What is yoga?

        As a graduate student doing my research on yoga I have spent a lot of time answering the question, what is yoga. Surprisingly, I don't get asked this question nearly as frequently as I thought I would by other academics or people interested in my research but I also understand that most people either take for granted that they know what yoga is, or they have developed their own understanding of it from their own practice and some literature on the subject. Although I have practiced yoga for years, during my research and travels to India I spent a lot of time working with translations, reading research, books, philosophy, poetry and of course talking to people; I have compiled here a definition of yoga as closely as I can from all of my research. Although creating this article is satisfying in that it achieves a goal that previous literature has struggled with, I don't feel that this represents many different interpretations of yoga; I have come to understand that yoga has evolved and been adapted by many people around the world. This article seeks to explain yoga as more than a word, it's literal translation - instead of answering what does yoga mean I have sought to explain what yoga is.

Misperceptions of Yoga

        As a male yoga teacher I get comments like, "yoga, isn't that for women?" all the time! Or I frequently get the "yoga, it's good for you like a good workout, right?" and of course people tell me "yoga's just stretching." Well, not exactly to all of the above. Yoga classes in the west are predominantly filled with women, it's picking up amongst men though. Scientific research shows there are much more efficient ways of getting in shape than doing yoga so making the argument that yoga is the ultimate workout is not really a part of what the yoga community tends to do (anymore). So we're left with what.. yoga is stretching, yes it definitely is: yoga was used as preparation for long periods of seated meditation, essentially warming up the body. That isn't what yoga is though.

Yoga is a Union

        There are many discrepancies in what this union means but many authors have called yoga a "union." Calling yoga a union, I believe is a natural conclusion because the Yoga Sūtras, the document associated with the founding of yoga is written poetically and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. When you read the Yoga Sūtras or books interpreting it's philosophy, yoga sounds a lot like bringing things together that weren't together previously.

In yoga, a union is not exactly the right description, although some say it's a literal translation, it's not. The literal translation is "yoke" as in "yoking." This gives readers or new scholars a sense that when I tie two things together I have yoked them. Correct, this is yoking but this is not yoga, we are not two separate things being tied together. Similarly if I spill a bucket of water into a lake, this union of water is not yoga. Yoga expresses duality, like the beginning and end of a rope that has never been cut, one long piece of rope that is one. This is a more

Intellectual Nonsense = Yogic Commonsense

        Academic research on the meaning of yoga exists but it is not good, this may be because, intellectually, the things that are written in the Yoga Sūtras may not make sense; to a rational mind they seem far fetched, a mix between poetry and philosophy. Some of what I'm going to write here also will not make sense intellectually but as someone who experiences yoga by practicing it, this will sound right and be accessible information. When you do yoga poses, you are making the ultimate expression of yourself. Sometimes in yoga our bodies appear contorted, they depict duality. This duality is a great metaphor for understanding what yoga is.

The Yogic Practice

        When I wrap my arms or bind my hands you may not know from first glance, which arm is which or which hand is the right and left, body parts cross the sagittal plane, moving to the opposite side confusing sometimes ourselves. For example, my right arm is on my left side and my left arm is on my right side. We express ourselves through our poses but the poses are not simply yoga, they are a part of the practice of yoga. We use breathing to link body and movement together but yoga is not simply breathing or combining breathing with movement. Yoga's union between mind and body does not treat breathing and the body or the mind as separate entities, yoga practices and teachings do but this is not what yoga is.

Enlightenment

        Poses are not a means of obtaining enlightenment, to take the posture itself is the purpose of yoga, there is no need to try and obtain enlightenment. By practicing yoga, you are expressing yourself, your own nature. You exist for yourself and yoga is a way for you to demonstrate your true nature freely. Obtaining enlightenment is not an objective, teachings which instruct practitioners to attach to this awareness is wrong. There is no need to talk more about enlightenment or "the right state of mind." Simply having a practice that brings you to the here and now, a practice which expresses your true self is enough, don't attach yourself or your yogic practice to other meanings. There is a potential through your practice to forget yourself, once we forget ourselves and exist only in the moment, we can express ourselves in complete freedom.

Yoga is the Expression of Self

        Every body is different, poses do not need to look a very specific way. Simply, own your physical body, it is yours - do what you can to honour your yogic practice. Don't slump, be in your body and be present right here and right now in the moment as you do your poses and breathing. Everything at this point will exist in the right place and in the right time. This also means someone with extremely limited mobility can practice yoga. Yourself for example, you may be sitting and reading this blog or listening to the words transcribed for you by an audio assistance program, right now you can take the right posture and be yourself in your own body as you experience these words.

        

Presenting My Research at Laurier University

It was a beautiful day outside but a group of 20 decided to commute in from Cambridge, Guelph, Toronto, Burlington, Oakville and even Toronto to spend the afternoon with me at Laurier's Faculty of Social Work, doing yoga and exploring its potential benefits for their client populations suffering with anxiety, stress, depression, insomnia and trauma.

