How To Choose Unique Yoga Mats

By Mattie Knight

Practicing yoga is an art that helps control your mind, body, and soul. It helps everyone in many ways. A strong flexible body, weight loss, peaceful mind, and good health are only some of the benefits of practicing yoga. Once you obtain peace within you, you will be able to live a life more fulfilling and happier. Keep in mind that this exercise is a constant learning. The deeper you practice, the more advantages you get.

Everything could only be possible if someone is using the right material for this practice. Yoga rugs are highly important when practicing. Like any other fitness gear, it pays to do a bit of research and know important tips. There are so many things to consider before purchasing unique yoga mats. Just like any other kinds of yoga practices, there are also varieties of mats.

Mats are also light which makes them portable. They can be carried everywhere you go. There are some products design for a specific class and made of Eco friendly materials. Select a certain type of yoga exercise you will be taking to avoid buying mats for another type of exercises like therapy and Pilates. Some of them can be very slippery for this form of exercise.

You have to consider how the rugs are being made. Most of these products are manufactured with a certain kind of plastic known as PVC or polyvinyl chloride which is affordable enough. This can be considered as a toxic plastic that is costly and hard to be recycled. Therefore, if you want to go green Choose an environmentally friendly products including recycled rubber and cotton.

The cost is also a consideration to keep in mind. The price may increase when materials, brand names, designs, and thickness are included to the overall purchasing process. Always remember that cheaper stuff do not mean quality and the best choice. Make sure to invest on high quality products to ensure durability and a long term use.

If you are not sure it the type of mat to choose, make sure to test the product and find out how comfortable you are using the product. But if you feel uncomfortable with a specific type of mat, then look for another option. Be sure to test the durability and quality of the rugs are various studios. Also, this is best to conduct a research first before buying.

Asking recommendations from your friend of instructor is also essential. This way, it would be easier for you to make a choice based on their suggestions. Everyone is assured that the kind of mat they choose is something that is best for the body when practicing the exercise.

This kind of rugs is no different from other products you purchase. Generally, there are different companies that consider the livelihood and health of people. It is best to choose products made of Eco friendly materials as it does not only improves your fitness condition, it also improves your health in many ways.

When purchasing the right mat for this purpose, consider some variables to successfully find a mat appropriate for the body. It is best to consider a trial and error test to ensure the quality of the product while getting the right product for your needs.

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What To Look For When Buying Unique Yoga Mats

By Elaine Guthrie

If you are interested in purchasing a mat to practice yoga on, you may have noticed that there are many different models available. Unique yoga mats can be found in different sizes, thicknesses and materials. Here is what you need to consider before you begin your search.

One thing that many beginners do not realize is what exactly a mat can do for you. One of the most appealing things for most people is that it provides a clean surface that keeps your face and body away from dirt and germs. It can also help provide traction when your feet are in some poses which require them to be far apart. As well, it can also help cushion you and make it easier for you to relax and meditate if your practice involves a period of relaxation at the end. For some practitioners, it also becomes an expression of themselves especially when they find a pattern or style that suits them particularly well.

Experimenting before you purchase a particular model is a good idea. Make sure you try out a range of options and think carefully about what you liked (or did not like) about it. If you are practicing at a studio, speaking with the instructor about any recommendations may help guide you in the right direction and allow you to find the perfect mat for your needs.

Size matters especially if you are tall. A longer model may be just what you need so that you do not need to position your feet oddly when moving from one position to the next. Your stance may need to be quite far apart for some poses and a longer mat will still provide you with the traction you need no matter which pose you are in.

Thicker versions are available. Some can be quite thick. This can be important for individuals who may have joint problems. Remember that some poses will put added strain on joints and limbs so if you need a little extra padding, this can be a good way to get it. Just remember to make sure that your choice is not so thick that it will be difficult to move or transport when you leave class.

Some people do not want the typical sticky mat to practice on. They may want a thin surface or one that is made out of a natural material. Looking online will be able to show you the range of options that exist and which are not limited to the same sticky synthetic material.

Accessories can be helpful and can even help extend the life of your yoga mat. For example, the right cleaner can keep the material from breaking down due to sweat or bacteria. A case can protect it when you are not practicing and can make it easier and more convenient to travel from home to practice and to all points in between.

Shopping online can be a great way to find options to choose from. If you are not sure, you may want to speak to your teacher or other students to find out what they are using and what their recommendations are.

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5 Ways Yoga Can Affect Your Health

by Baxter

Roots by Melina Meza

On this blog, we often address the health benefits of yoga, from its ability to support a generally healthy lifestyle to specific therapeutic benefits that yoga brings to a whole array of injuries, diseases, and conditions (see Common Minor Problems That Yoga Can Help With and Common Serious Problems That Yoga Help With). Therefore, how we are using yoga for health benefits can vary tremendously. So I feel it will be helpful to have a clear framework to describe yoga’s various roles in affecting our health. This will give us a better understanding of what yoga actually has the power to do—or not—for different types of conditions.

Within the world of yoga, yoga therapy is a rapidly emerging specialty. It is interesting to consider the origins of the word “therapy.” It comes originally from the Greek language, and literally means “healing” or “curing.” As I considered how yoga fits into modern concepts of healing and treatment for conditions and ailments, I came up five different categories. 

1. Preventative Medicine. Yoga can be “health promotion activity” that can prevent disease and create an overall sense of well-being. In choosing to practice yoga, you may not be targeting a specific disease or condition, but rather in a more general way you are promoting your general health and supporting a sense of well-being. We could say that in this way, yoga is acting as a form of primary prevention, addressing your overall health before any problems develop. Yoga can also be a form of secondary prevention for specific conditions that are present in a latent form or a presently asymptomatic, but if were left unaddressed, could progress to a more serious form. High blood pressure is one example of this. If we apply yoga to high blood pressure and it helps to normalize our blood pressure numbers, it could prevent the development of more serious conditions like Coronary Artery Disease and heart attacks. In this case, ongoing yoga practice will hopefully prevent future disability from the more serious consequences of untreated high blood pressure. 

2. Curative Medicine. Yoga certainly can help with complete healing, as is often noted with musculoskeletal conditions, such as common sprains and strains, and even more complex issues, such as back and neck pain. In addition, in some individuals, yoga seems to resolve serious issues like anxiety and depression, although it often does so as an “adjunct,” in combination with other forms of treatment. However, unlike an antibiotic prescribed for a specific infection for which it cures, yoga usually is not just used for two weeks and then discarded. So there is an ongoing “maintenance” aspect of yoga that differs from western pharmaceutical treatments. And before prematurely pronouncing yourself “cured,” you might consider monitoring your “cured” conditions for 1 to 5 years as they do with cancer treatment.

