38 Ways Yoga Keeps You Fit
Count on Yoga: 38 Ways Yoga Keeps You Fit
Are you looking for reasons to start practicing? Here are ways yoga improves your health: reasons enough to roll out the mat and get started.
By Timothy McCall, M.D.
If you’re a passionate yoga practitioner, you’ve probably noticed the ways yoga works maybe you’re sleeping better or getting fewer colds or just feeling more relaxed and at ease. But if you’ve ever tried telling a newbie how it works, you might find that explanations like “It increases the flow of prana” or “It brings energy up your spine” fall on deaf or skeptical ears.
As it happens, Western science is starting to provide some concrete clues as to how yoga works to improve health, heal aches and pains, and keep sickness at bay. Once you understand them, you’ll have even more motivation to step onto your mat, and you probably won’t feel so tongue-tied the next time someone wants Western proof.
I myself have experienced yoga’s healing power in a very real way. Weeks before a trip to India in 2002 to investigate yoga therapy, I developed numbness and tingling in my right hand. After first considering scary things like a brain tumor and multiple sclerosis, I figured out that the cause of the symptoms was thoracic outlet syndrome, a nerve blockage in my neck and chest.
Despite the uncomfortable symptoms, I realized how useful my condition could be during my trip. While visiting various yoga therapy centers, I would submit myself for evaluation and treatment by the various experts I’d arranged to observe. I could try their suggestions and see what worked for me. While this wasn’t exactly a controlled scientific experiment, I knew that such hands-on learning could teach me things I might not otherwise understand.
My experiment proved illuminating. At the Vivekananda ashram just outside of Bangalore, S. Nagarathna, M.D., recommended breathing exercises in which I imagined bringing prana (vital energy) into my right upper chest. Other therapy included asana, pranayama, meditation, chanting, lectures on philosophy, and various kriya (internal cleansing practices). At the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai and from A.G. Mohan and his wife, Indra, who practice just outside of Chennai, I was told to stop practicing Headstand and Shoulderstand in favor of gentle asana coordinated with the breath. In Pune, S.V. Karandikar, a medical doctor, recommended practices with ropes and belts to put traction on my spine and exercises that taught me to use my shoulder blades to open my upper back.
Thanks to the techniques I learned in India, advice from teachers in the United States, and my own exploration, my chest is more flexible than it was, my posture has improved, and for more than a year, I’ve been free of symptoms.
My experience inspired me to pore over the scientific studies I’d collected in India as well as the West to identify and explain how yoga can both prevent disease and help you recover from it. Here is what I found.
Flex Time
1 Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you probably won’t be able to touch your toes, never mind do a backbend. But if you stick with it, you’ll notice a gradual loosening, and eventually, seemingly impossible poses will become possible. You’ll also probably notice that aches and pains start to disappear. That’s no coincidence. Tight hips can strain the knee joint due to improper alignment of the thigh and shinbones. Tight hamstrings can lead to a flattening of the lumbar spine, which can cause back pain. And inflexibility in muscles and connective tissue, such as fascia and ligaments, can cause poor posture.
Strength Test
2 Strong muscles do more than look good. They also protect us from conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in elderly people. And when you build strength through yoga, you balance it with flexibility. If you just went to the gym and lifted weights, you might build strength at the expense of flexibility.
Standing Orders
3 Your head is like a bowling ball: big, round, and heavy. When it is balanced directly over an erect spine, it takes much less work for your neck and back muscles to support it. Move it several inches forward, however, and you start to strain those muscles. Hold up that forward-leaning bowling ball for eight or 12 hours a day and it is no wonder you are tired. And fatigue might not be your only problem. Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine.
Joint Account
4 Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or mitigate disability by “squeezing and soaking” areas of cartilage that normally aren’t used. Joint cartilage is like a sponge; it receives fresh nutrients only when its fluid is squeezed out and a new supply can be soaked up. Without proper sustenance, neglected areas of cartilage can eventually wear out, exposing the underlying bone like worn-out brake pads.
