yoga therapy

Most people who practice yoga know what a great therapy it is for emotional well-being. A new study shows that that may be good therapy for your heart as well. 

According to a recent report published in the February publication of the European Heart Journal, feelings of happiness, contentment, joy, and other pleasurable emotions are directly correlated with a decreased risk of heart disease.

Conducted by lead researcher Karina Davidson, director of Columbia's Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health, the study examined 1,739 men and women over the course of 10 years. All participants were assessed for heart disease risk at the beginning of the study. Simultaneously, researchers examined the presence of depression, hostility, and anxiety versus positive emotions, such as happiness, enthusiasm, and joy.

Over the course of the 10-year study, the researchers found that the happier a participant was, the less likely he or she was to develop heart disease—and by a significant amount: for every point on the study’s five-point positivity scale, the participant’s likelihood of developing heart disease dropped a full 22%.

On the flipside, those suffering from unhappiness and negative emotional states were significantly more likely to experience heart attack or chronic chest pain.

According to the scientists, the findings suggest that those who are happier have healthier hearts.

This news indicates that along with yoga’s known physical benefits, such as weight reduction, increased strength and flexibility, and better physical tone, the practice’s more psychological benefits may have positive physical outcomes as well.

Many people have practiced yoga for anxiety and depression and found relief from the tension and unhappiness that weighed them down. Through developing a more positive mood with yoga for depression, practitioners are not just taking care of their emotional health—they are improving their physical health as well.

Yoga for heart disease can provide those at risk with benefits on all levels, including establishing a healthier, happier state of being.

Although researchers acknowledge that the exact means through which our emotions influence our physical well-being is still unknown, one thing is for sure: yoga therapy is good for the heart—in more ways than one.

By Malinda Gosvig

According to a recent study published in the April issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise yoga therapy may help improve the health of heart failure patients, as indicated by several measures, including inflammatory markers, cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and overall quality of life.

Conducted by Paula R. Pullen, Ph.D., of Georgia State University in Atlanta, and colleagues, the study looked at 40 different patients (38 African American, 1 Asian, and 1 Caucasian) with systolic or diastolic heart failure. The patients were randomly divided into two groups: one that received 16 regular session of yoga therapy for heart disease patients over the course of eight to ten weeks and a control group that was instructed to follow a home walk program.

At the start of the study, all patients were measured for endurance, flexibility, inflammatory markers (including interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, and extracellular superoxide dismutase), and quality of life according to the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire.

At the end of the study, researchers again measured both groups and discovered significant improvements in the yoga therapy group —not just in one or a few areas, but across the board. The results reveal that yoga therapy can offer benefits to African Americans suffering from heart failure by improving flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, inflammatory markers, and overall quality of life.

For anyone suffering from heart failure or another kind of heart disease, the evidence that yoga offers natural therapy should be welcome news. So often in today’s society, conventional heart failure or heart disease “cures” isolate one specific aspect of our health, ignoring or even exacerbating other concerns. Yoga therapy, however, addresses underlying heart failure and heart disease causes and can bring improvement to all aspects of our health. Yoga therapy can also work alongside conventional treatments to help cure heart disease and heart failure and minimize side effects of medication.

Heart failure is tragically common: nearly 5 million Americans suffer from the serious cardiovascular disorder, and that number is rising. The outlook for patients is bleak: according to the Heart Failure Society of America, less than 50% of patients are living five years after their initial diagnosis, and after ten years, that number is halved again. Furthermore, the disease hits hard among African Americans, especially those who are at an economic disadvantage.

With heart failure rates accelerating alongside other cardiovascular diseases in our society, the need for a medically effective and cost-effective solution is more pressing than ever. Fortunately, in addition to its broad range of heart-related health benefits, yoga offers an inexpensive solution for those who may not be able to afford regular treatments for their condition. Once learned, yoga poses can be practiced at home. Patients who can’t attend a class can also practice with a yoga DVD.

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." --Winston Churchill

I've always wanted to be an optimist. Mainly for the very simple reason that I'm not. At least I didn't use to be. Early in life, it became clear to me that I had inherited my father's propensity for always looking at the gloomy side of things. Following his example, if there was a problem to be found, I’d be sure to track it down. 

Everyone loves an optimist. My mom was an optimist, bright, cheery, sunny-hearted. "You think too much!" was her standard response to my frequent, ten-minute long tirades about all the things that were wrong with my life.