3. Maintenance Therapy. Yoga can be helpful as a maintenance treatment for ongoing conditions that are in a remission state. For example, someone with MS can practice yoga between flares of symptoms in order to help maintain the relative symptom-free remission periods. Or someone with asthma during could practice during symptom-free periods with the goal of extending those remission times. During flares, people with these types of conditions might also do a modified, gentle, restorative practice, which would fall into our next category.

4. Supportive or Palliative Therapy. This type of therapy provides comfort care for the patient without treating the underlying condition. While palliative care  refers to serious or terminal conditions, it is related to supportive therapy. As an example, some of my students with chronic low back pain, often from ruptured discs that are not going to heal, benefit dramatically from the pain and stress-relieving aspects of their ongoing yoga practice. And for more serious situations, I think of a student of mine who had Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and used his pranayama and meditation practices even into the last stage of his life with some benefit.

5. Rehabilitative Therapy. Yoga is being used more and more to aid recovery from all sorts of acute conditions, such as following major surgeries to post-heart attack and post-stroke rehabilitation. In such cases, yoga is often introduced for certain periods of time, say two to four months, to accelerate recovery, and hopefully adopted for longer-term maintenance or supportive purposes after that.

Now, you might want to add more categories, or divide some of these into several, but my hope is that this organization, however simple, helps you to think in a clearer fashion about how you apply your yoga to health conditions. 

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Aging Telomeres and Yoga New Study by Elizabeth Blackburn and Dean Ornish

by Baxter

Telomere Caps

A while back, we reported on an interesting potential marker in the body for aging of the cells connected to the genes called a telomere (see Stressed Mind, Stressed Cells and Science, Aging and Yoga). A telomere is like a tail on the end of DNA strands found in our cells, and an enzyme called telomerase influences the length and activity of the telomere. Studies done a few years ago by a Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF in San Francisco began to show a connection between telomeres and cell longevity—the longer the telomere, the longer the cell life. Her work garnered her a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Now Dr. Blackburn has teamed up with Dr. Dean Ornish to see what effect his life-style changes approach to prostate cancer has on telomeres and telomerase activity. Dr. Ornish has already shown that a combination of dietary changes (vegan diet with less than 10% fat per day), exercise in the form of walking for 30 minutes most days, and stress management tools that include regular yoga asana and breath work, mindfulness meditation and once a week group stress reduction sessions can reverse heart disease and diabetes, and can stabilize prostate cancer and stop its progression.

In their most recent study, published in Lancet Oncology (see Effect of comprehensive lifestyle changes on telomerase activity and telomere length in men with biopsy-proven low-risk prostate cancer: 5-year follow-up of a descriptive pilot study), the two researchers looked at how the lifestyle program impacted the cellular genetic level in regards to telomere length and enzyme activity. What they found was that the 10 men studied had longer telomeres in the short (as quickly as three months!) and long run, if they stuck to the program, and the 25 men who were controls had shorter telomeres. And they also looked at gene activity in their ten study subjects, and found that 500 genes were turned on, and all were beneficial, according to Ornish. 

Even though telomeres may be an indicator of longer cell life, and by extension, longer overall lifespan, this has not been definitively concluded, so more studies will need to be done, looking at much larger numbers of people. But the early evidence is promising, and even if the telomere/aging cell theory does not pan out, it seems evident that yoga, diet, exercise and stress management do have significantly positive impacts on health, disease progress or remission, and are therefore worth the effort. And as Dr. Ornish noted, his study participants found the lifestyle plan easy to follow, with 85-90% compliance, much better than most pharmaceutical based treatment plans. Why, you might ask? Well, has he says, it’s because it’s pleasant and comprehensive and “most people feel so much better they change their lifestyle.”

To read more, you can check out articles at ucsf.edu and today.com—among others—which reported these new findings.

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The Psoas Muscle and Yoga

by Baxter

If you have been around the yoga classroom for any reasonable amount of time, you have likely heard of the psoas muscle. But you may not have a good idea of where it is or what it does! You should though, as your daily activities—or inactivity if you are sitting a lot during the day—can actually create a short, tight psoas muscle that could use a bit of lengthening. So today I’ll introduce you to your psoas muscle in a deeper way than can sometimes take place in the yoga classroom, inform you of some of its roles in posture and movement and suggest a few ways to lengthen it, if it is on the tighter side of life.

The only other time I could find on the blog that we had talked about the psoas muscle was way back in January of 2012 (I Think I Have Sciatica), where we first introduced the drawing of the lower torso and pelvis above, which shows nicely the psoas muscle seen here with everything except the skeleton and select muscle removed.

The psoas originates from the sides of the lumber vertebrae, possibly even starting as high up as thoracic 12 (T12), so it has multiple spots on the side of the spine where it attaches. It then travels downward, close to the midline of the pelvis, just in front of the sacrum and ileum, until it heads slightly lateral and anterior, so it can leave the pelvis by sliding right over the lateral pubic bone and just behind the inguinal ligament in order to dive down and laterally attach to the upper inside of the femur bone (at a bony bump known as the lesser trochanter of the femur). Now we can actually feel the greater trochanter with our hands, just about six inches below the side of our pelvic rim, but the lesser bump is not accessible - due to lots of muscles which make touching it almost impossible. And due to the fact that the psoas lies deep within the pelvis, it can be challenging to feel it - both literally and perceptually. 

Hopefully, with the help of the picture and my written description, you are starting to get oriented to where the psoas is. But what does this muscle do when it contracts and shortens? It depends a bit on which part of the set-up is stabilized and which part is free to move. And it also depends on whether it is working in concert with other muscles to help you walk (for instance), or to help you maintain upright posture when you are standing still.

Let’s look at it working alone first. If the spinal origins of the psoas are stable and not moving, the psoas is said to have the following effect on the femur bone (to which it attaches): it flexes the femur toward the belly, pulling it slightly medially toward the pubic symphysis, and rolls the thigh bone externally on its axis. If we wanted to take the femur bone in the opposite direction as a way of stretching it, we’d need to take it backward towards the buttocks, swing it slightly out to the side and internally rotate it. Doing a modified Locust pose (Salabasana), with the legs apart a bit and an emphasis on rolling the thighbones in would be an example of a pose that could lengthen the psoas.

When we stabilize the femur, as when you are sitting in a chair, and contract the psoas, the origin gets pulled forward and down, encouraging the forward folding action known as flexion of the lumbar spine. We use this action whenever we bend over to pick something up off the floor.  The psoas also works in concert with several other spinal muscles to encourage the upward lift of the spine that we cultivate in poses like Mountains pose. In that setting, it does not create excessive lumber flexion, but does allow the natural curve in the lumber area to be present. So that is a bit about what the muscle does (realizing that the psoas works with other muscles that flex the femur bone, such as part of the quadriceps).