Spinal Rap
5 Spinal disks the shock absorbers between the vertebrae that can herniate and compress nerves rave movement. That’s the only way they get their nutrients. If you’ve got a well-balanced asana practice with plenty of backbends, forward bends, and twists, you’ll help keep your disks supple.
Bone Zone
6 It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift your own weight. And some, like Downward- and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures. In an unpublished study conducted at California State University, Los Angeles, yoga practice increased bone density in the vertebrae. Yoga’s ability to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol (see Number 11) may help keep calcium in the bones.
Flow Chart
7 Yoga gets your blood flowing. More specifically, the relaxation exercises you learn in yoga can help your circulation, especially in your hands and feet. Yoga also gets more oxygen to your cells, which function better as a result. Twisting poses are thought to wring out venous blood from internal organs and allow oxygenated blood to flow in once the twist is released. Inverted poses, such as Headstand, Handstand, and Shoulderstand, encourage venous blood from the legs and pelvis to flow back to the heart, where it can be pumped to the lungs to be freshly oxygenated. This can help if you have swelling in your legs from heart or kidney problems. Yoga also boosts levels of hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the tissues. And it thins the blood by making platelets less sticky and by cutting the level of clot-promoting proteins in the blood. This can lead to a decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the cause of these killers.
Lymph Lesson
8 When you contract and stretch muscles, move organs around, and come in and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of lymph (a viscous fluid rich in immune cells). This helps the lymphatic system fight infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste products of cellular functioning.
Heart Start
9 When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you lower your risk of heart attack and can relieve depression. While not all yoga is aerobic, if you do it vigorously or take flow or Ashtanga classes, it can boost your heart rate into the aerobic range. But even yoga exercises that don’t get your heart rate up that high can improve cardiovascular conditioning. Studies have found that yoga practice lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise all reflections of improved aerobic conditioning. One study found that subjects who were taught only pranayama could do more exercise with less oxygen.
Pressure Drop
10 If you’ve got high blood pressure, you might benefit from yoga. Two studies of people with hypertension, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, compared the effects of Savasana (Corpse Pose) with simply lying on a couch. After three months, Savasana was associated with a 26-point drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number) and a 15-point drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) and the higher the initial blood pressure, the bigger the drop.
Worry Thwarts
11 Yoga lowers cortisol levels. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider this. Normally, the adrenal glands secrete cortisol in response to an acute crisis, which temporarily boosts immune function. If your cortisol levels stay high even after the crisis, they can compromise the immune system. Temporary boosts of cortisol help with long-term memory, but chronically high levels undermine memory and may lead to permanent changes in the brain. Additionally, excessive cortisol has been linked with major depression, osteoporosis (it extracts calcium and other minerals from bones and interferes with the laying down of new bone), high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. In rats, high cortisol levels lead to what researchers call “food-seeking behavior” (the kind that drives you to eat when you’re upset, angry, or stressed). The body takes those extra calories and distributes them as fat in the abdomen, contributing to weight gain and the risk of diabetes and heart attack.
Happy Hour
12 Feeling sad? Sit in Lotus. Better yet, rise up into a backbend or soar royally into King Dancer Pose. While it is not as simple as that, one study found that a consistent yoga practice improved depression and led to a significant increase in serotonin levels and a decrease in the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol. At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Ph.D., found that the left prefrontal cortex showed heightened activity in meditators, a finding that has been correlated with greater levels of happiness and better immune function. More dramatic left-sided activation was found in dedicated, long-term practitioners.
Weighty Matters
13 Move more, eat less that’s the adage of many a dieter. Yoga can help on both fronts. A regular practice gets you moving and burns calories, and the spiritual and emotional dimensions of your practice may encourage you to address any eating and weight problems on a deeper level. Yoga may also inspire you to become a more conscious eater.
Low Show
14 Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and boosts HDL (“good”) cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the effects of insulin. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney failure, and blindness.
Brain Waves
15 An important component of yoga is focusing on the present. Studies have found that regular yoga practice improves coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who practice Transcendental Meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better probably because they are less distracted by their thoughts, which can play over and over like an endless tape loop.
