, with a population that swells from 1,300 year round to 3,500 during tourist season, is a five-square-mile peninsula that hangs off the coast of British Columbia. Call it an oversight or a governmental snafu—the land is just south of the 49th parallel, so when borders were drawn in 1846, it became U.S. territory.

The quirks of cross-cultural living include trips to Canada to go to the movies or shop for shoes, and crossing two borders to hit U.S. soil for school or work. In town, everyone accepts both forms of currency, and Desiree Kleemann, 44, teaches her own version of vinyasa flow to a mix of Americans and Canadians. “I have so many students who come from Canada that the Border Patrol is starting to recognize them,” Kleemann says. “They’ll say, ‘Going to yoga? Have a good time’ and wave them through.”

Like the town itself, Kleemann’s studio on her wooded property is a refuge from the stresses of modern living. “When you’re in Savasana in Vancouver, you hear traffic and smell exhaust,” she says. “Here the most irritating thing might be hearing a dog bark. It’s almost like being on retreat.”

Having lived in Vancouver, Kleemann, a former professional dancer whose own influences include Shiva Rea, Sarah Powers, and Judith Hanson Lasater, enjoys bringing in teachers from the city (45 minutes by car) for workshops. But she doesn’t regret her decision to teach small classes in a small town; she cherishes the relationships she’s developed with her students. “Small studios are doing important work,” she says. “We’re just as important as those with 400 people going through every week.”

 

Fungh-ky Yoga

WHO Alison Donley
OMTOWN West Grove, Pennsylvania
POPULATION 2,652

After 12 years as a nomadic yoga teacher—driving to and from rec centers, gyms, and colleges to teach—Alison Donley opened a studio in her southeastern Pennsylvania town of West Grove. At a meeting to obtain her zoning license, Donley found herself fielding questions about plans for a massage room—was it all really just a cover for an X-rated massage parlor?

Then she had to deal with an unappealing local phenomenon: manure. “Basically, it stinks—often,” she says with a laugh. West Grove is the mushroom capital of the United States, and the conditions that create great ‘shrooms can make for some foul-smelling days. “There’s nothing like asking people to breathe deeply when it smells like chicken poop.”

Nixing her children’s suggestion to name her studio Yoga Fungha-mentals, Donley invested in an aromatherapy diffuser, peppermint and lavender oils, and a sense of humor about malodorous moments. Less than a year after opening its doors, the small, mainly Ashtanga studio—called the Light Within, based on a quote from Swami Rama—is thriving. Donley and her colleague, Carol Murray, a student of New York-based Beryl Bender Birch, teach 12 classes per week and plan to offer Mysore classes soon.

Donley, 44, says she has “lived yoga” for about 10 years now and attributes her devoted following to her own love of both the practice and her students. “I might not be the most gifted teacher in the world, but I love these people,” she says. “I want them to see how incredibly amazing they are. And the mat’s a great place to start.”

 

Great Yoga on a Great Lake

WHO Sandra Carden
OMTOWN Leelanau County, Michigan
POPULATION 21,000

In 1973, Sandra Carden and her husband, Field, set off on a three-month road trip from Detroit to do some soul-searching. With the book Be Here Now (by spiritual leader Ram Dass) in hand, the couple cruised the countryside and practiced yoga wherever they could—at campsites, in motel rooms, on top of their VW bus.

Carden, who had run out of medication for her hypothyroidism, decided to focus on poses that would help with the condition. She says that she was “hooked for life” when after the three-month adventure, her doctor said her thyroid was back to normal.

Carden and her husband eventually landed on 10 acres in Leelanau County, on Lake Michigan, and have lived there for the past 26 years. And since 1989, Carden has been teaching at her studio, Union/Yoga. The studio has developed a healthy following of 100 students a week and offers small yoga teacher trainings, based on Carden’s blend of metaphysics and the chakra model.

Her philosophy on keeping things fresh is simple and wise. “My first approach is that we’re all students,” Carden says. “We are all beginners. We must remain open to what is, as we are always changing.”

 

Deep in the Heart of Texas

WHO Patty Williamson
OMTOWN Fredericksburg, Texas
POPULATION 8,911

In a small town in Texas, not surprisingly, it’s hard to make ends meet as a studio owner. That’s why full-time yoga teacher Patty Williamson decided against opening her own studio. The quaint town of Fredericksburg draws more than a million visitors a year, so the rents are comparable to those in Austin—a city almost eight times its size.

Williamson’s decision has proven wise. She’s found incredible success piecing together a schedule of teaching at gyms and other locations. In five years, the self-proclaimed “corporate dropout” has gone from teaching 6 to more than 100 students each week.

It wasn’t easy—early on, Williamson had to face fearful churchgoers and people who stereotyped her as some sort of strange hippie. “It happens when you’re a vegetarian in a cattle state,” she says. But at the same time, she has been amazed by how much the local residents have grown to accept her. Perhaps surprisingly, half of her current students are middle-aged men—including construction workers, doctors, and real estate agents.

Recently, Williamson caught the attention of the owners of Yoga Yoga, a large studio in Austin. Impressed by her accomplishments, they’ve asked her to share her secrets and help them set up pilot yoga programs in other towns and communities. According to Williamson, “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened yet.”