I loved my mom. I badly wanted to be like her: cheery, happy, somehow always rolling with the ups and downs of, well, everything. I wasn't, however, cut out that way. And that was just one more thing to be depressed over.

Over the years, however, I have discovered something interesting. Slow learner as I am, it took me years to figure this out, but here it is: I am not necessarily always a pessimist. My outlook on life, how gloomy, morose--or, happy, cheerful, and content I am is linked to the state of my body.

For many years now, I have been practicing yoga and meditation, and with my practices one of life’s simple, little equations has become a wisdom I live by. Here it is:

Too little sleep, no yoga, disrupted routine, bad diet = really bad day, lots of problems, sad, gloomy, depressed.

Enough rest, nice long am yoga practice, meditate, eat those veggies and fruit = sunshine day; problems covering in the shadows; I’m the cheery bright, bushy-tailed queen of my world!

I have come to believe that we are not by nature optimists or pessimists. The state of our body determines the state of our mind. Our mood, our well-being, our energy boils down to this one thing: how freely and abundantly the life force flows through our body. The ancient yogis, of course, realized this millennia ago. Unfortunately, this simple truth is often lost on our evolved, “modern” society, causing much unnecessary suffering.

This simple principle holds even when it comes to emotional and mental issues, which so many people struggle with in today’s society. How vulnerable we are to stress, depression, or anxiety is related to how freely the life force, prana, vibrates through our extended body-mind. When prana doesn't flow freely, our light is dimmed and we cannot stand in our fullness.

This is why the work that LifeForce founder Amy Weintraub does with yoga for depression is so important. It is widely recognized that exercise in general is one of the most effective ways to relieve depression. In her work with yoga for depression, Weintraub takes this one step further. She has zeroed in on the fact that many yoga exercises and techniques afford greater therapy for depression and anxiety than regular exercise—because the very aim of yoga is to free up the flow of the life force by releasing energy blockages in its path. 

Yoga therapy can help create greater emotional well-being by releasing tension and dissolving the emotional blocks that hold us back from living a happy, healthy life. A regular yoga therapy practice over the long term can be a powerful tool for emotional healing and integration.

So ultimately, the answer to the question, are you an optimist or pessimist is neither. Nothing in life is cut in stone. Everything depends on how you create your life day in and day out, as you string all the moments of your life together. We here at YogaTherapyWeb.com offer our gratitude for the tools that yoga offers to turn those moments into a beautiful, bright, shiny strand of pearls.

Our friend Aline Marie (www.AlineMarie.com) allowed us to share this moving story about her yoga journey. This is a wonderful story about the  power of yoga to help us grow out of feelings of anger and depression and transform the way we view other people and life itself.

When I hated everyone on the planet, they hated me back. When I thought the world was against me, it was. When I was fearful of the intentions of others, I was right. I was validated with every action, reaction, situation, conversation, and reality.

Life sucked. Hard.

My beliefs had surrounded me with people, places and events that mirrored how much I hated my self, my life, my body and this existence. There was no escape from the nightmare. The more I focused on how awful it was, the worse it got.
I completely gave up in July of 03', ready to end my life on this planet, because in my naivete I had created a reality of no love, no hope, no light, just surrounded by darkness and alone. I had $10 in my pocket and had given my self 3 options: get a sandwhich, put gas in the truck, try a yoga class.

Any way I spun it that money was going to the wind, so thanks to working at a restaurant and getting food there I skipped the sandwich. My truck was pretty reliable on fumes, and I wanted to just give life one last shot before I totally threw in the towel. At least I could say I tried.

I walked up the studio stairs, angry and apprehensive but somehow forcing myself to break past this wall. I felt awkward and had no idea the names of anything, couldn't do half the poses. But when we got to the end-the laying down part- I experienced a freedom in my body and a release in my soul that brought me to tears. I couldn't believe what was happening. This was what my body and heart and mind needed the most. A safe release.

I was hooked. Every spare dime I had went to taking yoga classes, I practiced 3,4,5 times a day trying to "find" that freedom feeling over and over again. I never wanted to leave that feeling.

Things started to change. A friend at work let me rent a room out of her house, and in that space I was held, nurtured and loved on a level I had never known before. Because I was not very good at articulating my feelings I still spoke through my art and my paintings. I created some of the best oil pieces I have done in my life in that sweet loving little room upstairs. I had an art show at the restaurant, got a huge newspaper article and made some sales. Things started to change. The yoga was working beyond a level I could comprehend at that time.