Nerve Center
16 Yoga encourages you to relax, slow your breath, and focus on the present, shifting the balance from the sympathetic nervous system (or the fight-or-flight response) to the parasympathetic nervous system. The latter is calming and restorative; it lowers breathing and heart rates, decreases blood pressure, and increases blood flow to the intestines and reproductive organs comprising what Herbert Benson, M.D., calls the relaxation response.
Space Place
17 Regularly practicing yoga increases proprioception (the ability to feel what your body is doing and where it is in space) and improves balance. People with bad posture or dysfunctional movement patterns usually have poor proprioception, which has been linked to knee problems and back pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing home or never entering one at all. For the rest of us, postures like Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.
Control Center
18 Some advanced yogis can control their bodies in extraordinary ways, many of which are mediated by the nervous system. Scientists have monitored yogis who could induce unusual heart rhythms, generate specific brain-wave patterns, and, using a meditation technique, raise the temperature of their hands by 15 degrees Fahrenheit. If they can use yoga to do that, perhaps you could learn to improve blood flow to your pelvis if you’re trying to get pregnant or induce relaxation when you’re having trouble falling asleep.
Loose Limbs
19 Do you ever notice yourself holding the telephone or a steering wheel with a death grip or scrunching your face when staring at a computer screen? These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue, and soreness in the wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, which can increase stress and worsen your mood. As you practice yoga, you begin to notice where you hold tension: It might be in your tongue, your eyes, or the muscles of your face and neck. If you simply tune in, you may be able to release some tension in the tongue and eyes. With bigger muscles like the quadriceps, trapezius, and buttocks, it may take years of practice to learn how to relax them.
Chill Pill
20 Stimulation is good, but too much of it taxes the nervous system. Yoga can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life. Restorative asana, yoga nidra (a form of guided relaxation), Savasana, pranayama, and meditation encourage pratyahara, a turning inward of the senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system. Another by-product of a regular yoga practice, studies suggest, is better sleep which means you’ll be less tired and stressed and less likely to have accidents.
Immune Boon
21 Asana and pranayama probably improve immune function, but, so far, meditation has the strongest scientific support in this area. It appears to have a beneficial effect on the functioning of the immune system, boosting it when needed (for example, raising antibody levels in response to a vaccine) and lowering it when needed (for instance, mitigating an inappropriately aggressive immune function in an autoimmune disease like psoriasis).
Breathing Room
22 Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet taught a yogic technique known as “complete breathing” to people with lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After one month, their average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly, as did the oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other things you’d rather not take into your lungs.
Poop Scoop
23 Ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation: all of these can be exacerbated by stress. So if you stress less, you’ll suffer less. Yoga, like any physical exercise, can ease constipation and theoretically lower the risk of colon cancer because moving the body facilitates more rapid transport of food and waste products through the bowels. And, although it has not been studied scientifically, yogis suspect that twisting poses may be beneficial in getting waste to move through the system.
Peace of Mind
24 Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind, according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. In other words, it slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress is implicated in so many health problems from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks. If you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll be likely to live longer and healthier.
Divine Sign
25 Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. If you handle this negatively take drugs, overeat, work too hard, sleep around. You may pay the price in poorer health physically, mentally, and spiritually. If you take a positive approach and practice yoga, you’ll sense, initially in brief glimpses and later in more sustained views, that you’re worthwhile or, as yogic philosophy teaches, that you are a manifestation of the Divine. If you practice regularly with an intention of self-examination and betterment got just as a substitute for an aerobics class. You can access a different side of yourself. You’ll experience feelings of gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, as well as a sense that you’re part of something bigger. While better health is not the goal of spirituality, it’s often a by-product, as documented by repeated scientific studies.
Pain Drain
26 Yoga can ease your pain. According to several studies, asana, meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain in people with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other chronic conditions. When you relieve your pain, your mood improves, you’re more inclined to be active, and you don’t need as much medication.
