Therapeutic Yoga
Your body is amazingly adaptive. Whatever you present it with—your posture, your diet, your aches, or your worries—becomes a blueprint for the form your body takes. Unfortunately your body doesn’t consider whether that change is in your long-term best interest. We see this in people who’ve been injured and learned ways of moving to avoid the pain of the injury. Often those habits persist long after the injury has healed and the pain is gone, leaving the healed body stiff or bent. We see it in post-traumatic stress, in which hypersensitivity persists long after the danger that caused it is gone. And we see it in the limitations we too often accept as “natural” as we mature.
The problem is that the body can be “set in its ways.” A sudden return to exercise after time away or even simply asking the body to move in unaccustomed ways can cause it to rebel and punish you for pushing it out of its comfort zone. When that happens there are several ways you can respond. You can let your body have its way and stay in its limited state. You can force the change and risk anything from painful muscle aches to serious long-term damage. Or you can gently lead your body into healthy, positive new habits.
Therapeutic yoga, Somatics, and meditation are practices designed to work with your body to overcome old habits and limitations, retraining muscles and nerves for the natural ways in which they were designed to act. Unlike stretching, in which the muscles remain passive and the nerves inactive, therapeutic yoga and Somatics activate the muscles, “waking up” nerve pathways that may have been underutilized for years. Weak muscles become stronger without straining, and the muscles that had to compensate for the underused ones become less stressed. Muscles and joints begin to explore their full intended range, reducing pain and moving beyond the artificial limitations of habit.
With consistent practice you will see posture, function, and flexibility improving. Range of motion will increase, and you will begin to feel more energetic as your body is freed of built-up tension. With a combination of therapeutic yoga and Somatics, students reconnect with their bodies, moving with more freedom, improved function and greater range of motion. This relaxation of chronically tight muscles can help with:
- TMJ
- Sciatica
- Back and disk problems
- Arthritis
- Hip, pelvis, and shoulder problems
- Hamstring tightness or injury
- Muscle stiffness and tension.
As part of the practice, meditation helps quiet the mental “chatter” that keeps mind and body in a state of stress, distracting us in the day and keeping us awake at night. Like tuning a radio, meditation eliminates the static while allowing the signal to come through clearly. This “tuning” lets you respond to what’s really going on within and around you rather than to old anxieties and new worries. Studies have shown that minutes a day of meditation can help increase focus, reduce anxiety, decrease stress, and improve sleep.
Best of all, these practices do all this, not by external means but by triggering your system’s own healthy healing and operating mechanisms. It’s neither medicine nor magic; it’s simply removing impediments to allow your body and mind to do what they were designed to do.