 

Smoke-Free in Dodge City

WHO Nathalee (Nat) Shriver
OMTOWN Dodge City, Kansas
POPULATION 25,176

One hundred and fifty years ago, Nathalee Shriver, a yoga teacher whose motto is “Leave a path of peace as you go through life,” might have been run out of town by a bunch of tough-talking gunslingers. Fortunately, Dodge City has come a long way since its lawless days in the 1800s. True, it’s still better known as the setting for the TV series Gunsmoke than for Nat’s Yoga & Dance Studio, but the local community has backed Shriver’s yoga teaching since she introduced it 10 years ago.

“Some people were afraid it was something mystical, but more believe it can really help put their life in order and give them flexibility, strength, and good health,” she says.

 

From Gridiron to Guru

WHO Kelli Slocum
OMTOWN Iowa City, Iowa
POPULATION 65,000

Iowa City is a college town, home to the University of Iowa. And like many other college towns, it offers the same things as big cities do: culture, good restaurants, and now, lots of yoga studios. Kelli Slocum, a lifelong resident and yoga teacher, has eagerly watched them pop up. Today she’s a regular instructor of both flow and hot yoga at the Studio, a space founded by Tim Dwight, an NFL player with the New England Patriots.

Dwight, Slocum explains, had a favorite yoga studio in La Jolla, California; when he returned to his hometown of Iowa City, he was determined to re-create it there.

“We believe he succeeded,” she says. As a teacher, Slocum encourages her students to challenge themselves but also to listen to their bodies. “The cool thing about yoga is that it’s vigorous and motivating and you can feel great and accomplished, but there is always that next level,” she says. “You can always challenge yourself to take it a little bit further.”

 

Wisdom Does Wonders

WHO Tracey L. Thomas
OMTOWN Greensburg, Pennsylvania
POPULATION Population 15,889

Many folks in this not-so-tiny town 45 minutes southeast of Pittsburgh don’t like to get too far out of their comfort zone. They turned down an offer to be the home of the first maglev (magnetically levitated) high-speed train in the country. “It would have made Greensburg a landmark,” says Tracey Thomas, a longtime resident, “but they panicked, shut down the idea, and built a Wal-Mart instead.”

And some were a bit suspicious when Thomas opened the city’s first yoga studio, suggesting it was part of a religious cult that involved brainwashing. Others have been more supportive of Wisdom and Wonders, Thomas’s yoga studio and child-care center; the number of students has risen from 8 to 68 in just six months. Even the kids at the daycare center do yoga; other specialty classes include senior, prenatal, and family yoga; candlelight meditation; power yoga; and even yoga for golfers.

Thomas believes that her training as an elementary school teacher informs the way she guides her students. “I never focus as much on content as I do on planting that desire to learn,” she says. “Your gift as their teacher is to give them something to carry with them forever—the yearning to learn more.”

 

A Refreshing Hit of Southern Comfort

WHO Rebecca Gatz
OMTOWN Paragould, Arkansas
POPULATION Population 22,000

If you wander into one of Rebecca Gatz’s classes in Paragould, Arkansas, don’t be alarmed if you hear instructions given in the local vernacular: “In Warrior II, don’t point like a coonhound or let your knee or toe go catawampus!”

In the heart of the Bible Belt, Gatz decided to bring yoga to her hometown once she discovered it helped with her asthma attacks. In fact, she went to her first class 12 years ago and hasn’t had an asthma episode since.

Gatz teaches Iyengar-style yoga and loves teaching all ages and types-from the local Senior Bees to a summer kids’ college program to leadership groups.

 

O Pioneers!

Responding to a call for submissions on the Yoga Journalwebsite, more than 150 yoga teachers wrote in and told us that, yes, yoga really is everywhere. You flooded our in box with passionate stories about thriving yoga scenes from Skagway, Alaska, and Fargo, North Dakota, to Frankenmuth, Michigan, and Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia.

You showed us how, teacher by teacher, yoga is making its way into America’s nooks and crannies—into farming villages, resort towns, through subfreezing weather, and onto dazzling beaches—and improving the quality of life for people who never thought they’d be doing the Down Dog. Most of you are pioneers; you’ve overcome immense challenges to offer classes, many of you volunteer your teaching time, week in and week out, and you are almost all women. (A few male yogis wrote in with stories of great enthusiasm and inspiration, too, but most were students, not teachers.) What really rocked our world was to learn that all the teachers we interviewed know each and every student by name-heck, they usually even know whose daughter scored the winning point at the basketball game last week.

Andrea Ferretti, Yoga Journal’s lifestyle editor, is an Omtown yogini who hails from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

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Upward-Facing Soldier

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 1 Comment
By LAUREN K. WALKER from The New York Times

YOU are sitting behind the Humvee where you’ve dragged a wounded soldier. You’ve wrapped the gaping hole in his leg, given him a shot of morphine and radioed up the line for help. Your eye is trained on a distant, hazy point through the scope of an assault rifle. You can see the tiny, magnified bodies of your enemy. Maybe they are waiting for another explosion. A bigger one. Your heart starts pounding harder. The temperature is over 100 degrees. The kid next to you, a kid you always found slightly annoying, with his Massachusetts accent and his unwillingness to walk in the front position of the line, is now holding a bloody pad to his thigh and biting down on a bandanna to keep from screaming. Sweat is pouring down his face. There is no easy way out. You simply have to wait and try not to give away your position. Through your scope you can see their rocket launchers in a pile on the ground.

What you do, without moving your hands from the rifle, is to start breathing, because you realize you have been holding your breath for a long time. So you deepen it. Slow, deeper, deeper. The hiccups of fear start to mellow out. You can feel your belly soften a bit. Then you visualize your breath. In the left nostril, out the right. In the right, out the left. After just a minute, the mad thumping in your chest begins to slow. You hold the fingertips of one hand to your forehead to calm the fight-or-flight response so you can think clearly. The situation has not changed, but you feel yourself change, and you are now able to deal with it.

Back in the safe and cold green mountains of central Vermont, I walk into the yoga room to face a roomful of boys and girls. They are 17, 18, 20 years old, but they seem more like boys and girls than men and women. The stress in my students’ lives is not at combat level. Yet. Right now, most of them have the stress of being in the Corps of Cadets at a military college. That means P.T. at 5:30 in the morning, and constant building, running, gunning, learning, hiking, jumping and being yelled at.

Norwich University, the birthplace of R.O.T.C. and the oldest private military college in the country, trains both military cadets and civilians in discipline, integrity, confidence, loyalty and honor.

From here, many of my military students will deploy to the deserts of Afghanistan. I have a boy leaving next week.

They are young. They are strong. They have incredible stamina. But they don’t have fluency or ease within their bodies. They do push-ups and pull-ups and bench presses and weighted lunges. They run 10 or 20 miles with heavy packs on. But they don’t know how to breathe or to access the core muscles in their abdomens that could help them hump their packs or carry a buddy to safety. I teach them this, and also, how to find that place deep inside that is whole, untouchable, sacred.

Halfway through the semester, I ask my students how they think yoga will help them. Why did they sign up for this class? “It helps us to focus on the good,” one says. “That’s the only way we can get through this place.”

I think of them as if they are in the Bhagavad Gita, the great Indian treatise on war. The soldier Arjuna stops on the battlefield and cries out to Lord Krishna: “Do I have to do this? Do I have to kill?” Krishna, instead of telling him what to do on the battlefield, teaches him yoga. So that is what I do. I teach them yoga.

I am humbled by this prospect, but I come in to the classroom strong. This is a community used to leadership. They stand at attention and call me ma’am. I have to show that I have enough strength to lead them. But I don’t teach them strength. They learn that enough. One girl said to me, “This is the only class where I don’t get yelled at.”

I want them to love and respect themselves. At the end of class, when they lie on their mats in savasana like children at nap time, I nurture and tuck in these bodies. I hold their ankles and swing their legs back and forth to let their hips soften. I roll their shoulder blades under their backs to help open their hearts. I hold their heads in my hands, while they lie there. They don’t get touched here, at military college. They don’t get nurtured. Everything is hard and harsh and angry and fast and sharp. Some of them are so stiff and rigid. They hold their heads at attention even when they’re lying down.

“Let go,” I say. “I’ve got you.” They relax their necks and let their heads sink into my waiting hands. Their hair is buzzed to the scalp or tied back in a tight bun. I hold their heads and pray over them. I pray with all my might that God does the right thing by this boy or this girl. I place their heads down on the blankets and hold my thumb over their third eye, hoping that they keep their intuition strong and will remember that their inner souls are stronger than any enemy outside of them, seen or not seen.

In the beginner’s class, it’s all I can do to keep my students breathing while they move. In the advanced class, I teach these future soldiers the profound philosophy of yoga: how to sit in a stress position and still breathe, smoothly and steadily. How to keep minds open and flexible, to develop non-attachment, compassion, contentment.

We talk about what it would be like to have a buddy blown open next to you. How you would immediately feel yourself flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. How your natural impulse would be to run like hell to get out of there, or to train a machine gun at the horizon and blaze away at everything in your path. How much harder it is to remain calm, to analyze the situation and respond from a place of strength.

It may seem out of whack to hold chaturanga for 10 breaths and think this will be preparation for war. But in fact, this is what yoga is all about. And in fact, if there is anything at all that could truly prepare them to go and fight, it is yoga.

Many people ask me about ahimsa — the grand yogic tenet of nonviolence. I respond with what the revered yoga teacher T. K. V. Desikachar says: It simply means that we must always behave with consideration and attention to others.

So I teach them this, too.

Indeed, Arjuna killed members of his own family. He was following his dharma, and his conscience. He was fulfilling his destiny, playing out the role in the world that he, and only he, was created for.

In the world we have created, there is a huge divide between the ideal and the real. If everyone truly wanted no more war, we would have to change the behavior that leads us into war. But I am not here to teach the world to have no more war. That is for the Dalai Lama. I am here to teach these soldiers, these young men and women who are willing to pay for our system of democracy with their lives, how to uncover the truth of who they are. Who they are — warriors, lawyers, doctors, mothers, fathers, teachers, priests — is each one’s own specific path. I am here to help them find their inner souls, and to help them walk their paths with honesty, integrity and grace. It is what I teach in every yoga class.

But here at this military college, it feels weighted with much more consequence.

Lauren K. Walker runs the yoga program for veterans, cadets and civilians at Norwich University.

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Posted in Health, personal yoga practice, Research, Trauma

Use Yoga to Calm Spring Fever

Posted on April 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

From Feelgood Style

Do you get bouts of restless energy in the springtime? It turns out that spring fever is more than just a turn of phrase, and you can use yoga to harness all of that seasonal energy!