When the psoas is overly tight and short, it can affect the lower back in a negative way (contributing to back pain), influence the ease of a neutral pelvic tilt and affect gait. There are passive ways to release tension in the psoas and more active ways to lengthen and stretch the psoas.

In The Psoas Book, author Liz Koch recommends “releasing” tension in the psoas by lying in Constructive Rest position (on your back, with your knees bent and the soles of your feet on the floor), with your feet about 1-2 feet from your hips, and staying there for a while (maybe 5-10 minutes) with close attention to sensations in the area of the back belly and hip joints, as you attempt to sense the releasing of tension in those areas. Another version of Constructive Rest involves having your calves on a support, like our Easy Inverted pose (see Easy Inverted Pose). Once you get better at sensing release in tension in this area, slowly move one foot further away from the hips without letting the pelvis tip or tuck and stop when tension is encountered in the areas you are observing. Gradually moving that foot until the leg is straight, if you can do so without changing the pelvic alignment. A more advanced variation involves folding one leg into the chest (in an upside-down Pigeon pose), without tipping or tucking your pelvis, and then again slowly extending the other leg long on the floor (it’s the lengthening leg that will stretch that side's psoas).

In my regular classes, I often take advantage of the back leg position in Warrior 1 to bring attention to the psoas of the back leg, as it needs to lengthen in order to keep the pelvis neutral (not going into dramatic anteversion or forward tip).  From there, doing drop knee lunges, both with the hands on the floor next to the feet for an easier version, but gradually coming up higher, with hands on blocks, and finally with hands on the front thigh, while letting the hips and torso move a bit forward while keeping the pelvis stable, are great ways to lengthen the psoas. The back leg in upright Pigeon pose also gives a good stretch to the psoas.

This list of ways to work with your psoas is by no means complete. You might look at Mary Pullig Shaztz, MD’s book Back Care Basics for her approach to psoas stretching in the face of back pain. And Jean Couch’s classic The Runners Yoga Book is sure to have a few suggestions as well.  And if our readers have any favorites, please write a comment back to us! Happy stretching!

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Cancer Aging and Yoga

by Ram

Desert Flower by Marie Lossky (@Marie.Lossky on Instagram)

Is there a link between cancer and aging? Well, there is now irrefutable evidence that age is the single greatest risk factor for cancer. Nearly 70% of people who have cancer are 65 years or older and nearly 60% of cancer survivors are in their sixties. Interestingly, a subset of the biological mechanisms that regulate the aging process is also involved in the development of cancer. Since the population of adults reaching older ages is increasing rapidly, the total number of new cancer cases will also increase if current incidence rates remain unchanged. By 2030, an estimated 70% of all cancers will occur among adults aged 65 years or older. 

Being older can also affect cancer treatment and management. The issue becomes more complicated if the aged individual has another existing disease or disability (co-morbidity). Studies show that doctors restrict older adults from receiving every treatment that is available due to fears of side effects because of the age factor. Thus, older adults have fewer treatment options for cancer than younger people. And while older individuals deal with the mental and emotional challenges of cancer better than younger people, they have other concerns about how cancer treatment could affect their ability to live alone without support, how radiation therapy can compromise other organ function, or how chemotherapy could affect their memory. 

Although aging itself cannot be reversed, the age-associated factors that contribute to cancer risk can definitely be prevented, reversed, or delayed (see Aging: Terms and Theories). For example, it has been shown that when some of the environmental factors that influence the aging process are controlled, this can also delay or completely block the onset of cancer. Similarly, suitable dietary intervention or drugs that possess anti-aging activity are able to delay or prevent cancer. 

Current research suggests that for most adults who maintain a healthy lifestyle, cancer is not an inevitable consequence of growing older (see Yoga for Cancer: An Interview with a Nurse and Cancer Survivor). In contrast, the prevention or at least the delay of cancer can be viewed as an effective strategy for achieving a healthy, long life. Interestingly, several of the research studies point to midlife as the most crucial period in determining an individual’s longevity and chances of getting cancer (see Yoga for Cancer: An Interview with Cheryl Fenner Brown). Midlife is also the time when some well-recognized risk factors for cancer begin to have an impact on an individual’s lifespan. The occurrence of chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes tends to increase during midlife, and have been associated with increased cancer risk and reduced lifespan. Thus, the promotion of good lifestyle practices during midlife is a promising strategy to prevent or delay cancer incidence and to achieve a productive health span (Aging: Terms and Theories). Strategies include but are not limited to diet intervention, supplements, nutraceuticals, stress management, and exercise. 

One noteworthy intervention that is attracting a lot of attention among researchers and health practitioners alike is yoga! We have written several articles on how yoga limits age-associated degenerative changes (See a subset of articles on this topic by Baxter, Nina, Brad, Beth, Ram and Shari). Several studies now show that a yoga regimen for adults at midlife or individuals undergoing cancer treatment not only improves psychological outcome and physical symptoms as well, but also in that process extends the life span of those individuals (see Review of yoga therapy during cancer treatment). Yoga has been shown to improve diverse outcomes among cancer survivors by reducing adverse symptoms and mood disorders, and by enhancing function. Researchers are amazed at yoga’s potential to simultaneously address multiple areas, including social, physical, and psycho-emotional, and simultaneously enhance strength, coordination, balance, posture, and flexibility in cancer victims (see Evidence-Based Yoga Interventions for Patients With Cancer). 

Studies have shown that a structured yoga practice during cancer treatment can reduce stress and anxiety, and can radically improve symptoms such as pain and fatigue by reducing heart rate and blood pressure and easing the lung’s respiratory function. Additionally, yoga asana—no matter how gentle the movements—along with meditation allows the body to release endorphins that alleviates depression, anxiety, and insomnia to help patients become emotionally strong during the cancer treatment. 

All these research studies are revealing what cancer centers and yogic practitioners have long known: cancer survivors can benefit from yoga! So, if you have a loved one with cancer, encourage that individual to have a yoga practice that can serve as a way to help deal with the physical, mental, and emotional stresses. The calming effects of yoga and meditation provide a physically and emotionally beneficial activity which can be life affirming to a cancer patient, survivor, or even a caregiver to someone who is fighting the battle with cancer. Plus, it could add years to their life.