Heat Treatment
27 Yoga can help you make changes in your life. In fact, that might be its greatest strength. Tapas, the Sanskrit word for “heat,” is the fire, the discipline that fuels yoga practice and that regular practice builds. The tapas you develop can be extended to the rest of your life to overcome inertia and change dysfunctional habits. You may find that without making a particular effort to change things, you start to eat better, exercise more, or finally quit smoking after years of failed attempts.
Guru Gifts
28 Good yoga teachers can do wonders for your health. Exceptional ones do more than guide you through the postures. They can adjust your posture, gauge when you should go deeper in poses or back off, deliver hard truths with compassion, help you relax, and enhance and personalize your practice. A respectful relationship with a teacher goes a long way toward promoting your health.
Drug Free
29 If your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, maybe it’s time to try yoga. Studies of people with asthma, high blood pressure, Type II diabetes (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), and obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown that yoga helped them lower their dosage of medications and sometimes get off them entirely. The benefits of taking fewer drugs? You’ll spend less money, and you’re less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug interactions.
Hostile Makeover
30 Yoga and meditation build awareness. And the more aware you are, the easier it is to break free of destructive emotions like anger. Studies suggest that chronic anger and hostility are as strongly linked to heart attacks as are smoking, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol. Yoga appears to reduce anger by increasing feelings of compassion and interconnection and by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from the drama of your own life, to remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can still react quickly when you need to and there’s evidence that yoga speeds reaction time. But you can take that split second to choose a more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others.
Good Relations
31 Love may not conquer all, but it certainly can aid in healing. Cultivating the emotional support of friends, family, and community has been demonstrated repeatedly to improve health and healing. A regular yoga practice helps develop friendliness, compassion, and greater equanimity. Along with yogic philosophy’s emphasis on avoiding harm to others, telling the truth, and taking only what you need, this may improve many of your relationships.
Sound System
32 The basics of yoga asana, pranayama, and meditation will work to improve your health, but there’s more in the yoga toolbox. Consider chanting. It tends to prolong exhalation, which shifts the balance toward the parasympathetic nervous system. When done in a group, chanting can be a particularly powerful physical and emotional experience. A recent study from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute suggests that humming sounds like those made while chanting Om open the sinuses and facilitate drainage.
Vision Quest
33 If you contemplate an image in your mind’s eye, as you do in yoga nidra and other practices, you can effect change in your body. Several studies have found that guided imagery reduced postoperative pain, decreased the frequency of headaches, and improved the quality of life for people with cancer and HIV.
Clean Machine
34 Kriyas, or cleansing practices, are another element of yoga. They include everything from rapid breathing exercises to elaborate internal cleansings of the intestines. Jala neti, which entails a gentle lavage of the nasal passages with salt water, removes pollen and viruses from the nose, keeps mucus from building up, and helps drains the sinuses.
Karma Concept
35 Karma yoga (service to others) is integral to yogic philosophy. And while you may not be inclined to serve others, your health might improve if you do. A study at the University of Michigan found that older people who volunteered a little less than an hour per week were three times as likely to be alive seven years later. Serving others can give meaning to your life, and your problems may not seem so daunting when you see what other people are dealing with.
Healing Hope
36 In much of conventional medicine, most patients are passive recipients of care. In yoga, it’s what you do for yourself that matters. Yoga gives you the tools to help you change, and you might start to feel better the first time you try practicing. You may also notice that the more you commit to practice, the more you benefit. This results in three things: You get involved in your own care, you discover that your involvement gives you the power to effect change, and seeing that you can effect change gives you hope. And hope itself can be healing.
Connective Tissue
37 As you read all the ways yoga improves your health, you probably noticed a lot of overlap. That’s because they’re intensely interwoven. Change your posture and you change the way you breathe. Change your breathing and you change your nervous system. This is one of the great lessons of yoga: Everything is connected: your hipbone to your anklebone, you to your community, your community to the world. This interconnection is vital to understanding yoga. This holistic system simultaneously taps into many mechanisms that have additive and even multiplicative effects. This synergy may be the most important way of all that yoga heals.
Placebo Power
38 Just believing you will get better can make you better. Unfortunately, many conventional scientists believe that if something works by eliciting the placebo effect, it doesn’t count. But most patients just want to get better, so if chanting a mantra like you might do at the beginning or end of yoga class or throughout a meditation or in the course of your day facilitates healing, even if it’s just a placebo effect, why not do it?
