Yoga to Ease Anxiety
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​Benefits of Yoga for Anxiety in a Nutshell

12/2/2016

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PictureFrustration by Tanya Little. CC BY-SA 2.0
A college student recently sent me some interview questions for a paper she's working on about yoga and anxiety. One of the questions was “What are some positive effects you have seen with people who are struggling with anxiety?” I thought I’d share my answer here. If yoga has helped you, I'd love to hear about it!

People in my classes report both short term and long term benefits from yoga when it comes to anxiety. In the short term, they say having attended a yoga class makes the rest of the day easier to handle. This can stem from a combination of a number of things:
  1. the mood-lifting effect of having taken the time to do something that is good for them and that they enjoy
  2. rebalancing the nervous system with slow, deep breathing and savasana, and
  3. the neurochemical effects of shifting attention to the body, which lowers stress-related hormones and neurotransmitters while simultaneously increasing those chemicals that inhibit negative thoughts and induce positive emotions.

In the long term, I think the key word is patience. Even people who don’t have anxiety have told me that yoga increased their ability to be patient in frustrating situations. Anxiety makes everything seem urgent, overwhelming, and impossible. Frustration with self and others comes on quickly. The practice of yoga builds patience through purposefully and repeatedly removing our attention from our mental chatter and placing it in the body, using the body as the object of meditative focus. With an ongoing practice, we build the brain’s tolerance for frustration by increasing both the number of neurons devoted to patience as well as the strength of their connections.

With patience comes peace. Through the practice of yoga, we are increasingly able to slow down and handle the situation in front of us with thoughtfulness and compassion. This in turn allows us to rebuild our self-confidence, to know that we can take life as it comes. Then we can stop worrying so much about the past and the future and engage whole-heartedly with the present. That's the goal anyway!

Has yoga helped you manage anxiety? If so, I'd really like to hear your story. You can post here in the comments or you can email me through the contact page or at yogatoeaseanxiety(at)gmail(dot)com. 

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Relaxing by Onderwijsgek. CC BY-SA 3.0
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The Sacred Biochemistry of Self-acceptance

6/8/2016

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​“Integrated inner work does not seek to overcome or perfect the body. It does not cultivate an aversion to any aspect of our humanity, nor is it about trying to get somewhere other than in our bodies. Rather it seeks to become more self-aware, self-accepting and compassionate within the lived experience of our bodies.”  
​​A few years ago, I fell in love with Julian Walker’s little book Awakened Heart, Embodied Mind: A Modern Yoga Philosophy Infused with Somatic Psychology & Neuroscience. Given this week to considering the Yoga of Darkness, I come back to it here, seeking refuge and rootedness in the biology of transformation. All quotations in this piece are from Walker. I hope you find as much hope in the process as I do.
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​There are certain stages along the path to growth. Georg Feuerstein labeled these as
  • ​Self-observation
  • Self-acceptance
  • Self-understanding
  • Self-discipline
  • Self-actualization
  • Self-transcendence
  • & Self-transformation

And while we progress along these in a somewhat linear way, until we come to the end we don’t outgrow any of them. We begin at the beginning, with observation and acceptance, and continue observing and accepting as long as we want to keep on the path.

Call it mindfulness, call it witness-consciousness — self-observation is the act of becoming aware of our thoughts and processes, our drives and hang ups.

And when we start to really see what’s inside, it can be pretty damn uncomfortable. It might be disappointing, disheartening, or downright scary. You may, as I did, realize a depth of mental illness that seems unrecoverable. You may find violence and dread; antipathy, weakness, disease; resentment, jealousy, or maybe systemic resignation.

Regardless of what you find, the next step is acceptance. 

​No matter what we find when we turn within, that is where we are. To deny it or berate ourselves because of it is not the way forward; acceptance and compassion are. 

​“Compassion is an attitude of empathy toward the reality of human suffering. On the mat this means turning toward yourself with the same level of kindness and care you would offer a very close friend or dearly beloved.” 
​The work is to simply be present with what we find. 
​“Being present is an open attitude to what arises in awareness as the breath moves in and out.”
​
“Authentic presence is the greatest gift we can give ourselves and one another. It becomes the hallmark of a more integrated person who can be with self and other, shadow and light, struggle and grace authentically.”
And this is the beginning of change, a real and lasting and biologically based change:
​“In neuroscience terms, we train the brain to be in a state of mindfulness when we choose again and again to stay present with sensations. We are being mindful of our bodies and breath and the moment to moment unfolding of the experience of sensations. This mindfulness state has been shown to activate neuroplasticity—our brain’s ability to transform not only function but also structure in response to experience.
​
“We literally enter a zone of transformational possibility at the level of the brain when we are in meditative states. We can be mindful in many different ways, but being mindful in relations to our bodies brings together a set of brain functions that make insight, compassion and integration possible in powerful ways.”
By simply experiencing our embodiment, staying connected to our breath, observing and accepting what arises with compassion, we allow our brains to rewire toward peace.
“We think of these three principles [breath, presence, and compassion] of transformational neuroplasticity as a doorway into the ‘sacred biochemistry’ of yoga practice. They represent both a poetic and science-informed way of seeking to frame the experiential processes of self-transformation through yoga and meditation.”
​To put this together with Feuerstein's stages: through the discipline of embodiment, we observe, accept and come to understand ourselves. We heal; we grow. Our brains heal, and our brains grow. We blossom, actualizing into our best selves. Eventually, we have transcendent experiences of union. We transform into beings of sacred radiance.