Scientists tell us that when the days lengthen and the temperature rises, changes in our bodies’ melatonin and serotonin cause what’s commonly called “spring fever.” Our energy spikes, winter’s dark mood brightens, and we may crave socializing, shopping, and sex. While frolicking in the sun (or a dark bedroom) is a well-deserved treat after months of hibernation, spring fever can sometimes plow over our core priorities. When the cherry trees blossom, we may find ourselves shirking work, fidelity, exercise, spiritual practices, and savings plans.

What is Spring Fever?

Yogis describe this seasonal lust for life not as a chemical change in the brain, but as a rise in the energy called apana. A counterpart to the often-discussed prana, apana resides in the pelvis and lower abdomen. In addition to regulating some physical outward functions such as urination, apana is responsible for our “urge to merge” with the material world and each other. According to Chris Mastin of PranaShine Yoga, when this energy shoots off the charts in spring, we can use postures and breathing to channel it in a positive way and ground ourselves.

Using Yoga to Calm Spring Fever

Here are Mastin’s recommendations for calming spring fever, on and off the mat:

1) If apana runneth over, you’ll need to burn off the excess before introverted breathing and stretching are doable. Crank some music and dance before you settle into lotus. Many yoga studios offer dance classes and parties, if you want to boogie en masse.

2) Make calming and integrating postures, such as forward folds and gentle twists, the bulk of your practice. Hold each for at least 30 seconds, maybe melting over a bolster or foam block for a fuller release.

3) Move your spine in all directions for balance, but minimize backbends, since these poses are invigorating.

4) To cultivate calm and self-awareness, do dirgha or ujjayi breathing with this twist: make your exhales longer than your inhales (say, count of 6 versus 4).

5) Do a session of nadi shodana breathing: press down your right nostril and breathe only through the left to activate the calming aspect of the nervous system. (Don’t switch sides, because breathing only through the right nostril is energizing.)

6) If you’re still buzzing with excess apana after a calming practice, direct the energy toward something you find uplifting, such as gardening or calling a friend, rather than an activity you’ll regret.

Stretch Like a Sprout

Even though sandal weather has you feeling vivacious, Mastin suggests, “behaving in the way that spring plants do, which is to bud before they blossom.” Unless you maintained a fitness model’s exercise routine all winter, ease into springtime yoga with slow movement and kriyas–moving rhythmically in and out of postures and stretches–before you attempt their full expression. That flow “oils” tense joints with fluids that help prepare them for the challenging activities we crave in warm months.

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Seeking to Clear a Path Between Yoga and Islam

Posted on April 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Phenomenal piece in the Times this morning about Islam and Yoga. Can the two find a way to co-exist?

Seeking to Clear a Path Between Yoga and Islam

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Mimi Borda adjusted some classes at her yoga studio in Jackson Heights, Queens, to address the concerns of Muslim students.

As a community activist in Queens, Muhammad Rashid has fought for the rights of immigrants held in detention, sought the preservation of local movie theaters and held a street fair to promote diversity.

But few of those causes brought him anywhere near as much grief and controversy as his stance on yoga.

Mr. Rashid, a Muslim, said he had long believed that practicing yoga was tantamount to “denouncing my religion.”

“Yoga is not for Muslims,” he said. “It was forbidden.”

But after moving to New York in 1997 from Bahrain, he slowly began to rethink his stance. Now Mr. Rashid, 56, has come full circle: not only has he adopted yoga into his daily routine, but he has also encouraged other Muslims to do so — putting himself squarely against those who consider yoga a sin against Islam.

In New York City, where yoga has become as secular an activity as spinning or step aerobics, the potential sins of yoga are not typically debated by those clad in Lululemon leggings. But in some predominantly Muslim pockets like Jackson Heights, Queens, yoga has been slow to catch on, especially among first-generation immigrants, newly arrived from cultures where yoga is considered Hindu worship.

When Mr. Rashid, who also tutors children, had his students learn yoga to help improve their concentration, three Muslim students quit after a few yoga sessions, he said, in part, he believed, because of their families’ stance toward the practice. “I am putting them in something extra that is not in the Muslim religion,” he said. “The parents did not accept it.”

The religious opposition to yoga also extends to some Christian sects. One widely publicized clash came in 2010, when R. Albert Mohler Jr., an evangelical leader and the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declared the practice of yoga blasphemous because of what he said were its pantheistic roots.

In India, near-annual pushes by members of Parliament to make yoga compulsory in schools have riled Muslim parents who feel it bridges on indoctrination. When a member of Parliament proposed to insert yoga into most curriculums in 2010, wording was included to exempt things like madrasas, or Islamic schools.

Four years ago, a council of Malaysian Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against yoga, declaring it haram, or forbidden by Islamic law. The ruling followed similar edicts in Egypt and Singapore, where one of the earliest bans was issued in the early 1980s.

The fatwas typically cited the Sanskrit chants that often flowed through yoga sessions and which are considered Hindu prayer by some Muslims. According to “Yoga in the Hindu Scriptures” by H. Kumar Kaul, yogic principles were first described in the Vedas, the Sanskrit scriptures that form the backbone of Hinduism, and are considered to be over 10,000 years old.

Even the word “namaste,” which is often used to open and close a yoga session, invokes the divine.

Given that cultural history, it was understandable that when Mohd A. Qayyoom, an imam who runs the Muhammadi Community Center of Jackson Heights, joined a yoga demonstration at an interfaith festival in Jackson Heights last summer, it did not go unnoticed.