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Yoga for Performance Anxiety

by Baxter

The Violin by Juan Gris

On our blog we have espoused the benefits of yoga techniques for many health conditions. One the most common life situations that prompts us to become anxious and to over-stimulate our Fight or Flight response is the need to periodically “perform” for others. Performing can take the form of presentations in the academic world, starting at a very young age all the way up to the defense of one’s PhD thesis (that doesn’t sound stressful, does it!). It could be in the joyful context of the bride and groom’s dance on your wedding day when neither one of you are dancers. It is a common expectation in many corporate settings that you will give presentations to your fellow workers or prospective clients. As a young violinist, I recall vividly the levels of anxiety that I would experience prior to performing in violin competitions (that’s right, vying for $ against other little violinists) and as a soloist with the Toledo Youth Symphony in my sophomore year of high school. I weathered those stressful, stormy events, but I can only wonder at how it might have been if I had been practicing yoga and meditation as a youngster. I received this story via Facebook from a student I met on one of my teaching weekends in North Carolina, and thought that it speaks for itself and was worth sharing. Thanks to Janet for allowing me to share it with you here today!

Violin-Yoga

by Janet Orenstein

As many of you know I played a recital with Allison Gagnon last night at UNCSA -- only my second recital in 17 years (the first was last year, also with Allison). I walked onstage forty minutes before it started to check a tempo and found myself to be in almost a state of panic. My heart started racing and my hands went clammy and cold. My mind was racing. I went backstage to my room and had the impulse to just keep playing the violin until I felt better. Thankfully some inner wisdom stayed this impulse. My body was in trouble, but somehow I knew the difficulty was in my mind. I kept thinking about my students being at the recital, and how only a few had ever heard me play. Their primary teacher is Ida Bieler, a phenomenal powerhouse of both teaching and playing, who leaves me in awe on most occasions. I saw that I was terrified of not being worthy. What on old story! But what to do? Didn't Terry Brown (a fabulous yoga teacher) teach me that extending my exhales will calm the nervous system? How many times had I practiced that very thing in yoga class? (And how many repetitions of the same information does it take for me to learn?) So ten minutes later when Brooks came backstage to wish me luck, he found me sitting in the dark, breathing. In fifteen minutes my heart slowed and my hands stopped feeling cold. My mind still raced, but ten minutes later that too started to slow down. I tuned my fiddle and went backstage. Allison smiled at me and we went onstage to play Ives. She starts the piece alone and I listened to her. I was there with her, and, miraculously, I remained present the entire recital. I felt that rare and powerful connection to another human being that communicates trust. I was listening and reacting, and I felt heard and reacted to. That has got to be yoga, right? It was a blast. We were in sync and nothing else really mattered at all. I forgot my students; I forgot the entire audience. I remembered that this is why I play the violin. Thank you, Allison, and thank you to all my numerous teachers of violin and yoga. And of course, thank you to my students, who as it turns out, are also my teachers.

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Staying Upright About Our Postural Reflexes Balance and Yoga

by Baxter

Playing at Giants by Francisco Goya

In the course of researching agility and balance, I came upon the mention of “postural reflexes.” We humans have a lot of reflexes, so I was not exactly sure what these reflexes were. But I began to do some digging. 

It turns out that you have a couple of reflexes that automatically correct the orientation of your body when it shifts from being up upright. They kick in to action when unexpected events throw you off balance so your body can prevent you from falling by quickly attempting to self-correct. Imagine turning and suddenly almost (or actually) bumping into someone, walking down a slick ramp and suddenly slipping a bit, or reaching that darn crack in the side walk that trips you up. They also kick in to action during everyday balancing activities, such as when you are standing on a chair in the kitchen trying to reach into the upper shelf or when you are walking on the raised edge of a curb just for the fun of it. 

Our postural reflexes start to develop when we are infants starting to sit up, advance when we are toddlers learning to walk, and continue to be refined through adolescence into young adulthood. In the early days staying upright requires a lot of conscious effort, but with time and practice, our coordinated, muscular responses to being off balance or anticipating loss of balance become more subconscious and reflexive.

These postural responses that keep you upright (or try to!) are a result of information sent to your brain from your inner ears and eyes, the pressure sensors on your feet, and your proprioceptors (the nerves that tell you where you are space). As we age, our postural reflexes may slow down due to age-related changes in one or more of the components of this complex system.

However, in studies of older stroke victims who initially show a decrease in postural reflexes after their stroke there is evidence that practicing agility exercises helps them regain some of their lost function. So although there have been no specific studies of on yoga and postural reflexes, it’s likely that practicing a variety of yoga poses to improve strength, flexibility, balance, and agility would help you maintain and/or improve your postural reflexes. For maintaining postural reflexes, I would particularly recommend strength building practices, as well as balance and agility practices, both static and dynamic variations. 

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In Praise of Our Skin and the Song of Yoga

by Nina

Melina Meza photographed by Nityia Przewlocki

"Our skin is no neutral envelope; it is a busily sensing organ that situates us in relation to others and the world." —Adam Gopnik

Just a quick post today to let you know about a really interesting article Feel Me by Adam Gopnik, in recent edition of “The New Yorker." It’s all about how underrated our sense of touch is, and includes a long discussion of tactile research.

“We don’t appreciate how much of our behavior is governed by our intense sensitivity to pressure,” Dustin Tyler, the fresh-faced principal investigator on the Cleveland project, says, observing Spetic closely. “We think of hot and cold, or of textures, silk and cotton. But some of the most important sensing we do with our fingers is to register incredibly minute differences in pressure, of the kinds that are necessary to perform tasks, which we grasp in a microsecond from the feel of the outer shell of the thing. We know instantly, just by touching, whether to gently squeeze the toothpaste or crush the can.”

Although the article tends to focus on the hands, in yoga, we use our tactile senses to help us balance on our feet, as well as on our hands, sitting bones, forearms, shins, and so on. As we’re balancing, we respond to texture of the surface on which we’re balancing. And that’s why one technique you can use for improving balance or agility is to vary the surface you practice on.

But we also use our tactile senses to feel our alignment in our poses. Although some of the ability to feel our alignment comes from prioprioception, our internal sense of where we are in space, you use your skin to sense whether your weight is evenly distributed on your feet or hands, whether your top foot is in the right place in Tree pose or Eagle pose, whether your palms are pressing together completely in Reverse Prayer pose, or if you’ve actually grabbed your elbows or just your forearms when you take both arms behind your back. And, OMG, you finally made the clasp in Cow-Face pose (Gomukasana)!

In "Feel Me," Gopnik observes:

“One strange thing about the unsung sense is that it has no songs. Every other sense has an art to go with it: the eyes have art, the ears have music, even the nose and the tongue have perfume and gastronomy. But we don’t train our hands to touch as we train our eyes to look or our ears to listen.”

