If you are familiar with holistic health care, chances are you are already familiar with yoga. The practice of yoga is becoming increasingly popular across the world, and often touted for its myriad of health benefits, from enhanced physical fitness to stress relief. What you may not know, however, is that yoga can also be a powerful tool for those battling mental illness. From depression to eating disorders, yoga’s focus on bridging the gap between mind and body has transformed the lives of many.
- It helps relieve migraines, headaches, and chronic pain
- It can help reduce anxiety
- Increases your energy level
- Boosts serotonin and mood
- Enhances concentration
- Helps you to focus on the bigger picture in your everyday life
- Improves your responses to stressful events
- Keeps everything in perspective
- Gives you a deeper understanding of yourself & others
- Helps you to live in the present moment
For 90 other reasons to meditate, click here.
Yoga program bringing stress relief to at-risk kids in juvenile halls across LA, helping to reduce the occurrence of violence.
Article from azpm.org
Scientific research shows that yoga as a means of therapy can be an effective treatment for depression, says a Tucson yoga therapist and yoga teazcher.
Amy Weintraub says she was able to stop taking medication for depression, replacing it with meditation and her yoga practice many years ago. Since then, she has spread the word by becoming a teacher and yoga therapist and writing extensively about the benefits.
“What yoga does is it actually begins to change the physiology,” Weintraub says. “As you begin to deepen your breath, your posture changes. So for most people who have depression or mood disorders, they may have a physiological look of depression: Their shoulders are rounded, their humped over. There’s not a lot happening in the solar plexus.”
Deeper breathing stimulates the nerves and thus the brain.
“It deactivates the limbic brain,” she says. “That’s very important for those people who have a history of trauma.”
She says that in her own case, she began feeling better through the deeper breathing that yoga and accompanying meditation brought to her, so that she was able to wean herself from her medication.
Weintraub then went into training psychotherapists to show them how to help their clients “to empower them to manage their moods.”
Her book, “Yoga Skills for Therapists— No Mat Required,” was requested by a publisher recognizing that psychotherapists needed the physiological knowledge that yoga had brought to her to deal with her own depression.
10 Reasons You Should Meditate (from here)
- Gain inner peace
- Increase your self-awareness
- Makes you grounded & calmer
- Makes you present
- Increases your consciousness
- Source of inspiration
- Rejuvenates you
- Cures insomnia
- Increases your spiritual connection
- Increase your fulfillment of life