His participation drew instant reproach from the community, he said. “As soon as we finished our event, they said, ‘Imam, what is that, why are you doing that?’ ” he said. “ ‘This is not within our Islam.’ ”

But Imam Qayyoom said he had come to believe that Islam and yoga could be compatible — if the Sanskrit benedictions are left out, he said, and women’s skin-tight yoga gear is traded for more conservative garments. “Reformed, it will be more popular” among Muslims, he said. “It will not contradict with Islamic religion.” Others are less convinced.

Anwar Hassan, 27, who is from Bangladesh and works in the Queen of Sheba grocery in Jackson Heights, said yoga’s roots were irreconcilable with his faith.

“When I came here, I see there is yoga and everything, but we don’t go,” Mr. Hassan said. “A lot of people, they are new to it so they think it’s a gym class, or something. But Hindu people started it, and I think it’s Hindu religion, so I don’t go.”

When Alex Eingorn prescribed yoga recently to a Bangladeshi woman who came to him with spinal pain at his Better Health Chiropractic clinic in Midtown Manhattan, “she looked at me in horror,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m a Muslim, I can’t practice a different religion.’ ” Mr. Eingorn persuaded her to try it, he said, by saying that in New York, it is considered a secular practice.

Mimi Borda, 46, who runs MiMi for Me Yoga, a serene studio in Jackson Heights that is one of the neighborhood’s only yoga centers, has had to make similar allowances. “If there is a little chanting going on, right away this is a turn- off” for some of the Muslims who sign up for her sessions, she said. “Often they won’t come back.”

In response, Ms. Borda has tailored certain classes, cutting out Sanskrit chants if she thinks it will upset certain students. “Emphasizing the physical, they’re kind of cool with it,” she says. “They feel safe.”

For Ms. Borda, who has taught yoga to a variety of audiences, including Hasidic women in Brooklyn, it came as a shock, when shortly after opening a previous studio in the area eight years ago she was approached by a Muslim student who voiced concerns with customary chants like “ohm.” She found herself fielding questions like “ ‘Is ‘ohm’ God? Is ‘ohm’ Allah?’ ” she said.

Ms. Borda adapted her classes for her new clientele, either omitting chanting, or adding both “shalom” and “amen” to the sign-off of namaste.

“A lot of us in the Western world, we look at it as anything that is going to enhance the way we look aesthetically,” she said. Some Muslim students, she added, were “not looking at the physical aspect, they’re looking at the spiritual aspect.”

For many immersed in a culture where vinyasa yoga is more readily associated with a New York Sports Club than a Hindu temple, the origin matters little. And for some of the devout living here, the American conception has overridden the beliefs with which they were raised.

When Mr. Rashid finally took up yoga, he said there were more similarities with his faith than contradictions. In salat, the five-times daily Muslim prayers, which entail a meditationlike centering of focus and several kneeling bows, he felt there were echoes of yogic poses.

“I discovered whatever I’m doing in yoga, I’m doing five times a day in prayer,” said Mr. Rashid, who is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

During the daylong yoga class at the festival that Mr. Rashid helped organize in Jackson Heights last summer, classes were halted for salat. Imam Qayyoom and others performed those prayers on their yoga mats.

It dawned on him then, the imam said, that many Muslims, in a sense, practice yogic postures several times a day. “Maybe they’re getting that same benefit in their prayers,” he said. “Maybe they don’t need to do yoga.”

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Posted in personal yoga practice, yoga philosophy

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

By William Hudson, CNN
updated 12:06 PM EST, Sat February 25, 2012

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease is covered by Medicare
  • Patients do yoga, eat a plant-based, meatless diet and meditate regularly
  • Kathy and Frank Korona have lost 85 pounds on the program

(CNN) — Frank Korona lives near the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border with his wife Kathy, in a house that he built with his own hands, on the same property where he grew up.

He served in the Army Special Forces in Vietnam. The Koronas have a long, proud tradition of military service, but their family’s greatest losses have been to heart disease.

“Our family has shrunk tremendously. We’ve lost so many people through death,” Kathy says.

In 1992, Frank’s brother Bob died in his arms, suffering a heart attack on their kitchen floor. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins have all died from complications from heart disease, too. The Koronas point them out in a graveyard near their home.

Frank and Kathy have both had heart attacks, and both have stents holding their blood vessels open. The birth of their grandson Caleb led them to try harder to extend their lives. So last year, the couple joined the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

Medicare, the government health insurance program for Americans 65 and older, covers the Ornish program, which teaches a plant-based, meatless diet, meditation and regular exercise. The program was officially declared an intensive cardiac rehab program in 2010, and the first patients started in May 2011.

Ornish is a persistent advocate within the halls of government. There are mountains of scientific evidence that his recommended lifestyle changes do reverse heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States and worldwide.

Helping patients make these lifestyle changes costs Medicare about $70 per hour, and patients can receive up to 72 one-hour sessions. Proponents of preventative medicine point out that that cost is still much less than operations and medications.

Ornish believes that fear cannot motivate lifestyle change in people long-term. Change has to be about feeling better and having more zest for life. The greater the change, the better the feeling, he says.

Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.
Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.

That seems to ring true for the Koronas. Despite the grim history of heart disease, they say it’s how good they feel that keeps them living the lifestyle that their neighbors sometimes find strange.

“If I was going to be able to participate as a grandparent in his life, that gave me another incentive, that really did,” Kathy explains. “But in order to do that, I needed to feel good about myself first.”

The Koronas’ favorite yoga positions are “cobra” and “fish,” and their favorite pizza is meatless meat-lovers, made with soy pepperoni and soy “ground beef.”