But I beg to differ. Practicing yoga mindfully partly means training your skin to be more sensitive as you tune into subtle all-over body sensations. And I'm thinking that this might be one reason why practicing asanas can be such a beautiful experience, you know, like music or art.

“Our bodies are membranes in the world, with sensation and meaning passing seamlessly through them. Our experience of our bodies—the things they feel, the moves they make, and the textures and the people they touch—is our primary experience of our minds.”

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Yoga is a great thing but

by Nina 

Stop Sign by Brad Gibson

“Yoga is a great thing but it is not everything or the only thing.”

That’s the sentence that popped into my mind while I was practicing yoga yesterday afternoon (a very enjoyable backbend practice, by the way). In the back of my mind, I was obviously mulling over a post I read on the It’s All Yoga Baby blog (see when the yoga doesn’t work: depression, failure & the purpose of practice), in which Roseanne talked about her depression and her feeling that she is “failing” at her yoga practice.

“Underneath it all, however, is a vague sense that I’m failing at my practice, that I’m as broken and fucked up as I was before I committed to yoga (chronic and clinical depression was what drove me to practice in the first place), that the practice isn’t working. There’s also the vague sense that I’m not allowed to be feeling this way – there are many stories of miraculous healing from depression (and everything else) through yoga, but nobody talks about the relapses. I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

I’ve already mentioned in a couple of previous posts (see Practice As Many As You Can and Authentic Yoga) how reading Yoga Body by Mark Singleton brought home to me once again that most of what we consider to be “yoga” these days was developed in the 20th century. This means that, contrary to what some teachers claim, the yoga we know and practice these days is not some thousands-of-years-old practice that is the answer to everything, including depression and anxiety, as well as physical injuries and illnesses (though it can definitely help with those things for certain people). And I think those in the yoga community who promote it as such, do us all a disservice. Because the result for people like Roseanne is that when yoga doesn’t provide the answer for them, they feel as if they are at fault, that they are doing something wrong, or that they have “failed” in some way. And the truth is, yoga was probably only used to treat depression and anxiety starting in the 20th century.

When I teach yoga for emotional well-being (including depression, anxiety, stress, etc.), I always add that I while I consider yoga to be a powerful tool for improving mental health, it may not be the only answer for you. In fact, you may need to use it as a supplement to western medicine, including drugs and/or therapy. And I recommend that if you are in a crisis, you should consult with your family doctor or a mental health professional. You need to do whatever it takes to help you get better. And, please, no guilt or shame about this!

The truth is, many years ago, before I became serious about yoga but while I was taking regular classes, I had two nervous breakdowns (the diagnosis was agitated depression), within a five-year period. And I’m convinced that, especially during the second breakdown, that my family doctor and the drugs she prescribed for me prevented me from being hospitalized. Later on, life style changes, including a regular home yoga practice, helped me reduce the stress in my life that seemed to be the main trigger for my illness. And I’ve been well since then. But just as important, I believe that yoga has also helped me come to a state of self acceptance regarding my condition. And this included both overcoming my feeling of shame about taking medication for depression (my therapist encouraged me to stay on a low maintenance dose) and starting to talk—and write—about my experiences as a way of possibly helping others.

I want to be very clear that I’m not here giving any medical advice here. This post is not intended to tell anyone what the best way is to heal from depression. I just felt that it was very important to state that as wonderful as I feel yoga is, I believe it has its limits. And there's no shame in that. Really, all I’m trying to say here is summed up by the sentence that I opened this post with:

“Yoga is a great thing but it is not everything or the only thing.”

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What is an Advanced Yoga Practice

by Nina

Year-Old Snow and New Snow by Philip Amdal

A number of years ago, I encouraged a close friend of mine, M, to join me in taking Rodney Yee’s advanced class. Even though she had a muscular, athletic, and stiff body that made doing super bendy poses difficult, if not impossible, I knew that she understood how to take care of herself in class, that she would adapt the poses for her particular body type and keep herself safe, so I wasn’t worried about the class being too hard for her. She was interested, however, she expressed some concerns about not being “advanced” enough for the class. I decided to discuss the matter with our teacher himself, feeling fairly sure of what he was going to say. But what he told me when I asked him if she was “advanced” not only took me by surprise but has stuck with me all these years, transforming my thinking about the asana practice in general. What he said was this:

“Of course she’s advanced enough. M does yoga more mindfully than any student I’ve ever seen.”

And here I’d been thinking that being advanced meant being capable of doing difficult poses, like 10 minute headstands or extreme backbends, at some level or another! But doing yoga “mindfully”—now, here was goal we could pursue for our lifetimes and no matter our level of physical capacity was, we would always have the the ability to go deeper and deeper into the practice.

I’m thinking about this today because I’m helping a new friend of mine adapt her practice to allow her to heal from an ongoing injury. It’s taken her a long time to even be ready to temporarily give up certain poses and ways of practicing, because she felt such regrets about excluding poses from her practice that she used to be able to do with such great enjoyment. 

But as Baxter mentioned in his post on Wristful Wrists: How to Keep Your Wrists Safe, sometimes rest is the best way to heal from an injury. So being willing to adopt mindfulness as a goal in the practice rather than achievement is a necessary element in being able to heal from an injury.

People who are aging may find themselves in a similar position, not necessarily due to injury but simply due to the physical changes that come along with aging. To be honest, I used to have what I sometimes call a “semi-fancy” yoga practice. But in the last few years, I developed arthritis in my right hip that makes it impossible to do seated poses that involve a lot of external rotation. Lotus and half lotus are now impossible for me, and seated forward bends and twists that require certain leg positions are painful and difficult. And I now need props in many of the standing poses now. Still there is no question I consider my practice more advanced these days than it was in the years when I regularly took the East Bay’s most “advanced” yoga class.

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Making Yoga Accessible

by Nina

I like to think that Baxter and I have a pretty good idea of the range of physical abilities that yoga practitioners have in the real world. We’ve seen some pretty fancy stuff in person, such as crazy arm balances and impossible-looking backbends. But we also know that that the average person, especially the average middle-aged or older person, isn’t able to do the fancy stuff and sometimes even the classic stuff, such as Triangle pose (Trikonasana) with the bottom hand on the floor. In fact, even Baxter uses a block in that pose (and see how happy he looks!).

And because our blog is pragmatic, rather than inspirational or aspirational, we are committed to making sure the poses and sequences we describe are actually accessible to most people, if not all. (The exception would be some of our challenging sequences, such as the Challenging Agility Practice.) This is why recently Baxter and I have been working together on choosing a basic set of essential yoga asanas (you’ve been seeing some of those in our recent Featured Pose posts) with four different versions for each pose. 