And it begins with compassionate acceptance of the darkness within.
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Gentle, Soft, and Strong

9/13/2015

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Tao Te Ching
78

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains serene
in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter his heart.
Because he has given up helping,
he is the people’s greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical.

(Trans. Stephen Mitchell)
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Letting Go of Worry

5/23/2015

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If you trusted yourself to make the right decision and to take the right action in situations as they arise, would you still worry?

Dr. Thynn Thynn, a Burmese doctor turned meditation teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition has said,

 “Peace is a natural mind-state in every one of us. Peace has been there since the day we were born and it is going to be there till the day we die. It is our greatest gift; so why do we think we have no peace of mind?

“Experiencing peace is like looking at our hands. Usually, we see only the fingers—not the spaces in between. In a similar manner, when we look at the mind, we are aware of the active states, such as our running thoughts and the one-thousand-and-one feelings that are associated with them, but we tend to overlook the intervals of peace between them.”


Worry fills up those intervals, those spaces, until there is no room between thoughts. Worry causes stress and extended worry turns into anxiety.

I spent years constantly worried. I worried about everything and everyone. One particularly acute instance comes to mind.

I once had a friend who went to jail for dealing pot. He was away for years, and I never wrote or visited him because I was afraid to ask his brother how to get in touch with him. This was because the brother had gone a little wacko stalker on me many years earlier.

I was in the depths of my disorder when I heard that my friend was out of jail and had a job as a workman for a company in the small town where I lived. My guilt racked me. I was worried—beyond worried—that I would run into him. Maybe obsessed. Did I mention the town was small, so that an accidental meeting was actually highly likely? I just knew that he would be disappointed in me. I had let him down. I just knew that if I saw him I would panic, say something stupid, and ultimately have to admit to being an utterly shitty person.

I became hypervigilant. When I saw any truck belonging to that company I would hide, to the point of turning down streets I had no business being on, whether I was walking or driving. When I was alone at home, which was the whole school day long, I would sit rigid at the window, watching for their trucks, terrified to see one.

I spent days, maybe weeks, with my heart clenched in guilt over past actions and fear of an imaginary future experience.

Nuts! Yes, indeed. Frighteningly so. I knew something was very wrong with how I was acting; I was completely hijacked by worry.

Most of us, most of the time, aren’t consumed with worry to the point of being immobilized. But we do worry needlessly. We worry most about the people in our lives—our family and friends and co-workers. We might worry about what could happen to them or what they think about us. We might even worry for them. We might worry they aren’t making the best decisions. I used to worry about what my husband wore and what he ate. Turns out, he is indeed a grown man who can take care of himself!

999 times out of 1000, worry isn’t helping. The people we care about don’t need a worry-wart; they need someone who will be present with them and accept them as they are without trying to fix them; someone to listen with an open heart; and someone who will take action when it’s needed and only when it’s needed.

From Swami Rama,

“You can learn to control your mind very well—because it is yours, but do not try to control the minds of others and make them dependent. When one becomes dependent, one suffers, so you should learn to be independent, and you should not make others dependent upon you.”

Worry is a symptom of a lack of trust. If you trusted yourself to make the right decision and to take the right action in situations as they arise, would you still worry? What about the people in your life? Can you trust them to make their own choices? Spoiler: they’re going to anyway! The only person whose actions you can determine is you.

So, how can we, as individuals, come to make spontaneously good choices? Be Love.

I do not mean a superficial love, with rainbows and Lisa Frank stickers, or gooey, lusty love. I mean the Love that created and sustains this Reality and that beats in your heart. The Love that mystics mean when they say God is Love. Let Love be the rule that you always follow, to the point that it becomes ingrained in you.

In Yoga, the first moral precept is ahimsa—nonharming. All the other rules are based on this one. In every decision, do the least harm. It’s not unlike the Golden Rule, which can be found in one form or another in all the world’s religions:  Do to others as you would have done to you. In every decision, do the most good.

Rick Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley put it this way,

"Across all faiths and traditions, every great teacher had asked us to be loving and kind. Loving-kindness is not about being nice in some sentimental or superficial way: it is a fearless, passionate cherishing of everyone and everything, omitting none."

Plus, it feels good to let yourself live a life of Love. It feels like freedom and joy.

Worry will happen. Our brains are built to seek out threats and escape them. But if you trust in yourself and in Love, you can learn to let go of your worries. It just takes practice. That is what we do on the mat and in meditation.

I did eventually run into my old friend. He let me hug him.

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