“Usually at the end of the session, the instructor will say, ‘Now the reward, get into the total relaxation pose,’ and we do that, and it just feels so good,” Kathy says.

Together the Koronas have lost 85 pounds on the program, and Frank is off of four medications.

Hospitals can now bill Medicare for their patient’s yoga and group discussion sessions because the Ornish program is an approved intensive cardiac rehab program, a new class of cardiac rehab created by Congress in 2009.

Traditional cardiac rehab, developed in the 1950s and covered by Medicare since 1982, focuses almost exclusively on exercise — getting patients out of bed and the blood flowing again.

But in the 1970s, Ornish and others began leading experiments to test whether improving diet and stress levels could make a difference for those with heart disease. In the following decades the researchers published volumes of studies in peer-reviewed journals that became the basis of the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

There are four components to the program: nutrition, stress management, moderate exercise and group support.

Part of the underlying cause for widespread heart disease, explains Ornish, is chronic loneliness and isolation, which lead to stress and bad habits. When people feel emotionally close to others, they’re physiologically healthier, too, so Medicare is paying for it.

In 1997, Highmark Health Insurance Co. became the first insurer to cover the Ornish program, but even today,only three insurance companies will pay for the program. All three are in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

That’s expected to change.

“The reason that I spent 16 years working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to achieve Medicare coverage for our program is that I knew that most insurance companies follow Medicare’s lead. In other words, if Medicare covered our program, most other insurance companies would, as well,” explains Ornish, who also says he was once naive in thinking that solid science alone would be enough to change health care policy.

“Reimbursement as well as science are primary determinants of medical practice. If it’s not reimbursable, it’s not sustainable.”

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Posted in Health, Nutrition, personal yoga practice, Research

Om, Giga OM at SXSW: Morning Yoga Sessions Return

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Compass Yoga is thrilled to be participating at SXSW Interactive for the second year! Check out this press release from the SXSW crew:

yoga_conference_room.jpgNeed to find a path to higher ground at the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival? Then unplug your laptop, turn off your smart phone, relax and let it all go. Attendees to this year’s event will again have the chance to start their days mindfully as morning yoga returns to SXSW. Yoga was developed thousands of years ago as a way to prepare the body and mind to be more receptive to enlightenment. What better way to prepare for all the new people and ideas you will encounter every day at SXSW Interactive? These morning yoga sessions occur from 9:30-10:30 am on March 10, March 11, March 12 and March 13 in Room 8a at the Austin Convention Center. And, if you aren’t an early riser, there is also an afternoon session on Friday, March 9 from 2:00-3:00 pm in Room 8a). These SXSW yoga sessions won’t be overly strenuous, so feel free to wear everyday street clothes if you plan to attend.

Contributed by Hugh Forrest, photo courtesy Creative Commons

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4 Ways to Practice Safe Yoga

Posted on January 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

From ABC News:

gty woman exercise jef 111227 wblog 4 Ways to Practice Safe Yoga

Many of yoga’s practitioners tout its benefits for strength, flexibility and general health.

But the practice can also cause a range of injuries among beginners and experienced yogis alike, according to a report in the New York Times .

William Broad, author of the Times story and an upcoming book, “The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards,” describes gruesome injuries that have happened as a result of the practice – popped ribs, ruptured spinal discs, torn Achilles tendons, even partial paralysis and strokes.

Yoga and sports injury experts say yoga is right for some people, wrong for others and, like any physical activity, carries an inherent risk of injury. But if people approach the practice in the right way, they can do a lot to minimize their risk of injury.

”Yoga is a powerful tool and if you misuse it, you’re going to end up in the emergency room,” said Leslie Kaminoff, a New York-based yoga educator and author of the book, “Yoga Anatomy.”

Here are some ways to keep your yoga practice safe:

No. 1 – Know Your Limits

Experts say the chief culprit in yoga injuries is often overzealousness. Most people don’t think of yoga as a competitive sport but, at times, the need to out-perform others in class can seem irresistible.

“Sometimes, we find ourselves being very competitive with fellow students, especially in physically based classes,” said Judi Bar, a yoga therapist at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. “Then, we end up getting ourselves in trouble and hurting ourselves by not realizing our limitations.”

Another path to potential pain comes from taking on classes meant for more experienced yogis. Certain types of practices, such as high-heat bikram yoga, can encourage stretching that’s too aggressive. Beginners should steer clear of classes that are too advanced or strenuous.

Karen Sherman, who studies yoga and other complementary medicine techniques at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, said it’s important to listen to your body and respect its limits.

“One of the basic tenets of yoga is non-injury and self-honesty,” Sherman said. “When you practice with the idea that non-violence to your body is part of the practice, you’re more likely to avoid those injuries.”

No. 2 – Poses Can Aggravate Injuries

Certain poses, too, can be too much for the casual yoga-phile and create problems if done incorrectly or by people with little experience.

Bar said certain seated, stretching poses can aggravate sciatica or injure spinal discs. Headstands can be risky for the nerves, blood vessels and joints in the neck and spine, not to mention the risk of injury from toppling out of the pose. Even certain breathing practices can exacerbate asthma.

For people who are already injured, yoga can be either a useful therapy or can lead to further injury if students overdo it.