        This week I presented my research at Laurier University to a surprisingly receptive group of young clinicians. I took up researching yoga formally in 2011 after having felt the positive changes that yoga brought to my life through relieving stress, bringing emotional balance and physical fitness. I've practiced yoga for years and became a yoga teacher, needless I was already a believer in yogas benefits. Convincing my fellow graduate level mental health colleagues of yogas benefits I thought would be difficult.

Yoga is popular today, many people have an awareness of it so my assumption was that I would receive resistances from some during my presentation in the form of hesitations due to feelings that yoga was useful only for fitness and not for mental health, that yoga would be intimidating and required a high level of physical fitness and I also braced myself for the downright objections to participation, that was yoga was part of the occult or an eastern religion that conflicted with any participants belief. I tried to proactively suss this out by explaining to the group "Today, we will do yoga. To be clear, yoga is not a religion, nor does it require devotion to any God." I saw some nodding heads and knew we were on the right track. I continued to explain that yoga is for everyone, regardless of physical ability. Importantly, having an awareness of the body, understanding it's limitations are essential. To my surprise, the group eagerly hopped onto the mats, slipping of their socks and smiling to one another. 

I led the group of twenty through a brief introduction to yoga which involved me giving a fifty minute class that included poses (which  I am in the process of empirically validating as treatments for specific mental health concerns) and discussed the potential of using yoga in direct practice with clients, as a modality of therapeutic care for an hour. I explained the clinical research that has been done using yoga as a complementary therapy in mental health, specifically for anxiety, stress, depression, insomnia and even with diagnoses of schizophrenia. I explained to the group that I believe yoga has an important place in mental health; I challenged them to introduce yoga in their practice as counsellors and therapists.

The response was incredible, the participants shared that they saw the direct relevance of introducing a yoga practice into therapy and therapeutic programs with their clients. Most importantly, they told me I sparked an interest in them to learn more, to take yoga classes themselves and use yoga for their own self-care (something I've been touting for a while). 

I really feel that I'm on the right track,

Tim.

Yoga for Anxiety and Stress

        Recently I attended and reviewed the Iyengar Yoga School of Toronto's anxiety workshop which turned out to offer excellent yoga postures but very poor insight into mental health. I've scoured the internet to find accurate mental health information related to yoga that is accessible. This means I'm not going to cover any of the clinical research I've used in my thesis, no studies that require an undergraduate research course just to figure out what they're trying to say. Instead, I wanted to find what the yoga community and fellow bloggers were writing. I found well written articles with very good information.

The Daily Cup of Yoga's guest post Stressed? 10 De-Stress Yoga Tips written by Lindsey Lewis is well written and itemized with ten pointers that embrace a mindful, holistic lifestyle. Although at surface value the article doesn't seem to have too much "yoga" content, look to the wellness and lifestyle pointers to find what is at the heart of the Yoga Sūtras, a philosophy of living and living well.

Yoga Journal frequently publishes articles that expound on the benefits of yoga, sometimes those claims are less than legitimate but many times they're written by qualified professionals. Timothy McCall's article, Yoga for Anxiety and Panic Attacks. The article is short but talks about "nervous energy" and burning it off via an asana practice - presumably sun salutations although this is not specifically prescribed by the article. McCall notes in the last page of the article how useful anxiety can be, after reading this article I started noticing where many of the yoga teachers I have encountered who used their errant approach to anxiety in classes from, I presume this article. Let us be clear that anxiety is not good. Anxiety is not fear, anxiety occurs without identifiable stimulus, it's psychologically rooted in emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses as well as in physiological responses through the nervous system, racing heart, hot flash, etc. The "good" anxiety is not anxiety, it is fear. For further reader and avoiding confusion on this subject I recommend Gavin Becker's (1997) The Gift of Fear; a brilliantly written psychology classic that analyzes the cases of many people who escaped danger through trusting their fear.

Yoga Journal preceded the above article with Yoga for Stress and Burnout a somewhat less practical insight into mental health relies heavily on using philosophy, claiming that using yogic philosophy and practicing skills such as looking inward to induce a temporary sensory deprivation, a break from our highly sensory stimulated lives. I'm not sure how accurate this is, however, the article explains breathing ratios and how changing the ratio of inhale and exhale may affect your mental state. In a nutshell, rapid breathing could cause mental agitation whereas slow, deep breathing has a calming effect, increasing blood levels of carbon dioxide, dilating cerebral blood vessels, increasing the blood oxygen.

So, with all of these lifestyle tips and our new understanding of breathing and how it may affect our mood, where does our practice take us?

Yoga prescribes that the next step is meditation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a world renowned mindfulness meditation author and researcher. I frequently reference his academic writing in my studies but I highly recommend this simple article that he wrote on his own personal experience with meditation and yoga. This article really touches on a subject that speaks volumes to me, yoga is more than the physical practice. I know this isn't news to many yogins who are reading this but it may open up others who haven't really thought of yoga in a multidimensional way before.

Please share with me any of your recommendations for blogs, articles, etc. on Yoga for Anxiety and Stress.