The first version is always the classic version (done without props) of the pose. Then we provide three other more accessible versions. Sometimes the accessible versions use props, which help make the pose safer, more comfortable, or just plain doable for people (see 7 Reasons Why You Should Love Yoga Props). For example, this version of Upward Plank pose (Purvottanasana) with chair makes the pose accessible to people who can’t do the classic version without major straining or discomfort.

Other times, when a prop can’t really help, we simply change up the pose. An example of this is Side Plank pose (Vasithasana). In our post Featured Pose: Side Plank Pose, the first two variations of the classic pose, don’t use props but instead a slightly different shape to the pose (the first with a different foot position and the second with a different arm position): 

The final version reorients the pose completely, so you’re standing upright instead of balancing on the edge of your feet. 

Now you might be wondering why, if we’re so committed to being “accessible,” we don’t include chair versions of every single pose, such as Side Plank pose, so that people who can’t stand unaided, such as seniors and disabilities, can do all the poses. We do think that the chair versions of standing poses are truly wonderful and not necessarily for wimps (see In Praise of Chair Yoga). Here’s a good example of Warrior 2 done in a chair by the great teacher Eric Small:

Although in the future, we will include chair versions of some of the classic standing poses, we have decided not to include chair variations of every single pose because our blog is aimed at a different audience. Our intended audience is both middle aged and older people who want to use their yoga practice to foster healthy aging (see What is Healthy Aging, Anyway?). So we assume that you (or your students) can stand unaided, can get up and down from the floor, and are relatively healthy or are in recovery from illness. 

This is why even though many of our poses and practices can be used by people who cannot stand unaided and need to practice in chairs or wheelchairs (office yoga poses and some chair poses, breath practices, meditation practices, yoga philosophy), we don’t have specific instructions for these groups. Of course, we do think that yoga can provide great benefits to those populations, but that’s just not our target audience. But rest assured that are many great resources out there for these groups, whether that is Sam Dworkis’ book Recovery Yoga, Eric Small’s book on Yoga for Multiple Sclerosis (which has great photographs of chair and wheelchair yoga), or Timothy McCall’s Yoga As Medicine (which includes some excellent poses for people who cannot stand unaided). 

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Is yoga a science or an art

Wet Suit Girl in Stanley Park by Nina Zolotow

"Yoga is both. Where there is a technique, there is science. Yoga has its own technique of physiological, psychological, and supramental well-being of man. Like a musician who plays his instrument, the student or adept in yoga plays with his body, depicting various animate forms of nature. Like a sculptor fashioning out a sculpture, the yogi chisels his body and mind and expands his consciousness into the universe.

"If you accept the view that there is no art without philosophy, yoga is also a kind of philosophy, in which the practitioner is drawn to the shrine of divinity within himself. It is the art of living truly. Yoga does not express a view on life. Rather it is a way toward right living. Hence it is a science, an art, and a philosophy." —B.K.S Iyengar

From Sparks of Divinity: The Teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar from 1959 to 1975, Compiled by Noëlle Perez-Christiaens

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Take Your Time Results from Yoga Practice

by Nina

Horses Grazing by Brad Gibson

It's a running joke in our family that when Brad gets impatient with me—because I often do various household tasks a bit slower than he does—he says to me, "Take your time!" He swears that Bill Murray said this repeatedly in the movie Caddy Shack, but when we watched it again recently, no one actually ever uttered that line. Regardless, I always reply, "You take your time."

But many worthwhile things really do take time. For example, if you want to cook a really good meal instead of eating fast food, you need to shop for fresh ingredients and prepare everything from scratch. And if you want to turn a new acquaintance into a close friend, you need to spend a lot of time together, getting to know and trust each other. The same is true for seeing results from yoga practice. Obviously, one Downward-Facing Dog pose doesn't instantly make your arms stronger, though with regular practice, it definitely will increase your strength. And it also seems obvious that if you want to reduce your stress levels, you'll need to practice stress management regularly over a period of time.

So it was very interesting for me to hear about a recent study at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, that looked at the effect of exercise on insomnia. One of the findings as reported by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times post How Exercise Can Help Us Sleep Better was:

"After the first two months of their exercise program, the exercising volunteers (all of them women) were sleeping no better than at the start of the study. Only after four months of the program had their insomnia improved."

Yes, it took four whole months of regular exercising to bring improvements. That's quite a bit of time, don't you think? The women in this study were not practicing yoga for exercise, but it's likely that using yoga as a form of exercise to help with insomnia (something I definitely recommend) might take a similar amount of time. And it also makes sense to me that if you are practicing yoga for insomnia (see Yoga for Insomnia, Part 1) by using stress management techniques, you should also give that some time (though some people report that doing breath practices in the middle of the night produces immediate results). So be patient.

In general, the time you invest in your yoga practice—whether you are practicing for your physical health, your emotional health or both—is what brings the payoffs. After all, yoga sutra 1.14 tells us that equanimity is attained only through steady, dedicated, attentive practice:

Long, uninterrupted, alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations of the mind. —trans. by B.K.S. Iyengar 

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Experts Weigh In on Injury Risk with Yoga Poses

by Baxter

A few months back, I had the honor of moderating a panel discussion for Yoga Journal Magazine on the topic of injuries that occur when performing yoga poses. In the West, you and I know this physical part of yoga as “asana practice” or the doing of a series or sequence of yoga poses. In many settings, these yoga pose sequences can be devoid of any of the other limbs or aspects of yoga, such as meditation or lifestyle guidelines (like the niyamas). As has been suggested elsewhere, there is an inherent risk of injury to our oh-so-human bodies when we humans engage in physically demanding activities, such as exercise, and yes, even yoga asana.

Joining me for the panel discussion (which appears as an article in the February 2013 Yoga Journal Magazine) were three of the country’s most experienced yoga teachers, representing different yoga traditions:

Gary Kraftsow trained under TKV Desikachar, who focuses on one-on-one instruction, often with a more therapeutic bent.

Patricia Walden has studied with BKS Iyengar for some 40 years, with his attention to solid alignment, static held poses and the assertion that doing asana is another way of doing meditation.

Ana Forrest, also a veteran of almost four decades of teaching, is the founder of her own style of yoga, known as Forrest Yoga. From my limited experience of taking a session with her, I would describe her style as a physically demanding and strong practice, but with attention to the mind and breath.