“Lots of patients go to yoga because they have herniations of the neck and back, and they go to yoga and those injuries improve. But at the same, time, I see patients who get these injuries from yoga,” said Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein, director of the spine service at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

Any sore joints, such as the hips, knees, wrists, shoulders, neck and back, can become more painful if tweaked or twisted in even the simplest of poses. For example, downward dog could put too much stress on an injured shoulder; forward- or back-bending might be too much for a strained back. Also, patients with other health concerns, such as high blood pressure, should steer clear of certain poses or yoga practices.

No. 3 - Let Teachers Help

Injuries don’t necessarily put yoga off-limits. Students should let their instructors know if they are injured or have a medical condition so instructors can tailor a yoga routine to their specific physical needs.

Kaminoff said experienced teachers will get to know their students and ask to hear about any physical problems. Then, it’s up to the student to be honest with the teacher.

“The teacher-student relationship is important,” Kaminoff said. “If the student’s not willing to confront a teacher with a difficulty they’re having, the teacher won’t be able to help them avoid further injury.”

No. 4 – Choose the Right Teacher

More people than ever before are toting yoga mats and regularly practicing their asanas. The number of Americans who do yoga has grown from nearly 4 million in 2001 to 20 million in 2011, according to the New York Times.

As interest in yoga has exploded in the last decade, the number of yoga studios and instructors has grown along with it. But not all teachers have the same level of qualifications and experience to safely teach yoga.

To help choose the right teachers, experts offer this advice:

  • Observe a teacher’s class before you participate to see if it’s right for you.
  • Be sure a teacher is qualified; the Yoga Alliance certifies instructors as registered yoga teachers at basic, intermediate and advanced levels.
  • Avoid teachers that aggressively adjust your poses – they may push your body over its limits.

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Posted in personal yoga practice

Taking Yoga May Make You More Employable

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Karnataka, India is the home of a women’s-only engineering college, GSSS Institute of Engineering and Technology for Women. In order to prepare students to face this very competitive industry it is encouraging them to take up yoga. The institute believes soft skills like these will help these women be more employable. Being able to deal with stress calmly is certainly a very employable trait.

in 2007, the college constructed a meditation hall, it was conceptualized as an add-on facility to help the students ease out academic stress. The facility is now being used to accustom the girls to handle stressful situations, thus increasing their employability. “Today’s students are tomorrow’s engineers. If students accommodate meditation in their routine, they can handle stress better. Even I do meditation here whenever I feel like,” said P Prakash, principal.

Twenty minutes per day of guided workplace meditation and yoga combined with six weekly group sessions can lower feelings of stress by more than 10% and improve sleep quality in sedentary office employees, a pilot study suggests. “It doesn’t matter what the stress is, but how you change the way you perceive the stress,” said Maryanna Klatt, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of clinical allied medicine at Ohio State.. “I like to describe mindfulness as changing the way you see what’s already there. It’s a tool that teaches people to become aware of their options. If they can’t change the external events in their life, they can instead change the way they view the stress, which can make a difference in how they experience their day-to-day life.”

This institute isn’t the first one to realize yoga can help both relieve stress and increase productivity. There are actually two whole yoga movements, Corporate Yoga and Workplace Yoga, which particularly focuses on helping people reduce work stress. Catherine Halcomb has been working with corporations and small businesses since 1989. Before she became interested in yoga Catherine was helping to bring unity and teamwork to the workplace. Having seen the benefits yoga has had on her students, Catherine began teaching Yoga in the workplace. She has a mobile yoga center that includes yoga mats, belts, blocks and blankets. All of the equipment needed to conduct a yoga class in a board room, office or recreation area. Some of the companies she has worked with include AT&T, DuPont, PG&E, IBM, Bank of America, MSN, Minnesota Vikings and numerous small businesses.

Some companies do offer yoga in the workplace but it seems that it hasn’t become as big a part of corporate culture as one would hope. More companies should consider this though as studies show that companies who offer yoga and wellness programs to their employees reduce their annual health insurance premiums, and therefore improve their bottom line. According to a recent study on worksite health programs, corporations realized $3 – $6 in savings for every $1 invested in wellness programs. The same study showed more than a 25% average reduction in health-care costs for well-designed programs  according to the American Journal of Health Promotion. A report from the United States Department of Health and Human Services revealed that worksites with physical activity programs, such as yoga, have reduced healthcare costs by 20 to 55%, reduced short-term sick leave by 6 to 32% and increased productivity by 2 to 52%. Throw in a Lulu Lemon discount and I’ll sign up tomorrow.

Photo:  Diego Cervo/Shutterstock.com

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Homeless men take to yoga

Posted on January 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

From The Gazette (Montreal) Skeptical at first, residents of Nazareth House now wait eagerly for instructor Anne Marie Delaney.

When yoga instructor Anne Marie Delaney entered the basement of an old greystone in Shaughnessy Village a few weeks ago, her eager students were waiting patiently beside their mats.

But the small group of students are not your traditional yoga disciples. They are mostly elderly men who live at Nazareth House, a shelter and residence for men who have struggled with homelessness, addictions or mental illness.

Most Wednesdays, Delaney takes time out of her busy schedule to take the men through a 30-minute yoga class that she hopes will empower them physically and emotionally. With soothing music playing in the background, she uses breathing techniques, stretching and relaxation exercises to help them strengthen their mind, body and spirit.

“It (yoga) can be life changing if you can take it off your mat and into your life with you,” said Delaney, who teaches the class on a volunteer basis to men aged 52 to 77.

