Spring 2016
yogamagazine.com spring 2016
“Yoga is the fountain of youth. You’re only as young as your spine is flexible. It is not about touching your toes. It’s about unlocking your ideas about what you want, where you think you can go, and how you will achieve when you get there.” — Bob Harper,
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Aerial Yoga
How Yoga Could Help Keep Kids In School
Yoga Can Help Improve Your Balance
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Aerial Yoga
yogamagazine.com spring 2016
Flying yoga which are forms in which you’re suspended off the ground Cirque du Soleil–style may have seemed faddish at first, but it’s still gaining momentum. That’s in part because of its surprising physical benefits, including spinal decompression, pain relief, and ease in inversions.
The image to the left is the hanging stag pose. It helps stretch the thighs and hamstrings. Image from spaholis.com
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erial-yoga practices started more than a decade ago, as teachers began combining traditional yoga with aerial acrobatics in the occasional class. Today, there are several distinct schools, and classes appear regularly on studio schedules and at yoga festivals around the world. The aerial-yoga family now includes in-gym or studio practices that go by the names of Air Yoga, AntiGravity Aerial Yoga, and Unnata Aerial Yoga, as well as portable systems from companies OmGym and Gorilla Gym that are popular at yoga festivals and conferences, and that are sold for personal use at home. Though these brands and styles may vary, they all share the use of a suspension system with therapeutic value: An aerial yoga “silk,” or hammock—suspended from the ceiling or a metal frame—that can support your weight, ease pressure, create space in your joints, decrease compression in your spine, and help you find more mobility. Hanging upside down may seem risky, but you can invert in the hammock without putting pressure on your head or spine as you would in classic inversions, which can lead to back and neck pain and injury over time, explains Joe Miller, a New York City–based yoga teacher who leads anatomy and physiology trainings around the country. The hammock can also be used to strengthen muscles and find correct alignment in most poses, not just tricky inversions. “Research on suspension training indicates that you have to use your core muscles more when you’re suspended than when you’re on the ground to keep yourself stable,” says Miller. And then there’s the arm strength you gain by hoisting yourself into and around the silk. “Because students have to pull down on the hammock to lift themselves up, they build a kind of core and upper-arm strength that they don’t build in traditional yoga, where most arm movements
are about pushing, not pulling,” says Michelle Dortignac, founder of Unnata Aerial Yoga, a practice that emerged in 2006 when she combined her yoga teacher training with an interest in aerial acrobatics. Aerial silks can also provide natural alignment adjustments. For example, if you were to do a
The hammock can also be used to strengthen muscles and find correct alignment in most poses, not just tricky inversions. suspended variation of Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend) or Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose), with a hammock at your hip crease, the placement of the sling helps glide the heads of the thighbones back—which is how they should move when you fold forward at the hips, but is hard for some people to achieve on the floor, says Miller. For the practitioners, “the sling help relieve pinching at the front of the hip joints in forward bends,” he adds.