As we began our discussion, each one of us was able to recall at least one, and sometimes more than one incident of having sustained an injury during yoga practice. In my case, through inattention, for Ana, secondary to being generally disconnected from her body when she first started practicing, for Patricia due to her ego wanting to impress her teacher, and for Gary, long inversions with unskillful sequencing or lack of adequate preparation. So we all had the personal perspective of being a human being who can get injured doing physically challenging yoga poses. Interestingly, in each case, these injuries, which could have been viewed as negative, unwanted events, actually led to important insights as healing occurred, allowing us to feel compassion for our students and for ourselves and giving some tools to help others avoid our mistakes and heal more quickly when injured. 

Some of the important take-home messages from our conversation were that we all would benefit from:

• Remembering that the underlying purpose of yoga is not to master a bunch of difficult yoga poses, but to develop a healthy, deep relationship with our bodies as a gateway to a more important relationship with our mind and heart.
• Working mindfully and gradually to build intelligence in your body and understanding of the poses you do decide to learn, with the guidance of a skilled and experienced instructor who has the same intention for you and who can provide feedback as to your readiness to go further safely.
• Reframing our intention as it relates to yoga poses from mastering poses to helping bodies. If that were your underlying purpose, we would all be less likely to move into situations where we injure ourselves.
•  Realizing from the start that we often bring somewhat injured bodies to our first yoga class, just by virtue of being human and living a typical human life.  If we can keep this in mind, compassion for ourselves arises naturally and we can truly be kind to our bodies as we enjoy the challenge and newness of yoga.
• Studying with teachers whose sequences of poses leaves us feeling really good at the end of practice and the next day. Then learning for ourselves in our home practice how to sequence to do the same. And cutting ourselves some slack if we end up tweaking our bodies now and then!  If three of the country’s most renowned teachers did it, don’t you think we probably all are going to have it happen to us at least once?

The conclusion of all four of us is that yoga’s benefits far outweigh any risk for injury that exists. Setting clear intentions as to what your purpose and hope is by doing yoga is as essential an ingredient as a safe and fruitful practice. Coming back to a relationship with the movement of the breath as a grounding focus for the mind was also strongly encouraged. And finally, as Gary mentioned, remembering the poses are just tools designed to help individuals understand their bodies and transform them, and that the practice is about you and not the poses! Such an attitude goes a long way toward keeping you safe and injury free.

For those last-minute folks who might think about joining us, Gary, Ana and I will all be teaching at the San Francisco Yoga Journal Conference this coming weekend. To read the entire article “Injuries: Why They Happen & How to Avoid Them,” pick up the February issue of Yoga Journal out now or look for it online at yogajournal.com.

Be safe out there while you are having all that fun doing yoga!

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Jill Satterfield Joins Yoga for Healthy Aging!

by Nina

Jill Satterfield by Jamey Lord

I’m excited to announce that I’ve invited Jill Satterfield to join our staff and she has accepted. That means you’ll be hearing from her regularly from now on, probably once a month. And from now on, she’ll write under the name “Jill” and be listed on our About Us page. She already has a page Jill's Workshops and Classes with her classes and workshop information on it as well as Guided Meditations by Jill with some of her guided meditations.

I invited Jill to join us both because we’re big fans of her writing (my favorites include Spiritual Sanity and When Red Flags Should Be Raised) and because she has some expertise in areas that we don’t due to her knowledge of Buddhism well as yoga. Besides being a very experienced, long-time teacher of mindfulness and embodiment practices, she also has a lot of knowledge about helping people with chronic illness and pain, something she has had personal experience with this. And she is currently training to be a hospital chaplain (which I hope she’ll write about sometime). 

The funny thing is that I got to know Jill because of Facebook! After she moved to Berkeley, she posted a photo of a quirky shop near my house. I commented on her post that I lived nearby, which lead to personal messages and then a get-together for tea. Kind of like a blind date only for friendship! We’ve been friends and colleagues ever since, always talking about “work” issues as well as personal ones. I especially appreciate the intellectual discussions we have about differences and similarities between yoga and Buddhism, which has led me to new insights. And some of her posts came out of discussions we had when we got together as friends because I said, "You need to write about that!"

To find out about Jill, see her website: vajrayoga.com. Here are all the posts that Jill has done for us so far:  

Practicing Titration in Difficult Times  

Mindfulness of Sensation 

Checking In: A Guided Meditation  

The Kindness Practice 

Attached to My Face 

Spiritual Sanity  

When Red Flags Should Be Raised 

No Control: Watching Your Breath in Asana

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Friday Q A Back Stretches and Inversions for Chair Yoga

This week, we have a follow-up question to our Friday Q&A on chair yoga (see Friday Q&A: Chair Yoga) from one of our readers who actually teaches a chair yoga class

Q: I teach a chair yoga class which cannot go to the floor for healthy aging. How can I do a safe inversion or back stretch that does not stress the osteopenic back?

A: If you teach chair yoga, many students are older or infirm and not able to transfer from standing or sitting in a chair to the floor, where you might have them do any number of reclining poses that could stretch the back or approach an inversion, like Legs Up the Wall pose (Viparita Karani). 

If by “back stretch” you mean a forward bending action of the spine, like in Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana), in light of possible osteopenic or osteoporotic spine, you need to be careful with most forward folding positions (see What is Ostepenia and How Can Yoga Help?).  It is not hard to do a seated version, however, if that is what you are looking for. One of my favorites that is fairly shallow and would not create too much force on the vertebrae of the spine would involve placing a second chair in front of the first, facing it away from you. Then ask your students to tip as much as possible from the hips and place their crossed forearms on the top seat back of the chair in front of them. This is similar to seated forward fold we showed for our Office Yoga series (see Featured Pose: Chair Forward Bend).

If, however, by “back stretch” you are referring to a back-bending action, then there is a bit less concern of hurting the spines of students with OP.  In seated Cat/Cow pose, the Cow variation is a nice, easy backbend shape that most could do in the chair. (See Featured Pose: Chair Cat Pose.)

Or, have the students stand behind the chair, use the top back rung for their hands for balance purposes and do a gentle standing backbend from Mountain pose (Tadasana).

As for inversions, this may be a bit tougher. You could have them put their chairs against the wall, and if they still have good hip mobility of rolling the pelvis over the femur bones, you could do a Downward-Facing Dog version with the hands on the seat of the chair, walking the hips and feet back into this higher version of regular Downward-Facing Dog, but with a slight downward slant from hips to hands. Make sure they bend their knees as they walk forward towards the chair at the end of the pose, and rise up slowly monitoring for any lightheadedness or dizziness. (See Featured Pose: Downward-Facing Dog (Chair Version)).

