Reflections on Nilbon’s Yoga Therapy for Stress workshop
Autumn is just around the corner… We can feel it in the cool breeze of early mornings and we can see it in the changing colours of leaves. For many of us, this change can be a pleasant experience. We prepare ourselves by taking our warm clothes out, by adapting our schedule to the daylight, and we dream of finding comfort under our warm blanket with a good book in the evening. For the rest of us, the change of seasons and the shortening of the days can be a source of stress and anxiety. Some of us (including me), do not deal well with the cold weather and worry that our mental health may get worse as the cold weather creeps in.
To prepare ourselves for this change and to share some tools for dealing with the stress, we got together at Studio One in Nettlebed to talk about stress and how yoga can help us manage our stress better.
We started our session by a grounding practice, finding connection between our feet and the earth beneath us and brining awareness in to parts of the body we are not normally aware of during the day. We then moved on to a breath inquiry for a non-judgmental exploration of our breathing patterns. We talked about the relationship between our nervous system and the location of breath and that during fight or flight, or stress response, we are more likely to breathe into our upper lungs (more on that in another post), which further activates the stress response. After our breath inquiry, we moved onto our asana practice and experienced the joy of movement at our own pace. When it comes to movement in a therapeutic sense, we always think that more is less and we do not need to have a complicated and physically demanding practice to count what we do as yoga.
In our workshop, there was also time to talk about stress and our Window of Tolerance, a term that is coined by Daniel Siegel and I need to write a full blog post on it. We talked about the difference between acute stress and chronic stress and how chronic stress can lead to weakened immune system and make us more susceptible to illness. To make the link with yogic teachings, we talked about the Kosha’s model and we had time to think individually about how stress is affecting our physical body, our energy levels and breath, our mental well-being, our wisdom and knowledge, and our experience of joy and bliss in our lives, and what is the one thing that we can change. We ended our practice with a full-body relaxation.
In the weeks to come, we are going to reflect on Ahimsa and Satya, two of the five Yamas mentioned in Yoga Sūtras, which refer to non-violence and truthfulness respectively.
when we left the studio, I thought to myself that I all living things accept the change of seasons as they cannot fight it. They do what they need to survive the cold seasons, and so should I. Adaptability is one of the most important characteristics of we humans and my yoga practice will support me to reflect and grow continuously.
