Yoga News

Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr., in addition to starring in movies like Tropic Thunder, Iron Man, and Sherlock Holmes, has recently been busy with another new hobby - yoga!

Robert Downey Jr., who hasn't always been on the spiritual path and has suffered from drugs and addiction, has recently discovered the balancing effects that yoga has on his mind and body, and he can't stop talking about it.

Downey Jr. credits his miraculous comeback to his yoga teacher, Vinnie Marino, who also overcame a battle with addiction to become one of LA's most prestigious yoga teachers.

Comeback kid Downey Jr. appeared on the cover of the January/February 2012 issue of Men's Fitness to talk about his yoga practice and was quoted in TIME magazine:

He’s fit, mellow and reflective after a morning of power-flow yoga with his teacher Vinnie Marino, part of what could be called Team New Downey, a large coterie that includes yogis, massage therapists, martial-arts instructors and people who know about herbs.

“I need a lot of support,” Downey says, “like Lance Armstrong. Life is really hard, and I don’t see some active benevolent force out there. I see it as basically a really cool survival game. You get on the right side of the tracks, and you now are actually working with what some people would call magic. It’s not. It’s just you’re not in the f___ing dark anymore, so you know how to get along a little better, you know?”

Iron man RDJ is not the first celebrity to find relief from an addiction through yoga practice. Stars like Mariel Hemingway and Marianne Faithful were among the first to speak out about using yoga to overcome addictions.

See also TV anchor Anita Lopez story of how yoga helped her battle depression and a pain killer addiction.

What drives the transformative powers of yoga? Check out this interview with Anusara yoga founder John Friend in which he muses about The Radical Quantum Shift of Yoga.

By Emma Needleman - 

When Yoga For Vets founder and ex-Marine Corps captain Anu Bhagwati left the military in 2004, she didn’t know where to turn.  Suffering from multiple injuries, as well as depression and PTSD, she began a yoga teacher training course to try to regain the mental and emotional balance and physical well-being she had lost.

But Bhagwati discovered that yoga presented a challenge she didn’t know if she could meet: unlearning the rigid military way of life, which was preventing her from “healing.”

“Being forced to let go of the Marine way of doing things was a humbling experience,” she wrote in an article for the Huffington Post, “and one that I fought every step of the way. Before yoga, sitting still or enjoying a quiet moment was my idea of torture. Physical movement was my way of processing stress. As a Marine, if I saw a mountain, I had to run to the top. Objects were meant to be lifted, and open space was meant to be conquered, and fast.”

Slowly, Bhagwati overcame her physical and emotional limitations.  She credits her regular yoga practice with helping to treat her depression and PTSD without drugs.

After becoming certified as a yoga instructor, she decided she wanted to reconnect with the military community and give something back to them.  So, in 2008, Bhagwati started Yoga For Vets NYC, a free yoga program for veterans in the New York area.  Each class is small and tailored for participants recovering from injuries or trauma.  Even seriously disabled veterans can participate.

Bhagwati says she downplays competition and physically demanding yoga poses, focusing more on yoga for emotional well-being: helping vets to relax, breathe deeply and break out of the military mindset.

“I think that anyone who has been through the military is an expert at sucking up pain and functioning well under extreme stress,” Bagwhati said. “We try to make the class a place where you don’t have to fight anymore. I think it’s more challenging for most of us to calm down and let things go.”

Most of Yoga for Vets’ students are veterans of the Iraq and Afganistan wars, but there are Vietnam vets who participate and even a regular who served in WWII.  Spouses and family members are also eligible to participate in the free classes.

Morgan Cooley, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a regular participant in Yoga for Vets classes, says, "Yoga for Vets changed my life. I found the class just after returning home from Afghanistan. It showed me that medication wasn't the only form of therapy out there. Since I started yoga, my anxiety and stress levels went down and I felt a sense of peace I had never known."

Yoga for Vets NYC is online at yogaforvetsnyc 

By Emma Needleman -

For many people with chronic illness, pain, discomfort and limited mobility is a part of their daily life. For such people, yoga therapy can help not just to relieve pain issues, but even set them back on the path to healing, according to Nancy Sutton, founder of House of Yoga in Redding, California.

Marrying her background as a registered nurse and a yoga teacher, Sutton has integrated a specialized, therapeutic yoga for people with chronic pain into her practice. Many of her clients are referred to her by their physicians; they suffer from diverse ailments like depression, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s and injuries.  Her approach to them is tailored to work around their limitations and get them into a state of mind where they can more successfully heal.

“With the body reconnected to the mind and brain, then it's a conscious road back to healing,” Sutton recently told the Redding Record. “So much of what we do is to give a person permission to learn to deeply relax, and once a person relaxes, they can heal. So many people are in that constant state of fight or flight, where they're always in stress mode, especially when they've been diagnosed with a serious condition. If you're always in a stress mode, you can’t be in a healing mode. Teaching a person to profoundly relax is when the body begins to heal itself.”

