On the Benefits of Yoga... Beyond Exercise?

I think the answer to the question in the title is an undeniable “yes.” There is no doubt in my mind that the benefits of practicing yoga regularly go far beyond the benefits of mere exercise. To be sure, the yoga that I practice – Vinyasa – is fantastic exercise. After practicing regularly for about three months, I was noticeably stronger and more flexible. In a general sense, my body simply felt better. And, while the workout yoga gives you isn’t particularly cardio, Vinyasa and Ashtanga yoga do significantly raise your heart rate and quicken your breathing. The age of the word’s preeminent Ashtanga yogi – Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, recently turned 91 – speaks to the fact that certain types of yoga, when practiced regularly, can indeed be enough to keep you fit and healthy.

And yet there’s quite a bit more to yoga than mere exercise. In a word: yoga is moving meditation, and all of the benefits that go along with meditating are accessible to the yogi, whether experienced or not.

One of San Francisco’s yoga celebrities, Larry Schultz (see previous posting), put it quite succinctly: “yoga strengthens and purifies the nervous system so it can reflect a greater degree of consciousness.” In my experience, this is very accurate. Our daily lives have evolved to the point where we spend 99% of our waking existence completely oblivious to our own bodies – that is, until something goes wrong. Consider a typical white-collar working day: wake up, drive to work, work at computer / attend meetings / etc., drive home, watch TV / read / socialize, go to sleep. There is virtually nothing in this cycle that would draw your attention to your own body (and here I don’t mean judgments about your own body, which most of us make all the time, but rather a consciousness of the body, an awareness of how it feels as it receives stimuli from the world). Exercise is, of course, an exception, but most forms of exercise focus on only a few parts of the body, or a few specific movements, and although we feel better afterwards, we are not left feeling significantly closer to our bodies as we are after yoga.

It is an inherent truth about emotions that although they exist in the mind, they manifest themselves in the body. If you doubt this, consider how your chest feels after a significant break-up, or how your shoulders feel before, during and after a stressful event. Our emotions show themselves to us in our bodies even when we aren’t aware of them in our minds. The yogi’s body is particularly awake – and thus the yogi is aware of emotions, as they show themselves through the body, in a way that those who don’t practice will have difficulty imagining.

It has been claimed that yoga can be beneficial in treating the following psychological ailments:

-anxiety
-panic attacks
-stress
-attention deficit
-depression

Whether this is the case or not depends largely upon the individual and type of practice. There have been virtually no medical studies conducted on the mental health benefits of yoga. And yet so many of these benefits are so common across the experience of all yogis, from beginners to experts, from those who practice yoga to relax to those who practice yoga to stay fit.

If what I’ve written so far seems a bit vague, let me explain how these benefits show themselves in my own life and my own practice. Keep in mind that I am a beginner, and have only begun to unlock the secrets of asanas, prana, and the practice of yoga.

First off, there are certain poses that demand the utmost of our concentration. These include balancing poses such as tree pose, crow pose, and all varieties of head-, arm-, shoulder- and handstands. In order to achieve these poses, so much of our concentration is required that we are forced to empty our minds entirely of all thoughts and distractions. In effect, these poses bring moments of Zen into our lives without requiring us to sit still in a quiet room for hours on end. If this doesn’t yet make sense to you, try standing in tree pose for a moment and notice how the concentration it requires brings peace into your consciousness, even of only for the duration of the pose itself.

My second point is best illustrated by a quote from Pete Guinosso, a yoga teacher here in San Francisco of whom I am particularly fond. “Without breathing,” Pete says at the beginning of his classes, “yoga is nothing more than calisthenics.” Whether this is true or not is debatable, but Pete’s point is that to reap the psychological benefits of yoga, we must incorporate breathing into our practice. Focusing on breathing is the most fundamental technique in almost all forms of meditation. This is because our breathing is always with us, and it is such a part of the background of our lives that focusing on it allows us to exit what Henepola Gunaratana calls “monkey mind” – the incessant flow of thoughts and judgments through our minds. By coordinating our movements with our breath, yoga allows us to reconnect with it, engraining it into the new consciousness we develop of our bodies. This awareness of breathing carries us through our practice, but it also persists off the mat, affording many psychological and physical benefits. As Larry Schultz put it during one of my Rocket classes: “surprise, surprise: when the human body breathes, it feels good.”

Lastly, there is something significant about the repeated experience of holding postures and releasing them (this may apply to certain types of yoga, such as Vinyasa and Ashtanga, but not others). A hold draws our consciousness into whichever part of the body we are using to maintain it. When the hold is over, we feel immense relief, and then we proceed into a new hold, straining a new part of the body, and re-directing our attention to a new locus of tension. This repeated pattern of tension and release is a sort of metaphor for life itself, which is also a series of stresses and tensions, followed by releases and then new tensions and stresses. If you are like me – under a constant amount of stress, no matter what environment you are in – yoga can train you to be aware not just of the stress you feel, but also of its release when it occurs. In other words, it trains you to expect moments of relief during moments of stress, and to prepare for moments of stress during moments of relief. Thus yoga prepares us for the challenges we face in life by engraining a new consciousness of life into our experience of our bodies.