Timothy McCall, M.D., is Yoga Journal’s medical editor and a board-certified specialist in internal medicine. His book Yoga as Medicine will be released in fall 2005. Check with your health care provider before following any of the recommendations given in this article.
Just Let Go
Sometimes the simplest advice can be the hardest to take. Here’s how to practice detachment without giving up on life.
By Sally Kempton
I’ll never forget the first time I seriously considered the relationship between detachment and freedom. I was in my 20s, staying with a friend in Vermont, trying to recover some equilibrium in the midst of a difficult breakup. One evening, bored with my moping, my friend tuned in the local alternative radio station, which happened to be broadcasting Ram Dass. He was telling a famous anecdote about the way you catch a monkey in India. You drop a handful of nuts into a jar with a small opening, he explained. The monkey puts his hand into the jar, grabs the nuts, and then finds that he can’t get his fist out through the opening. If the monkey would just let go of the nuts, he could escape. But he won’t.
Attachment leads to suffering, Ram Dass concluded. It’s as simple as that: Detachment leads to freedom.
I knew he was talking directly to me. Between my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and my painful relationship, I was definitely attachednd definitely suffering. But letting go of my fistful of nuts seemed unthinkable. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without the drama of a love affair, without cigarettes and coffeeot to mention other, subtler addictions, like worry, resentment, and judgment. Still, the story of the monkey and the jar stayed with me, a depth charge waiting to go off.
A year later, I had become a fledgling yogi. I no longer hung around with girlfriends who would listen to my latest troubles. Instead, my time was spent with people whose answer to any expression of discontentment was, “Let it go.” Pursuing simplicity, I had blithely flung away my career, my apartment, and my boyfriend. What I hadn’t managed to get rid of were the worry, the resentment, and the tendency to criticize. In short, I had simply moved from one behavioral pole to the other, and as a result, I was still suffering.
Only the Trying
It took me a few years of throwing out the baby instead of the bathwater to figure out that detachment is not about external things. In fact, as is so often the case with the big issues of spiritual life, detachment involves a deep paradox. It’s true that those without a lot of clutter in their lives have more time for inner practice. But in the long run, disengaging ourselves from family, possessions, political activism, friendships, and career pursuits can actually impoverish our inner lives. Engagement with people and places, skills and ideas, money and possessions is what grounds inner practice in reality. Without these external relationships, and the pressure they create, it’s hard to learn compassion; to whittle away at anger, pride, and hardness of heart; to put spiritual insights into action.
So we can’t use detachment as an excuse not to deal with fundamental issues such as livelihood, power, self-esteem, and relationships with other people. (Well, we can, but eventually those issues will rise up and smack us in the face, like an insulted ingenue in a 1950s movie.) Nor can we make detachment a synonym for indifference, or carelessness, or passivity. Instead, we can practice detachment as a skill. Perhaps the essential skill for infusing our lives with integrity and grace.
The Bhagavad Gita, which is surely the basic text on the practice of detachment, is wonderfully explicit on this point. Krishna tells Arjuna that acting with detachment means doing the right thing for its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about success or failure. (T.S. Eliot paraphrased Krishna’s advice when he wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”)
At the same time, Krishna repeatedly reminds Arjuna not to cop out of doing his best in the role his destiny demands of him. In a sense, the Bhagavad Gita is one long teaching on how to act with maximum grace while under maximum pressure. The Gita actually addresses many of the questions that we have about detachment.Pointing out, for instance, that we are really supposed to give up not our families or our capacity for enjoyment but our tendency to identify with our bodies and personalities instead of with pure, deathless Awareness.
Questions, Questions
Yet the Bhagavad Gita doesn’t deal with all of our questions. That’s just as well; the real juice of the inner life is discovering, step by step, how to find these answers for ourselves. For instance, how do we fall in love and remain detached? Where do we find the motivation to start a business, write a novel, get ourselves through law school, or work in the emergency room of a city hospital unless we care deeply about the outcome of what we’re doing? What is the relationship between desire and detachment? What’s the difference between real detachment and the indifference that comes with burnout?
