Loosen the grip of anxiety part one

It is an ordinary day. Perhaps you are at the office, walking down the street, or reading your email. All of a sudden, you think about a task you haven’t finished. Or you think about your friend who hasn’t called in several weeks, or your college roommate who is doing so well in his law practice (much better than you!), or about the fact that you have to give a presentation tomorrow. Suddenly, your shoulders seize up. Your neck tightens. Maybe your breath constricts or your belly starts to hurt. The tendrils of anxiety—that most modern of afflictions—have wound themselves around your body and mind like the arms of an octopus. And if you are like the rest of us you think it is…. normal.

Anxiety is often so ingrained in the body and nervous system that we live with it for years without noticing how much it drives us. Anxious people often have real worries. That’s why merely telling yourself “there’s nothing to worry about” usually won’t help you feel less anxious. Instead, it’s much more useful to own your anxiety—to observe its patterns, to look at what might be setting it off, and then to find ways to work with it.

It’s only when you are willing to bring consciousness to your anxiety—to pay attention to the bodily sensation it brings, the thoughts that trigger it—that you can begin to learn from it.

Anxiety is mostly about the future. The woman who is worrying about her upcoming mammogram is not actually sick. She’s anxious about something the doctor might discover. The man whose palms sweat when the flight takes off is just anticipating that something might happen to the plane. If you keep nourishing your anxiety by letting worry feed on itself, your anxiety becomes like a motor with no off button.

The first step to loosening the grip anxiety has on your body and mind, is simply to become aware of it. See if you can become aware of how anxiety feels in your physical body. What part of you tightens when you feel nervous? Do you hunch your shoulders? Does your throat get constricted? How about your lower back? The next time you notice these physical symptoms, notice what kind of mental dialogue you are having with yourself.

In the process of working through anxiety in the present moment, you can, eventually become familiar with the sensation, thoughts, and emotions that trigger your habitual anxiety. It often takes a while even to be able to pick up on the physical sensations and to recognize the negative thoughts. But when you practice with your habitual reactions to anxiety, its tendrils will start to dissolve. Your shoulder will become more relaxed, your inner dialogue will become kinder, and your emotions will be less reactive.

Nancy Adams Certified Thai Yoga Therapist

                                                            And Ayurveda Consultant 

Yoga’s Many Benefits

Whatever your age or current physical state, yoga can improve your overall health. Moving your body, focusing your mind and opening your soul on the yoga mat transforms your life off the mat. Yoga's many benefits include stress management, breathing efficiency; awareness, bone strength, and improved posture just to name a few. Yoga is not only for the young and flexible—yoga poses can be modified to suit every body type and level of ability. In fact, studies have found that 2.9 million American yogis are 55 or older.

Stress management: Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind; it slows down the mental loops of frustration, regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. Since stress is implicated in so many health problems—from migraines and insomnia to lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—if you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll be likely to live longer and healthier.

Breathing efficiency: Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet taught a yogic technique known as “a complete breathing” to people with lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After a month, their average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6. Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly. As did the oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other things you’d rather no take into your lungs.

Awareness: Yoga increases feelings of compassion and interconnection by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also increases your ability to step back from drama or your own live, to remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can still react quickly when you need to but you can take the split second to choose a more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others.

Bone strength: It’s well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you lift you own body weight. And some, like Downward-and Upward-Facing Dog, help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to osteoporotic fractures. In an unpublished study conducted at California State University, Los Angeles. Yoga practice increased bone density in the vertebrae. Yoga’s ability to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol may help keep calcium in the bones.

Improved posture:  Regularly practicing yoga increases the ability to feel what your body is doing, where it is in space, and improves balance. People with bad posture of or dysfunctional movement patterns usually knee problems and back pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing home or never entering on at all. For the rest of us, postures like Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.

Nancy Adams Thai Yoga Therapist

                                                            And Ayurveda Consultant 

Skillfully Take on whatever Life brings

Yoga is not about stretching it’s about consciousness. Yoga techniques, whether they focus on body, breath, or brain, seek to cultivate an expansive, quiet state of mind. When we practice the main thing on our mind is often the intense sensation of the stretch, it can be hard to get beyond that to experience the postures as anything more than physical exercise aimed at wrestling an uncooperative body into unusual positions. But you are awakening your ability to feel what’s happening in your body, heart, and mind.

Awareness becomes more refined; it can guide you in all areas of your life. You begin to observe which foods make you feel best, which work you find most fulfilling, which people bring you joy—and which ones have the opposite effects.

In the high-stress environment the fight or flight response is triggered over and over and becomes chronic. Meditation is mindfulness and will help you process this agitation; part of the processing happens simply by holding what is called a spacious mindfulness. To create this state, you must first recognize the way anxiety feels in you body. As you breathe, tune in to the way it feels in your muscles, the different sensations it creates. Once you recognize it, you can practice releasing stress on the exhalation. As you do this, talk to yourself, coach yourself by saying, “it’s ok” “let go a little” don’t feel that you need to get rid of your anxiety all at once. Release little by little.

When it comes to transforming your own response to stress, it’s tempting to search for that one pose or breathing exercise that will work its magic. But there isn’t one magic pose. The process is a gradual exploration rather than an easy solution.

When fear comes up ask the fear what it wants then listen to what it has to say to you. Tell the fear that you know it is trying to protect you, and that you appreciate this, but that you would like it to back of a bit for now. Then sit in meditation a little longer. When you soften the fear and treat it kindly—not trying to get rid of it—you make space for fear to relax.

If you’re practicing yoga every day, you’re preparing for what life brings. You don’t have to have a strategy for what yoga technique you’ll use in a difficult situation. When challenges arrive, they will begin to flow through but not overwhelm you. You’re not so caught up in the stress of it, but you’re present for it.

This is the real story of how yoga can help you manage stress. It doesn’t just provide ways to burn through stress or escape from it. It doesn’t only offer stress-reduction techniques for anxious moments. It goes deeper, transforming how the mind and body intuitively respond to stress. Just as the body can learn a new standing pose that eventually becomes ingrained, so can the mind learn new thought patterns, and the nervous system can learn new ways of reacting to stress. The result:? When you roll up your mat and walk out the studio, you can more skillfully take on whatever life brings.

Nancy Adams Thai Yoga Therapist

                                                              And Ayurveda Consultant