The image above is the hanging split pose. It is good for stretching the hips. Image from yoga.com
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yogamagazine.com spring 2016 Using the silks is especially useful to beginners, says Dortignac, who has trained more than 20 Unnata teachers in the last nine years. “When a new student drapes over the hammock, in Down Dog, for example, gravity does the work for them,” she says. “The hammock helps with lengthening and creating internal space. Once we give students that feeling in the hammock, they’ll have the memory of what that was like, and take it with them to their floor practice.” Or maybe you’re struggling with Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (One-Legged King Pigeon Pose). In an inverted King Pigeon in the hammock, you can explore important actions of the pose, such as lengthening the spine and the hip flexors of the extended leg, while avoiding pressure on the front knee, which can make the regular pose problematic for some people, says Miller. The sling also helps with the backbend in this pose, while decompressing the spine. All of its therapeutic and alignment value, an aerial practice is also fun. “The word ‘antigravity’ can also mean ‘against graveness,’” says AntiGravity Aerial Yoga creator Christopher Harrison. “So we practice ananda (or extreme happiness or bliss) while inverted, using laughing breaths, or forcefully exhaling with a laugh.” People are also
Image from www. nacentralohio.com
naturally curious about what it might feel like to fly or be suspended, adds Dortignac. “Aerial yoga is a chance to dream and to play, to try something different and put yourself in a position you never thought you could be in,” she says. Would you like to swing on a star? Or maybe (a bit more realistically) on yards of silk suspended in mid-air? This approach to fitness is what more and more women are taking up these days, as aerial yoga is literally lifting them off the floor of gyms and studios across the country. Recent interest has been touched off by professional acts like the Cirque du Soleil, but aerial dance has been around for hundreds of years; an aerialist is someone who performs moves from a joist that hoists them into the air. Aerial yoga is the latest spin on this older type of workout. This is filler text about aerial yoga and how to do it properly. While specific poses may vary from instructor to instructor, aerial yoga combines the basics of yoga with calisthenics, dance, Pilates and acrobatics. This approach allows you to enjoy the more spiritual benefits of yoga along with the physical exercise, while having fun. Have fun whhile you’ll be suspended from the ceiling from silk fabrics tied together.
yogamagazine.com spring 2016
How Yoga Could Help Keep
Kids In School
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cientific evidence is mounting daily for what many have long sensed: that practices like mindfulness, meditation, and yoga can help us address certain intractable individual and societal problems. Prominent companies – Google, General Mills, Target, Apple, Nike, AOL, and Procter & Gamble among them – and prominent individuals have already embraced this possibility. Tim Ryan, the Ohio congressman who wrote the book A Mindful Nation, has been a big proponent of bringing mindfulness to the masses. He, along with others, believes that mindfulness should be a part of everyone’s day, to help wire our brains to deal with our many modern stressors. Last month, a group of American and Canadian scholars, researchers, businesspeople, and yoga teachers came together for a weekend at Omega Institute to discuss how this group of practices that helps us self-regulate as individuals could, quite possibly, help us regulate on a society level. The issues the country is facing – the massive dropout rate of school kids, substance abuse among all age groups, PTSD among
veterans, the staggeringly high incarceration and recidivism rates – cost the country volumes in human potential, not to mention trillions in dollars. There are no single solutions, but the evidence suggests that some or all of these problems may be amenable to the practices that have been shown to redirect attention, improve concentration, increase self-control, and endow people with reliable and healthy coping mechanisms in the face of stress and trauma. Some of the faculty at Omega’s conference have been key players in making this happen. BK Bose, PhD, of the Niroga Institute, a former Silicon Valley engineer who grew up practicing yoga, now works to make mindfulness/meditation/ yoga the game-changer that many believe it can be. Rob Schware, PhD, who heads the Give Back Yoga Foundation and the Yoga Service Council, and writes for the Huffington Post, brought his two decades of management experience with World Bank to help grow the movement as a second career. Many, including Bose and Schware, say that the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a famously insidious and costly problem in lives
Image on the left is from http://www.comoshambhala. com/ and the image on the right is from http://beherenowyoga108.com/
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yogamagazine.com spring 2016 lost and money wasted, is one of several that could be altered by a little mindfulness training early on in life. In terms of economic cost alone, Cecelia Rouse at Princeton estimates that one high school dropout “costs” about $260,000 in lost earnings over his or her lifetime. Given the fact that at least a million kids drop out of school every year, the annual cost of school failure alone is estimated at $260 billion. As Bose points out, “Over ten years, the cost is upwards of 3 trillion dollars. And this is just for dropping out alone.”
single common denominator is stress: Chronic stress, toxic stress, traumatic stress, primary and secondary post-traumatic stress. Trauma is endemic. The tentacles of stress and trauma run right through – domestic abuse, substances abuse, poverty, racism. And once a kid drops out, homelessness, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, crime, violence are just waiting to pounce. Not to mention the boatload of chronic disease, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, diabetes, you start to see this powerful trajectory between school failure and adult outcomes.”
If you continue the trajectory a little further, he And this is where the capacity to cope becomes says, based on the relatively common course that highly relevant. Methods that train the brain attend can include juvenile differently, andselfMethods that train the brain attend hall and prison, the regulate, and respond differently, self-regulate, and numbers grow. “The to stressors are one respond to stressors. It tells us school-to-prison part. “If you look to that stress, among other things, pipeline is incredibly neuroscience,” says disrupts brain functioning, especially costly,” says Bose. It Bose, “it tells us that in the prefrontal cortex. can cost upwards of stress, among other $250,000 per year to things, disrupts brain keep an inmate in prison, if you factor in all the the functioning, especially in the prefrontal direct and indirect costs that tend to come with cortex. And the same neuroscience is also saying it, like loss in productivity, damage to the family, there’s also class of practices that mitigate all of the escalated health and mental health costs. this: Mindfulness.” “Folks have been looking at career criminals – There’s some good evidence for the idea. In and estimates over their lifetimes are between 2011, a Harvard study showed that mindfulness $4-7 million. If you apply this to all those who is linked to increased gray land in jail over and over again, the numbers matter density in certain become stratospheric.” cortical areas, including the One approach is to increase school prefrontal cortex and regions retention; the national dropout involved in self-referential rate is between 25% and 35%, thoughts and emotion and and up to 50% in inner city regulation. There seems to be schools. But if you go back a strong connection between a necessary step, Bose mindfulness and the brain argues, the real culprits machinery involved in selfare enormous stresses regulation. Other work has and traumas that are shown mindfulness to be so often present in linked to relative dethe kids’ lives. “The
activation of the default mode network (DMN), the brain system that’s active during mind-wandering and self-referential “worry” thoughts, which are generally stressful in nature. Indeed Jon Kabat-Zinn, MD at UMass has developed his career to developing the mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR) to helping people learn to change the stress response. This is all well and good, Bose adds, but there’s an obvious caveat. When they’re in the midst of stress and trauma, few kids have the ability to sit still enough to take part in a sitting practice. “If you’re not ready to sit in classroom,” says Bose, “you’re not ready to do sitting meditation. If you have drugs and gangs and violence all around you, you simply can’t sit still. Teachers tell us that they often yell at kids 100 times a day to sit and pay attention. It doesn’t work. And to ask them to do this in the context of meditation can have a worse-than-neutral effect – it could be disastrous.” So, you have to go beyond the neuroscienceof-meditation field and look to the trauma research, which tells us that physical activity can help the brain deal with stress and trauma. “Trauma research tell us that we hold trauma in our bodies… The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex doesn’t even talk to the amygdala. Neuroscience says mindfulness; trauma research says movement. All of the sudden you’ve got moving meditation or mindfulness in motion. Mindfulness alone isn’t going to cut it for these kids.” One theory is that because the executive areas of the brain can be affected by stress and trauma, “getting in” through another avenue is key. Indeed, some studies have shown that physical activity can enhance cognitive control via the prefrontal cortex in children, and exercise is well known to enhance neurogenesis in brain regions like the
hippocampus, in you and old alike, which can be affected by stress. This story is so awesome it is the best ever. Therefore, Bose and his colleagues have done what are also beginning to, combining movement and mindfulness into one program, called Transformative Life Skills (TLS), which incorporates elements of movement, attention training and relaxation skills. The 18-week program can be introduced to schools relatively cheaply. The research so far has shown that it can be extremely helpful in helping kids reduce levels of negative thinking, negative affect, revenge motivation, depression, emotional arousal, physical arousal, rumination, perceivedstress, attitudes toward violence; and it’s been associated with greater levels of self-control, tolerance for distress, and school engagement. The return-on-investment seems to speak for itself. The cost of training and coaching 50 teachers in TLS is $5,000. And if they work with 1,000 students, works out to be about $5 per kid. If even one kid took a different path in life, the program would be worth the investment many times over. And similar programs, like the one run by the Holistic Life Foundation, Inc. (HLF) serving inner city schools in Baltimore, have found just this. Ali Smith, Executive Director, who founded the program along with his brother and college friend as a way to bring meditation to “at-risk” kids, has seen the results firsthand with the eye. Image on the left is from http://i. imgur.com/ and the image on the right is from www.namastekid.com
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yogamagazine.com spring 2016
How Yoga Can Improve Your
BALANCE When we practice yoga, we’re not only working on our physical body. We’re also working on our energy and mind. As we grow in yoga practices, we can see the results in our life: we feel more comfortable in our bodies, we will have more energy, our emotions become more stable, the mind is more focused.
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he most important aspect of yoga is that it will help you still your mind. As you practice poses, your focus should always be inward: feeling your body in the pose, noticing what different poses do to different parts of your body, how your breath changes through the practice. As you draw your attention inward, you practice one of the 8 limbs of yoga called Pratyahara. Disconnecting from your surroundings is the first step that will lead you into concentration. This will slow down the impulses of your mind and will bring you closer to meditation, which is the complete stillness of the mind. The reason why this is the most important aspect of yoga is that the mind is the source of our reality.
If we learn to still our minds, we can be free from any limiting thoughts that bring negativity into our lives. If we can still our minds, we can relax deeply and allow our bodies to rejuvenate. If we can still our minds, we can connect to our intuition and make wiser decisions in our lives. The balancing of the mind will have a positive impact on the balance of the emotional/energetic body and the physical body.
and as the physical body releases during the stretches, we also release emotions that we were holding onto. Each part of the body relates energetically to one of our chakras and to a particular emotion.
The balance in the physical The balancing of the energetic body happens as we body is closely related to the release energy where we have an excess and we other two. Although there is increase energy where we have a deficiency. a physical aspect of strength Luckily, you don’t need to understand what this means for it to work. Basically, during your It is important that when you try yoga practice you will to balance, you keep your eyes still clean your body from in one spot. As you still your eyes, any negative energy you should bring your attention (anxiety, anger, stress) inward and keep your mind still and as you eliminate as you feel your body in the pose. these energies you will make space for new and flexibility required for the positive energy to replace it. body to hold itself in a pose (which yoga will definitely help The combination of strengthening you improve), there is only so poses and stretching poses will have an much that the strength and impact in your nervous system, allowing you to release deeper than you would with flexibility can do in a pose if your energy and your mind other kinds of exercises. We hold emotional are not in balance. stress in different parts of the body
yogamagazine.com spring 2016
Poses to Improve Your Balance
Half Moon Pose Type of pose: Standing, balancing Benefits: Strengthens ankles & thighs, stretches the hamstrings, improves balance and core strength.
Forward Bend Type of pose: Forward bend Benefits: Stretches and lengthens the hamstrings
Awkward Chair Type of pose: Standing Benefits: It strengthens the thighs.
Standing Split Type of pose: Standing, balancing
Tree Pose
Benefits: Strengthens the legs, stretches the hamstrings, improves balance and core strength.
Benefits: Strengthens legs, improves balance.
Type of pose: Balancing, standing
Warrior III Also Know As: Flying airplane pose Type of Pose: Standing, Balancing Benefits: It strengthens the legs and it improves balance and core strength.
Revolved Half Moon Pose Type of pose: Standing, balancing, twisting Benefits: Strengthen the ankles, and thighs, improves balance, aids digestion
Sugarcane Pose Type of Pose: Standing, balancing, backbending Benefits: Improves core strength and balance, stretches the quadriceps and hamstrings.
King Dancer Pose Also known as: Lord of the Dance Pose, Dancing Shiva Pose
Eagle Pose
Type of pose: Standing, balancing
Type of pose: Standing, balancing
Benefits: Strengthens the legs, improves balance and core strength, stretches the shoulders.
Benefits: Strengthens legs, glutes, adductors, improves balance and core strength, stretches the shoulders.
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