What about social activism? Is it possible, for example, to fight for justice without getting caught up in anger or a sense of unfairness? And then there’s the relationship between detachment and excellence. It’s nearly impossible to excel at anything including spiritual practice of we aren’t prepared to throw ourselves in 100 percent. Can we do that and still be detached?
Then there are the really knotty issues, the situations that seem literally defined by attachment, like our relationship to our children or to our own bodies. How do we work with attachments so visceral that to let go of them feels like letting go of life itself?
I have a friend whose 18-year-old son dropped out of school and now lives on the streets, choosing not to get a job. My friend and her ex-husband did everything they could to keep their son in school, including promising to support him financially through any form of educational training he chose. When none of their efforts worked, they acted on professional advice and withdrew financial support. Now, when they want to see him, they drive six hours north and go to the park where he hangs out and look for him. Their son seems fine with the whole situation, but they still wake up in the middle of the night, imagining him cold and hungry or seriously injured, and they move daily through different stages of worry, fear, and anger.
“This is the choice he’s making about the way he wants to live his life,” they tell themselves, drawing on the spiritual teachings that have nurtured them. “It’s part of his journey. He has his own karma.” But how do you stop being attached to your son’s well-being? Can you just cut the cord that binds you to that long-cultivated feeling of concern and responsibility? During times like this usually times of loss, since loss is notoriously more difficult to detach from than success, face the hard truth about detachment practice: Detachment is rarely something we achieve once and for all. It’s a moment-by-moment, day-by-day process of accepting reality as it presents itself, doing our best to align our actions with what we think is right, and surrendering the outcome.
On one of the homeless son’s birthdays, his mother found him, took him to dinner, and bought him new clothes. He didn’t like the pants, so he left them and went off in his old ones. “At least I saw him. At least I could tell him that I loved him,” my friend said later. “I could remind him that anytime he wants to make other choices, we’re here to help him.”
I admire the way this woman holds the complexity of her feelings about her son, doing what she can while still recognizing what she has no power to do, looking for a way to find the best in the situation without glossing over its difficulties. There’s nothing Pollyanna-ish about her detachment; it’s hard-won. Life demands this of all of us?I>all of usooner or later, because if this world is a school meant to teach us how to love, it’s also a school for teaching us how to deal with loss.
Detachment, Step by Step
When things are going well for us, when we feel strong and positive, when we’re healthy and full of inspiration, when we’re in love, it’s easy to wonder why the yogic texts carry on so much about detachment. When we’re faced with loss, grief, or failure, it looks much more appealingur practice in detachment becomes a lifeline that can move us out of acute suffering into something close to peace.
Yet we can’t leapfrog into detachment. That’s why the Bhagavad Gita recommends developing our detachment muscles by working them day by day, starting with the small stuff. Detachment takes practice, and it reveals itself in stages.
Stage One: Acknowledgment
When we’re dealing with a major loss or strong attachment, we always need to begin by acknowledging and working with our feelings. These feelings are the stickiest aspects of attachment: the excited desire we feel when we want something, the anxiety we feel about losing it, and the sense of hopelessness that can arise when we fail to achieve it.
Acknowledgment doesn’t just mean recognizing that you want something badly or that you’re feeling loss. When you want something, feel how you want itind the wanting feeling in your body. When you’re feeling cocky about a victory, be with the part of yourself that wants to beat your chest and say, “Me, me, me!” Rather than pushing away the anxiety and fear of losing what you care about, let it come up and breathe into it. And when you’re experiencing the hopelessness of actual loss, allow it in. Let yourself cry.
Stage Two: Self-Inquiry
Once you’ve felt your feelings, you’ll need to process them through self-inquiry. To do this, start by probing the feeling space that the desire or grief or hopelessness brings up in your consciousness, perhaps naming it to yourself, and gradually breathing out the content, the story line. (It sometimes helps to talk to yourself for a while beforehand, to take care of the part of you that needs comforting. Remind yourself that you do have resources, recall helpful teachings, pray for help and guidance, or simply say, “May I be healed,” with each exhalation.)