For many people, yoga is a very athletic practice.  But it also has a healing, spiritual component, which is what Sutton emphasizes in her work with the chronically ill.  Some of her classes don’t even require participants to leave their chairs.

“It's about living our lives to the fullest capacity,” says Sutton. “It doesn't matter what layer of suffering people are experiencing. When they begin to see the gift of their lives, their suffering diminishes. Yoga therapy opens them up to that.”

You exercise and eat right to keep your body looking and feeling young. But did you know that your brain needs just as much attention in order to stay supple, too, and that yoga asanas and meditation might be some of the best ways to keep the brain young?

As we get older, our brains don’t get as much oxygen or glucose, which means certain brain cells can actually starve to death. That’s the cause of short-term memory loss and decreased mental acuity that many older people experience.

Yet new discoveries in the field of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to reorganize itself and form new neural connections all through life, show your brain is malleable, and it can change. The brain is like a muscle—it needs regular workouts to keep in shape. People who are concerned with developing or strengthening parts of their brain often do puzzles or other brain-bending activities, and, indeed, studies show that people who continue to learn throughout their lives age better overall. 

But that’s not the only way to improve your brain. New neurons are created each time you exercise, including yoga stretches, and exercise stimulates your sensory and motor cortices. Yoga breathing, or pranayama, draws more oxygen into your body, enriching your brain cells, leading to greater memory and concentration.

Exciting research also demonstrates that yoga and meditation actually change the structure of your brain, stimulating mental activity and increasing memory and concentration.

A 2005 study by Harvard, MIT, and Massachusetts General Hospital compared brain MRIs of regularly practicing meditators and non-meditators. In the meditating group, the right insula was consistently thicker than in the non-meditating group, and the thickness of the Brodmann 9 and 10 areas of the brain, located in the frontal cortex, did not decrease with age in meditators.

What does this mean? First of all, the right insula is involved in brain functions like body awareness, as well as laughter, tears, empathy, compassion, language, heart rate, speech and social emotions. And the Brodman 9 and 10 areas regulate emotion and cognition. These findings suggest that meditation may both strengthen your brain and keep it from degenerating.

Similar research and brain scans on the Dalai Llama and other monks in a study conducted in 2005 at the University of Wisconsin show greater activation of powerful gamma waves in meditators—both while meditating, and while not. Gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses, are linked to higher mental activity and heightened awareness.

Evidence that yoga and meditation help patients with memory loss was also documented in a 2007 study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Subjects were a group of adults ages 52-70 who either had a history of memory complaints or a mild cognitive impairment. None practiced meditation before. Brain scans measured blood flow before their meditation instruction and then after an eight-week trial period.

Follow-up tests not only showed statistically significant memory improvement, but more importantly, the brain scans showed dramatic increases of blood flow to the region of the brain responsible for memory and learning. This region, the posterior cingulated byrus, is the first section of the brain to deteriorate in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

“For the first time we are seeing scientific evidence that meditation enables the brain to actually strengthen itself and battle the processes working to weaken it,” says Andrew Newberg, M.D., the study’s principal investigator in a SeniorJournal.com article.

This promising research shows that yoga and meditation are significant tools to prevent memory loss and degenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s. You’ll keep your brain sharp with daily exercise, a brain twister or two, and regular practice of yoga and meditation.

There are few things in life that can be more terrifying and potentially disastrous than getting a diagnosis of having Parkinson's disease. Facing the prospect of having your body literally giving out on you and you not being able to exert any sort of control over it can be a difficult thing to contend with.

While medical science has come a long way in the treatment of Parkinson's, present day medical treatments are still lacking in having a huge effect on this particular condition. However, there are a few ways to effectively deal with the onset of Parkinson's and there are a few people leading the way on this front. The treatment is yoga therapy and one of the people leading the charge is Colleen Carroll.

As a yoga teacher for over 15 years, Colleen began to consider that yoga was not only helpful for the rank and file, but that yoga could actually be beneficial for people suffering from disorders such as Alzheimer's, MS, epilepsy and Parkinson's. This led her to Loyola Marymount University where she studied in the yoga therapy RX program, which is a course on using yoga in a clinical setting. After completing the 2 year program Colleen began to focus her yoga techniques to deal primarily with those suffering from Parkinson's.

While there are many deeply complicated issues surrounding why and how Parkinson's effects the human body, the main issue with this condition is that it effects gait, muscle coordination and balance. With yoga therapy, these are combated through simple techniques of breathing, proper posture and simple but specific movements. While Parkinson's results in tremors and muscle rigidity, therapeutic yoga is aimed at promoting fluidity and control.

While this is certainly no miracle cure, these simple techniques have shown great promise in combating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, prevention of the worsening of the disease and has also proven to improve the physiological effect this disease has on a person such as anxiety, depression and sleep disorders.

Parkinson's disease can be a scary and troubling diagnosis to get, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world. Medications can certainly help, but medicines are not the only line of defense when battling Parkinson's disease. With yoga therapy, you can have a way to not only fight and battle back Parkinson's disease, but you can improve your quality of life in the process.