And you could show the class how to do Legs Up the Wall pose on the ground, demonstrating it for them, and suggesting they try this at home in their beds, swinging the legs up the headboard side of the bed if the bed is up against a wall. I’d have them only stay for 2 minutes or so at first, as you will not be there to monitor them. Of course give them all the usual precautions regarding inversions and high blood pressure and glaucoma, as the older your crowd, these conditions are more common. I hope these suggestions give you things to consider. And armed with the information from our posts on OP, you can be creative in your approach to working with your chair yoga classes.

—Baxter

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How and Why Yoga Helps with Pain

by Ram

Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh

Say, a heavy object fell on your big toe, or you cut your finger while peeling vegetables, or you applied alcohol over a bruise, or while walking down the street you twisted your ankle and immediately let out a shout—in all these situations, you have experienced an unpleasant feeling due to a tissue damage. When something harmful or irritating affects a part of our body, there is a biological response to try to remove it. This response takes the form of the unpleasant feeling/sensation called pain (see Yoga for Pain Management). 

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage.” You may ask why should anyone experience pain? Well, pain is part of the body’s inherent protective mechanism to:

• motivate you to pull out from a damaging situation and prevent further damage to the tissue
• allow the damaged tissue to rest and begin the healing process
• avoid similar encounters

Thus, you may appreciate the fact that pain is beneficial in a true sense when, for example, your back sustains a blow and the injured tissues need care and protection. Individuals who suffer from congenital insensitivity to the pain response are easily injured and most of them die at an early age. On the flip side, pain is a major symptom in several medical conditions that can interfere with a person's quality of life and general functioning as well see Interview with Shari and Bonnie on Pain Management). In these cases, pain turns out to be the most common reason for individuals to visit their physician.

Several classes of pain exist based on the initial stimulus and the site of damage:

1. Nociceptive pain (pain due to excess heat or cold; pain due to mechanical damage as in crushing, tearing; pain due to chemicals: pepper powder in the eyes; alcohol on bruises), 
2. Inflammatory pain (pain associated with acute or chronic inflammation—see Chronic Inflammation and Yoga)
3. Neuropathic pain (pain due to damage to nerves as in burning, tingling, stabbing, pins and needles, etc.)
4. Pathological pain (pain due to abnormal function such as arthritic pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, etc.)
5. Cancer pain (Cancer pain is complex as it constitutes a varied combination of pain types)

Just like inflammation, the phenomenon of pain is generally transient, and recedes when the stimulus is removed or the damaged tissue has healed. In a perfect setting or perfect body, pain occurs just as it should when needed, and turns off when the stimulus is withdrawn and the tissue has healed. However, there are certain abnormal pathological conditions where pain is a constant feature and persists for a long time. This is chronic pain that lasts beyond the expected period of healing. Unfortunately, chronic pain brings with it other health issues including constant fear, worry, anxiety, depression, and memory deficits. It is unclear if chronic pain triggers these co-morbidities or vice versa.

The entire process, starting from the initial stimulus to the actual pain response and the waning of the pain, involves several specialized receptors, neurochemicals, and transmission of the pain information through specialized channels. For example, if you cut your finger while chopping vegetables, this response triggers numerous events: a) mechanical stimulation from the sharp object, b) injury to the tissue, c) release of certain chemicals at the site of damage, d) signals from damaged tissue and the chemicals stimulate nerve endings found in the skin, muscle, joints, bone and viscera, e) information travels from the nerve endings to the spinal cord, for suitable action to be generated. The end result is the damaged area gets flooded by various inflammatory molecules and chemicals, including Histamine, Arachidonic acid, and Substance P, all of which trigger the pain response. Furthermore, when these pain signals traverse through certain areas of the brain, they stimulate a set of autonomic responses resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure, rapid breathing and sweating.

Several factors can influence the pain perception including:

Age. As brain areas degenerate with age, brain circuitry also diminishes, so older people have lower pain tolerance and face severe problems dealing with pain.

Gender. In general, women have lower pain threshold and a higher sensitivity to pain. This could be due to hormonal changes that may be modifying the pain perception system.

Memory. Our past experience dealing with pain can influence neural responses to the incoming pain stimulus. 

Whether for acute or chronic pain, interventions include pain relievers/killers, including over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs-Advil, Motrin), or prescription painkillers that are opium-like powerful drugs. Is there an alternate way to overcome pain, especially chronic pain? There are several studies that report the benefits of yoga in curbing pain. Yoga helps in the following ways: 

1. Yoga asanas trigger increased flow of oxygen to the brain and muscle tissues that improves energy levels and sense of wellbeing.
2. Yoga asanas help to release muscle tension and stretch the muscles thereby reducing the intensity of the pain
3. Yoga asanas can create more mental clarity thereby decreasing the level of perceived suffering
4. Yoga stress management practices, including meditation, focused relaxation, and relaxing asanas, help you cope with stress that can have a feedback effect on improving pain.

Furthermore, in animal models, research studies show that physical activity and a socially enriched environment reduce pain behavior. Similarly, studies in humans reveal that the practice of meditation and/or yoga reduces pain perception. Patients with chronic pain have accelerated, age-associated gray matter loss and decreased insular connectivity. The gray matter together with the associated insular areas plays important roles in emotion, perception, motor control, and self-awareness. It is not clear if pain triggers the gray matter loss and insular connectivity or vice versa.

In a recent study Insular Cortex Mediates Increased Pain Tolerance in Yoga Practitioners, a group of researchers concluded that yoga may prevent age-related gray matter loss and also increase intra-insular connectivity, thereby increasing the pain tolerance. The research study involved 14 experienced yoga practitioners and 14 individuals who did not have any practice of mind-body techniques (individuals were matched for gender, age, body mass index, left/right handedness, education, and exercise level other than yoga). The cold pain tolerance test involved immersing the hand in cold water until they could no longer tolerate the cold pain. The researchers conducted brain-imaging scans to examine the structural and functional differences in gray matter and white matter between the two groups. They also noted the strategies adopted by the individuals to tolerate the pain. The results were not very surprising: 

1. Yoga practitioners tolerated cold pain more than twice as long as the non-yoga individuals.
2. Researchers found a significant difference in gray matter volume in brain areas associated with pain processing, pain regulation, and attention.The increase in gray matter volume was associated with increases in the insular connectivity that correlated with the higher pain tolerance
3. Yoga practitioners had increased white matter (this would indicate extension of nerve fibers and improved nerve signaling). 
4. Yoga practitioners used various cognitive strategies to withstand the pain (such as observing the pain sensation but not reacting and using breath-relaxation techniques to accept the sensation) while most non yoga individuals were unable to think of such strategies. 

While definitive causal conclusions cannot be made, it is worthwhile to note that regular, long-term yoga practice seems to help individuals to deal with unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with pain. Take home message: Yoga In, Pain Out!

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