My body started changing. I was not as angry. I was not as stressed out. I now knew what to do when I got upset: Find a quiet place and breathe. I became so connected to my heart that I found this delicious gorgeousness in loving other people, strangers even. I started to find appreciation in the delicate quirks of other people, as well as my own.

All of a sudden things had changed. No one was out to "get me" anymore. In fact, everyone was a potential person who could help me somehow and whom I could help somehow. Being in the restaurant business I came to the perspective that it wasn't about me being an indentured servant to awful people, it became a game of how much could I love my clients, how great of a time I could give to them, how I could create a positive experience for them, and help them feel nurtured.

My relationships with my coworkers and managers became precious as I learned how to love them and appreciate them even more, and they were watching me evolve and raising me and doing what they could to keep me safe, buy art from me, help me. Now.. if you've ever been in that business, it's not humanly possible to maintain that state of mind 100% of the time. Everyone has their breaking point, and I hadn't reached sainthood yet, but I had a foot in the door and was making some headway.

I got a bartending gig at really high-end restaurant. One of my favorite Thursday night clients asked me if I could come and share yoga with some of her students at an alternative rehabilitation school in Hawthorne, NY, just outside of NYC. I agreed.

It was this moment that the biggest change ever started to happen. I showed up to teach these six girls in their early teens who could have and used to kick peoples asses like mine inside and out. I had to have a guard in the room, it was crazy. They loved it. They hugged me, and called me Miss Yoga. I went from teaching them one class twice a week to extending my services to the other schools on the campus and teaching 5 classes a day twice a week. It was amazing the transformation in the students as well as my own. I wasn't a yoga teacher, I was just this girl that did yoga.

Well that changed too. I got my yoga teaching certification from Kripalu Center for Yoga and health up in Lenox, Mass.  That place was like being on a spaceship. I called it Hogwarts school of yoga because the magic and the healing and epiphanies that went down on a minutely basis was mind-blowing. It was the culmination of learning and being certified in everything I had ever believed in, in my heart and mind, but had never had the words or outlet to say and show and share.

We were doing yoga for 9 hours a day, anatomy, lectures, energy work, it was incredible. The most powerful experience was having to look 60 people in the eyes without looking away and saying to myself and them "this person has felt pain, this person has felt fear, this person has cried, this person has had their heart broken, this person needs love..." it went on and on.
Looking into someone else’ eyes is actually like looking into a mirror. You are reflected back to you what you feel inside. You can also see what the other person is feeling inside without having to say a word. When you see your own pain reflected back to you, it is impossible to not connect to our fellow humans with compassion.

We learned how to be human at Kripalu, and how to love people. We were taught that as yoga teachers, we were teachers of love, love of the body, of the spirit, of the mind, of each other. We were the pioneers in a revolution of compassion, and as such we had an arduous task ahead of us. Ego was not allowed. There was no competition. There was only love, acceptance, non-judgment and nurturing of all aspects of the human condition.

Needless to say, going back into the "other world" as they called it was interesting. Even driving a car was weird. So the bartending came to an end, the restaurant had closed, I got some work doing illustrations and was picking up jobs teaching at yoga studios as well as the school in NY 

I have taught yoga ever since, and life has never been better. As I like to say: Waking up 6ft above ground every morning? Priceless.

Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing is clearly a labor of love and the ultimate guide to yoga therapy. This definitive volume was written by the Yoga Journal medical editor, Timothy McCall—a conventionally trained internist and seasoned yogi, who has practiced Iyengar yoga for over a decade. In Yoga as Medicine, McCall introduces the history and science of yoga and translates yoga therapy and India’s ancient medical system Ayurveda into Western medical terms.

The book is centered on yoga therapy as it profiles some of the leading yoga therapy practitioners in different fields of specializaiton. A full twenty chapters focus on leading yoga therapy instructors and include detailed information about their approaches to a wide array of medical conditions, including yoga for arthritis, chronic fatigue, yoga for cancer, infertility, multiple sclerosis, depression, back pain, heart disease, and so on. One of the great features of the book is that it outlines specific yoga asanas recommended by each yoga therapy instructor for specific conditions and gives the reader insight into how to utilize therapeutic yoga (including breathing techniques and meditation) for prevention and healing of illness.

Yoga as Medicine includes sections on how to practice yoga safely, particularly for people with physical limitations, and it guides the reader through steps to finding a yoga therapist and what to expect from a session. McCall describes yoga therapy as “a systematic technology to improve the body, understand the mind, and free the spirit,” and Yoga as Medicine gives you the essential guide to doing so.

 Click Here to learn more about Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing