Please consider how much each emotion weighs on your physical body. How much does anger weight for example. Most of the decisions we make in life are emotionally based. Emotions are the key to our humanity. No decision can be made without the consequense of an an emotional toll on the physical nervous system. Consider that fear, anxiety, relief, pleasure, pain, sadness, joy, etcetera are intangible to the forces of gravity. Yet if you consider the amount of pressure created by a fear based decision in comparison to an altruistic act of kindness, a measurement can be made. Emotions has an invisible pull on our psyche and our physical and spiritual body. Why do emotions show up as symptoms of pain, discomfort or disease?
Archive for the ‘Healthy Yoga Lifestyle’ Category
The Weight of emotions
Friday, April 17th, 2009Self Correcting Organisms
Friday, March 20th, 2009
As intelligent beings it is easy to blame our environment for our posture and bad habits. The food we eat, the traffic on the freeway, our noisy neighbors, the state of the economy and a million more reasons to complain about something. Our brain has an incredible capacity to change, to learn new skills and the ability to heal itself. The bad habits we developed can be corrected and unlearned by incrementally reinforcing positive habits during our lifetime. Humans are highly self intelligent but our brains are easily tricked and numbed by a barrage of stimuli. Our failure or ignorance to accurately perceive the misuse of our physical body leads to dis-ease and sometimes painful consequences. It is not normal to live with stress, migraines or back pain. Don’t just put up with it and expect to relieve the pain with a daily dose of medication. The fact that we make mistakes is inevitable, but we have to use our body awareness to self correct and must have a deep inner desire to heal.
By cultivating a daily attitude of healing the mind and body, the brain will soon start to auto-correct itself. Try to develop a daily relationship with your senses, take time to do yoga, walk in nature, swim, meditate, not because its relaxing, see these daily activities as an exercise in learning about how your body works. Cultivate what feels natural and what intuitively feels good to you, there is no one system. Keep a diary or post-it notes of the things that made you feel energized and the things that bring you down, date it and review weekly. Your intuitive intelligence with the proper motivation to heal is your best guide. And of course get advice from your doctor, dietitian, physical therapist or Google a credible site with healthy advice.
Don’t confuse Bliss with Exhaustion
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Yoga can be applied as a mental tool when needed for a mind and body tune up. An obsessive daily routine with a motivation of attaining a perfect pose or a blissed out state of mind by pushing and pulling the muscles of the body to their limits can lead to exhaustion. Exhaustion may sometimes be associated with surrender and a temporary suspension of thought, but it is not bliss. It is just plain tired, your body may be depleted of its vital energy from trying to achieve the definitive power vinyasa flow.Observation of how your subtle body is feeling and how the synergy of breath and movement affects your state of mind is the process of becoming the silent witness. Check in with your body and ask yourself how you are feeling. Make sure all systems are go before, during and after your practice. Yoga is not necessarily a goal oriented practice but an ever present realization. Spiritual progress is not a horizontal or vertical progression, it is multidimensional, you have to view it in many different angles. Don’t do yoga because you think you need it to be healthy and sane, do it because it strikes a chord in your heart and mind, make yoga an enjoyable experience.
So what is the purpose of daily practice? One is example I like to use is the lady at the check out counter at the grocery store. Even if he or she does not practice any type of yoga, to me she is an advanced practitioner because he or she is able to maintain her poise, patience and composure amidst the chaos of long lines and the complaints of disgruntled customers.
In my opinion yoga is not about being able to twist and bend into difficult physical contortions until you are completely drenched in sweat to the point of collapsing, then come into corpse pose and think you have reached a state of stillness. Let the teacher within you speak, call it instincts or intuition, but if you listen to the intelligence of your body, energy awareness will lead you on the path that honors your skills and ability on and off the mat. The proper motivation should be towards more therapeutic modalities and much more heart centered. If you practice yoga six days out of the week to achieve the perfect alignment of a pose that is great. But in the end, there is no definite authority for the type of yoga you practice. Sutras, gurus, and postures are only reflections of what is already inside your heart and mind, yoga is a referential vehicle so when applied with the proper motivation may lead to liberation and health.