To begin the self-inquiry part of the process, bring yourself into contact with your inner witness. Then explore the energy in the feelings. As you go deeper into this energy, its knotty, sticky quality will start to dissolvefor the time being. In any process for working with feelings, it’s important to find a way to explore your feelings that allows you both to be present with them and to stand a little aside from them.
Stage Three: Processing
In the third stage of detachment, you begin to become aware of what has been useful in the journey you’ve just taken, in the task or relationship or life stage you’re working with, regardless of how it all turned out. The mother who came back after her son’s birthday and thought, “At least I saw him,” was experiencing one version of that recognition. Many of us reach the third stage of detachment when we realize that we have actually gained something, even if it’s just a lesson in what not to do.
A young scientist I know spent two years on a career-defining study and was nearing a breakthrough when he picked up a journal one day and found that someone else had gotten there before him. He was devastated and lost his enthusiasm for his work. “My mind kept coming up with hopeless thoughts,” he told me. “I’d find myself thinking, ‘You’re just unlucky; the gods of science won’t ever let you succeed.’ I didn’t even want to go to the lab.”
He learned to move through his hopelessness using a combination of tactics: mindfulness (“It’s just a thought”), talking back to it (“Things will get better!”), and prayer. He told me he knew he’d begun to detach (the word he used, actually, was heal) when he realized how much he’d learned from the research he’d done, and how it would come in handy later.
Stage Four: Creative Action
The scientist will have reached the fourth stage of detachment when he’s able to start something new with real enthusiasm for the doing of it, rather than out of the need to prove something.
Loss or desire can paralyze us, so that we find ourselves without the will to act or else acting in meaningless, ineffective ways. One of the reasons we take time to process is so that when we do act, we’re not paralyzed by fear or driven by the frantic need to do something (anything!) to convince ourselves we have some degree of control. In the early stages of loss, or in the grip of strong desire, it is sometimes better just to do the minimum for basic survival. As you move forward in the processing, however, ideas and plans will start to bubble up inside you, and you’ll feel actual interest in doing them. This is when you can take creative action.
Stage Five: Freedom
You’ve reached this stage when thinking about your loss (or the thing you desire) doesn’t interfere with your normal feelings of well-being. Desire, fear, and hopelessness are deeply embedded in our psyches, and we feel their pull whenever any remnant of attachment exists. We know that we’ve begun to achieve real detachment in a situation when we can contemplate what’s occurring without immediately getting blindsided by these feelings.
The fifth stage is a state of true liberation, which the sage Abhinavagupta describes as the feeling of putting down a heavy burden. It’s no small thing. Every time we free ourselves from one of those sticky feelings, we unlock another link in what the yogic texts call the chain of bondage.
Detachment as Offering
Whether we’re doing it daily or as a way of dealing with a big bump in our road, practicing detachment is easier if we do it with a soft attitude. I have a huge amount of respect for the Zen warrior approach to the inner life, the one in which you heroically renounce your weaknesses and tough out the hard stuff, perhaps using your sense of humor to give you the power to move forward. But when I try to detach in that way, it seems to lead to a kind of emotional deep freeze.
So instead, the way I ease myself toward detachment is to practice offering. I connect myself to the inner Presence (the Vedantic texts call it Being/Awareness/Bliss), and then I offer up whatever it is that I’m doing, whatever I’m intending or wanting, or whatever I’m trying to get free of. That’s the time-honored method set forth in the Bhagavad Gita: Offer the fruits of your labor to God.
Every spiritual tradition includes some form of offering (and some form of God), but for detachment practice, the two most powerful ways to offer are to dedicate your actions and to turn over your fears, desires, doubts, and obstructions to the one Consciousness. Offering our actions helps train us to do things not for any particular gain or personal purpose but simply as an act of praise or gratitude, or as a way of joining our consciousness to the greater Consciousness. Offering our desires, fears, and doubts loosens the hold they have on us, reminding us to trust in the Presencehe source of both our longings and their fulfillment.
