Just what the doctor ordered: yoga as a true embodiment of holistic therapy
By Dr. Ruddy, Inner Fire Yoga Teacher
As I reflect on fourteen years of service in healthcare and two decades of experience in yoga instruction, it is both humbling and encouraging to see how a thriving yoga community can truly help elevate the well-being of so many people regardless of personal circumstances and health challenges.
The “skills before pills” approach to living espoused through dedicated yoga practice can even help us safely navigate the many pitfalls and shortcomings of modern medicine, which can be effective in the short run yet often costly and/or risky in the long haul.
How is yoga, a relatively “ancient” method, uniquely qualified to help us maintain our health and vitality? Well, here are some of the ways, scientific as well as pragmatic:
The breath-focused entry into each pose enables our mind to properly access the non-verbal pathways encompassing our deeper human abilities beyond cognition (thinking). In certain meditation practice, this is understood as direct experience via intuition.
The non-judgmental approach to any sensory feedback and the feeling each asana elicits makes us more insightful about our physical alignment and physiologic processes, in turn making us more compassionate beings and helping us restore equanimity (resilience) amidst whatever challenges we individually and collectively face, on and off the mat.
The intimate, communal aspect of practicing yoga together enables each of us to experience the most evolved, sophisticated inner mechanism of self-healing, i.e. the heart-mind connection known as Flow. This state can be an antidote to so-called chronic stress response rendered by our habitual, unskillful engagement of the relatively more primitive freeze-or-fawn, fight-or-flight reactions widely rampant in today’s society.
With deliberate and consistent practice, yoga can help us each fully inhabit our authentic, powerful and loving selves. Only by doing so can we feel reliably at ease and confident in our own bodymind (a term deliberately used here to represent a more embodied understanding of the so-called Mind-Body connection).
Healing is ultimately the process of becoming truly at home in the world, which requires skillful engagement of our own body that leads us to a more proactive mode of living. A yoga practice cultivated in earnest can wholly transform our outlook by undermining our fiction (deeply held false beliefs). This in turn provides much-needed inner clarity and compassion for ourselves and those we love and serve in the most authentic, meaningful, and helpful way. A profound, lasting change of heart is the healing outcome of our lifelong yoga practice.
See you on the mat! Namaste.