“It is an honour to guide them through a yoga class. They just drink it up. You see it when they are sitting there meditating.” Delaney said she doesn’t expect the yoga class to radically change their lives, but she hopes it gives them tools to help manage their stress and “find their inner strength.”

John, who has been at Nazareth House for about a year, said he didn’t realize how much of a workout yoga is. “It stretches out my muscles and relaxes you.” he said. “I thought yoga was just for women, but it is good for men too.”

Robert Cuttle had attended yoga classes at his church before he fell on hard times and said it has been great to get back at it.

“I feel very relaxed after the class and my body is very content.” He also said he and the other men are grateful that Delaney makes time for them each week. “She is a special person,” he said.

Doris Mercier, the house manager at Nazareth House, said she knew she would have to pull a few tricks out of her hat to persuade the men to participate in a yoga class.

“I told them we were starting a yoga class; that a lady was coming who was a volunteer and that we gotta be there,” Mercier recalled.

Some of the men balked at the idea, saying yoga was for “women or something religious.”

Mercier ignored their protests and gently ushered the men into a room in the basement where the class was being held. For the first few classes, Mercier participated until the men felt comfortable taking the class without her.

“They were nervous at first; it is hard to get them to change or do something new,” she said.

Within a few months, some of the men began turning up for the class on their own. During a class just before Christmas, Mercier watched on proudly as Delaney took the men through a series of breathing exercises and stretches. “They really like her and they trust her,” Mercier said. Sheila Woodhouse, the director of Nazareth House, took up yoga last January and became a huge advocate. After noticing that yoga increased her flexibility, improved her sleep and helped reduce stress, she wondered whether it would help the men of Nazareth House.

After doing some research on the Internet, Woodhouse discovered that organizations around North America have been offering yoga to homeless populations and other people with mental illness for several years. “It helps them with their focus, concentration, breathing and relaxing,” she said.

Woodhouse said she hoped the yoga class would give the men “a little more identification with their bodies.”

“It is working out well,” she said of the small class. “The fact that they are there every week speaks volumes. That they would sit together in a quiet room with music and learn to control their breathing. It is a major step.”

Woodhouse has been was so impressed with Delaney’s rapport with the men that she has hired her to give the men a chair message following the yoga class.

“Men like this, who have lived on the street and don’t have family, haven’t been touched for years,” she said.

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Posted in Compassion, homeless, Nonprofit, personal yoga practice

Yoga helps breast cancer survivors curb fatigue

Posted on January 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

(Reuters Health) – About one third of breast cancer survivors experience fatigue that can affect their quality of life, but a small new study finds that doing yoga might help restore some lost vitality.

After three months of twice-weekly yoga classes, a group of breast cancer survivors in California reported significantly diminished fatigue and increased “vigor.” A control group of women who took classes in post-cancer health issues, but didn’t do yoga, had no changes in their fatigue or depression levels.

Dr. Maira Campos, a research scholar at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, said the findings echo similar results from past studies that looked at yoga and cancer patients.

Persistent fatigue lasting years after cancer treatment is a common problem whose origin is unknown, and for which there are no validated treatments.

Some studies have shown that stress-reduction techniques or exercise classes can help reduce fatigue among cancer patients and survivors in general. But none of them has specifically targeted cancer survivors experiencing fatigue to see if a potential therapy reverses the problem, according to Julienne Bower, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues.

They recruited 31 breast cancer survivors to undergo “treatment” for their fatigue over 12 weeks at the UCLA Medical Center. Each woman was randomly assigned to participate in either two 90-minute yoga classes every week or a two-hour health class once a week.

At the start of the study, each group of women had similar scores on a questionnaire that gauges fatigue levels.

The group taking the educational classes experienced about the same amount of fatigue and energy throughout the initial study period. However, the group taking the yoga class reported about a 26 percent drop in fatigue and a 55 percent increase in energy after the 12-week yoga regimen.

The women in the yoga group also continued to report significant improvements in fatigue levels three months after the classes stopped.

The findings, published in the journal Cancer, do not prove that yoga caused the improvements in fatigue levels. The researchers note, however, that both groups of women had similar expectations that their assigned “treatment” would help them, so a placebo effect is not a likely explanation for the benefits seen in the yoga group.

Jacquelyn Banasik, an associate professor in the College of Nursing at Washington State University, also noted improvements in cancer fatigue after yoga classes in a study she published in the Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners in 2010.

“I can’t say that yoga is the only way to achieve the results seen in ours and other studies,” Banasik told Reuters Health in an email. “A beginning ballet class — with (its) emphasis on form and positioning — might have similar effects. Gaining a sense of control over one’s physical body, when one has a disease like breast cancer, might be an important part of the benefit.”

Both of the studies by Bower and Banasik used Inyengar yoga, which, according to Banasik, emphasizes taking poses slowly and paying close attention to maintaining correct form.

Campos told Reuters Health that acupuncture, exercise and physical therapy are sometimes used to treat cancer survivors suffering from fatigue, without a prescription if their symptoms are mild.

She added that she would not prescribe yoga based just on the new study, however.

She said it would be better to compare yoga to another exercise instead of a health- class setting.

Campos also emphasized that it’s important for patients to talk to their doctors about fatigue during and after cancer treatments.

“The patient should not be suffering or impaired just because they had cancer,” Campos said.

SOURCE: bit.ly/sSZeZZ Cancer, online December 16, 2011.

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Posted in cancer, Health, personal yoga practice, Research