Here is what the practice of offering might look like.
First, call to mind the largest and most benign level of reality you can connect to whether it is humanity, a particular teacher or divine form, a sense of oneness, or simply the great collective of the natural world: humans, animals, plants, the earth and air, the stars and planets and space itself. Or simply become aware of your own being, the Presence or energy that feels most essential to your life.
Once you’ve done this, bring to mind the action you’re about to do or the outcome you’re hoping to bring about. Mentally make an offering of it to the Presence. You can say something like, “I offer this to the source of all, asking that it be accomplished in the best possible way.” If your issue is a strong attachment or something that disturbs you about yourself, your life, or someone else, bring it to mind and offer that. You might say, “May there be balance and harmony in this situation,” or “May things work out for the benefit of all,” or “May things work out according to the highest good.”
If you care deeply about what you’re offeringour desire for a particular relationship, or your wish for the well-being of yourself or of someone you love you may notice that you’re reluctant to let go of it. If that’s the case, offer it again. Keep offering it until you feel a loosening of your identification with your hope, fear, desire, anger, or feeling of injustice. Whenever you feel the clutch of attachment, offer it again.
Once you’ve made the offering, let yourself linger in the feeling space you’ve created inside yourself. The nurturing force of the Presence is the only power that really dissolves fears and attachments. The more we get to know that vast, benign energy, the more we realize it is the source of our power and love. And that’s when our detachment becomes something greaterot detachment from desire or fear but awareness that what we are is so large, it can hold all of our smaller feelings inside itself and still be completely free.
Sally Kempton, also known as Durgananda, is an author, a meditation teacher, and the founder of the Dharana Institute. For more information, visit www.sallykempton.com.
sukshma vyayama – 祛風系列
祛風姿勢是一組練習，它從體內釋放出風和濁氣。
祛風姿勢系列非常簡單，然而，對調節在印度稱之為體液的痰（kaf）、風（bat）、酸或膽汁（pitta）最為有效。
按照被稱為阿育吠陀（ayurveda）的古代醫學，這三種體液控制人體的一切功能，如果這些功能發生任何異常，人體的代謝就會出現負反應，疾病產生。
風不僅指腸胃濁氣，而且包括人體每一關節處形成的風，因為由於人體內不正確的化學反應，發生了風濕病和強直。酸或膽汁既指消化必須的汁也指尿酸這類東西，必須有規律的把它排出。倘若人體的該系統內有過多的酸，某些器官就會發生功能不良。
祛風姿勢練習將有助於把過多的風和酸從體內，尤其是從關節內排出。這些練習對恢復期病人、久病衰弱的病人和移動四肢和身體有困難的人都有用。長期臥床之後，可以用這些練習柔和的重新訓練肌肉。它們對緩解各種類型的肌肉毛病也有效。
祛風姿勢系列的練習可分成兩個截然不同的組：抗風濕組和抗胃病組。
抗風濕練習將有益地影響人體的不同關節和器官。雖然它們似乎十分簡單，但對練習者有微妙的作用。這組練習梵文稱之為sukshma vyayama，意思是微妙的練習。
這組練習應該在每日瑜伽姿勢練習階段進行，以放鬆關節，使肌肉柔軟。目的是供初學者、病弱的人、心臟病人、高血壓病人和身體過於強直不能做其他姿勢的人。
開始練習祛風姿勢之前，應該練挺臥放鬆身心。背部平臥，兩腿分開，雙手放在身體兩側，掌心向上。試著放鬆所有的肌肉和關節，無各種緊張。要感覺到自己的身體，意識到自己的呼吸。你正在放鬆，注意你的呼吸，看看是否自然，自發而不用力。計數呼吸，數息時不要壓制任何想法，注意它們，作為一種證明，不從感情上捲入。你主要關心的是放鬆，放鬆整個身心，暫時忘卻所有的擔憂、焦慮和世俗問題。
幾分鐘後慢慢移動雙臂和雙腳坐起來。這時，從思想上和身體上做好了準備，開始練習祛風姿勢
from:《瑜伽功法全書》
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