Tim.

Yoga for Anxiety & Mental Health Workshop Review

        Hot off the heels of a great week working on my thesis and the incredibly busy but very successful fundraiser evening we put on for Lutherwood's Running Club I decided a self care weekend was much needed. It started off Friday with a good friend of mine, Alyssa; she agreed last minute to accompany me to "An evening with The Walkmen" which was excellent! The Walkmen are one of my favourite bands and they played everything I wanted to hear from their catalogue of songs. I then spent Saturday working (read mostly jamming and doing some therapeutic music sessions with the kids) and was really looking forward to my Sunday afternoon at the Iyengar Yoga School of Toronto.

Boy, was I in for a surprise.

As a graduate student of social work, I am used to hearing some people say negative, uninformed or downright ignorant things about mental illness. I have learnt not to snap back and be the obnoxious advocate. At the same time as a yoga teacher I am also used to seeing yoga teachers stepping outside of their comfort area into such realms like spiritual guide, life coach, therapist and more; I think it's easy for yoga teachers to fall into this trap - they want to help, I get it.

However, today when I attended a workshop described by the Iyengar Yoga School of Toronto as "Yoga for Anxiety & Mental Health" I was shocked to see that all of the above had come together in one afternoon that turned out to be.. difficult.

The class started with a completely disorganized teacher running through what appeared to be run-of-the-mill definitions googled around the term anxiety. The problem here though was that this yoga teacher had almost zero understanding of what they were talking about. I was curious and inquired about the teachers experience or qualifications in mental health, they had none. The teacher offered the class mental health information with the ease of an expert but muddled terminology, made generalizations, labelled - took part in tautology where presenting symptoms are labelled as a disorder which justified the diagnoses. The worst of the day, the teacher didn't understand the experience of people have with mental illness, the teacher referred to those who suffer with post traumatic stress as "victims" in a demeaning tone claiming they "always act as if the world has done this to them and they have no part in it." That was hard for me to hear. One of the this teachers student teachers, an employee of the Iyengar Yoga School of Toronto joked that someone with post traumatic stress "needs to get a hobby." He laughed out loud and I piped up but respected that this wasn't my space or forum to share my thoughts. I simply protested and explained that traumatic stress can be debilitating. I saw the reaction of other workshop participants and was relieved to find that they also seemed uncomfortable with this disjointed talk about mental health.

Thankfully, the class took a sharp turn. We broke off into small groups and worked on poses which this teacher had handpicked for specific anxiety spectrum disorders. The teachers expertise in understanding the poses was complimented with a dedication to the Iyengar "way" of doing yoga where many props/supports were used (bolsters, blankets, blocks, chairs, ropes fixed to the walls). This really validated my ideas about using yoga with mental health clients who may have physical limitations in participating in yoga or find it intimidating. We spent an hour and a half working on only a few poses per group but really mastering how to get into the pose, how they were prescribed for dealing with anxiety and of course getting out of the pose safely.

Although I was dismayed with the first half of the workshop, I received what I wanted, additional training in poses to relieve anxiety. I will be sharing some of these poses in upcoming posts.

Tim.

Can Yoga Heal?

Half Lord of the Fishes, a Yoga Pose.

        People say yoga is good for you - is it? Iyengar, a world famous yoga teacher wrote in his book Light on Life that yoga can cure illness, my friend Elizabeth swears by it; she says that she knows it can heal, "it worked for me, it gave me control back over my body" she says. I appreciate her passion but I'm a skeptic. Historically, yoga has made extensive (sometimes unrealistic) claims of reversing aging, slowing heart rates to the point of stopping, living longer (if not forever) and more.

I know from first hand experience that it feels great to do yoga. For years I've attended regular yoga classes, developed my own practice at home (now doing yoga every morning) and becoming a yoga teacher/enrolling in yoga teacher training really immersed me in yoga and deepened my knowledge of it. It's been a running joke with friends that you walk out of a yoga class feeling the "yoga high." It's a feeling of peacefulness and inner contentment. Needless to say, I love yoga but do I believe it can heal? I'm not entirely sure, there hasn't been a lot of legitimate research to show that it "heals" but there is a LOT of legitimate research on it helping and facilitating changes in those who practice it. These changes I'm talking about may not be as significant as yogins have historically claimed but they are significant.

I realize that I am opening a can of worms, starting a conversation that is very deep and involves many different perspectives so allow me to take a step back and let you know that this is something I've been researching for about seven months now. This research is in fact the subject of my masters thesis, it involves talking to professionals in mental health, working with other yoga teachers, talking to people who report having experienced the healing qualities of yoga, collaborating with other researchers using yoga in their research work and reading. A lot of reading. I have become a walking encyclopedia of knowledge related to the history, philosophy, theories and clinical applications of yoga. I invite you do the same, I will frequently link to and post citations of things that I'm reading.

Please join me over the next months as I fulfill the original intention of creating this blog, exploring yoga as a modality of therapeutic care.

I'm excited!

Tim.