Yoga for Office Workers

By Sangeetha Saran

The modern office worker has a lot to be thankful for from retirement plans and health care options to Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and other perks geared toward making working life a little more healthy and less stressful. Even as nice as all of that might be, it still doesn't repair some of the health and comfort issue associated with desk jobs. This is where yoga can help!

Posture

We all know what terrific benefit yoga can provide in terms of correcting poor posture and the damage it can cause. For those whose lower backs are on fire after a long day at the office, their seated posture can easily be the culprit. A regimen of beginner level yoga postures and breathing exercises can help put this right without having a chiropractor involved. Some may find the Hero Pose (Virasana) quite helpful in creating good posture.

Weight Gain

No one ever wants to admit that their job is making them obese. Yet, working at a desk does not require as much physical labor in comparison to jobs of the past. Unfortunately, obesity and weight gain can open them up to a world of unnecessary health issues, including high blood pressure and diabetes. Learning to incorporate yoga into their lives can help combat weight gain due to a sedentary lifestyle. This can be done through scheduled classes either before or after work or by bringing yoga into the office during lunchtime or other regular breaks. While yoga may not strip away the pounds, it will help tone, strengthen, and maintain what lies beneath them.

Lowering Stress

A little stress can help focus the mind. A lot of it can cause unwanted consequences that affect both physical and mental health. To keep stress below toxic levels, people in high-stress positions would do themselves a big favor by adding yoga to their weekly, if not daily, routines. According to an article in Complementary Therapies in Medicine (2007), yoga was better than other relaxation techniques for reducing stress and anxiety levels. Many students find the Child Pose (Balasana) and the Cobra Pose (Bhujangasana) both quite conducive to stress reduction.

Yoga is not just for athletes and the overly health-conscious anymore. It is a discipline for which many people can benefit; especially those whose jobs have them desk-bound much of the day. Yoga can be used to improve posture, combat weight gain and relieve stress, all of which improve the quality of life of those employed in offices.

© Copyright 2016 – Aura Wellness Center – Publications Division

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Tales About Yoga Posture Alignment

By Gopi Rao

When taking yoga classes, you will often hear unproven tales about proper alignment. What does it really mean? The word “alignment” floats around with no real guidance attached to it. Here are a few stories and reality checks about alignment.

Tales vs. Reality: Yoga Posture Alignment

1. When you do poses with proper alignment, energy flows freely throughout your whole body.

Well, most practitioners believe when you do a yoga pose with perfect alignment, your nervous system lights up. Energy, or prana, flows through the entire body. All obstacles that are blocking any energy are removed. However, the idea is to create a blockage with the pose so that you can have large amounts of energy flow through you after a few minutes of doing the pose. Whether you twist your spine or do a triangle pose, the idea is to test the ability to continue breathing and remain calm while doing difficult poses.

2. You were born with perfect alignment, but you lost it due to environmental conditions.

This story is very common in yoga, but it is also very wrong. The truth is that we are all born imperfect. That means one arm is longer than the other, one breast may be bigger or smaller than the other for women. Everyone has a dominant side as in the hand you write with. Me being a righty, I am more comfortable doing things on the right side of my body as opposed to the left side. Life experiences, mood, and behavior do affect the tone of your muscles and your posture whether it is for the good or bad. Once you realize that everyone's body is unique, you will be able to get the pose into your body rather getting the body in to the pose.

3. If you are not in proper alignment, you may injure yourself.

When it comes to a machine, alignment is very important. Like aligning tires for your car. The thing is, bodies aren't aligned like cars or machines. Bodies are constructed in curves. Not straight lines. So while some yoga teachers will make this comparison, it isn't completely accurate. Now, injuries can occur in yoga, but it's unlikely that the result is from improper alignment. The reason why people injure themselves in yoga is because they do not pay attention to the signals their body is trying to send them. They push themselves to reach some goal that they are not ready to achieve just yet. They don't look at what is safe and what is unsafe for their body.

The real truth is that there is no perfect alignment in any body. All bodies are individually unique. Your body is born the way it is and all you can do is use it properly. In order to make it better, you have to test yourself carefully to see where you can go, realize that your body may not look like someone else’s' and that is okay. Also, realize that you should not push yourself farther than you can go in order to fit your body into a preconceived mold.

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More About Contraindications For Asanas and Pranayama

By Sangeetha Saran

Yoga is generally always safe, but some asanas and positions need to be avoided by people with several medical or physical conditions. Yoga has been used as a healing tool for centuries, but it is important to have full knowledge about implementing this tool. Also, for several serious conditions a group session is just not the way to go. Individual sessions are more preferable for practitioners with serious conditions.

Short-term contraindications:

·      Recent surgery

·      Vestibular apparatus violation

·      Intracranial and intraocular pressure increase

·      Worsening period of a chronic disease

·      Over-cooling and overheating of the body temperatures

·      Neuroinfection

·      Intense fatigue

·      After consuming a lot of medication

Long-term contraindications:

·      Hematopathy

·      Musculoskeletal system infection

·      Organic heart problems

·      Epilepsy and mental disorders

·      Tumors

·      Severe injuries in spine or fresh injuries in head

However, practitioners can continue their practice under several conditions if the poses/asanas and breathing exercises (pranayama) are modified in order to avoid any damage arising from a contraindication. Here are several contraindications that can be addressed with slight modifications in the asana:

·      Diseases of spine: Students who are suffering from any sort of disease in the spinal area should avoid asanas that include forward bends from any position in order to ensure there is no further damage to the spinal cord.

·      Digestive issues: Students suffering from these should avoid twisting and turning their bodies while practicing yoga. Any asana that might have an effect on the abdominal region should not be practiced.

·      Arthritis, arthrosis: These patients should only be practicing therapeutic yoga and should avoid any asanas outside of therapeutic yoga.

·      Enlarged or twisted veins: Stay away from any asana that requires balancing the body on one or both legs and asanas that require the legs to be pressed against the wall in order to achieve a pose.

·      Hypertension: For any asana that requires inversions, it is advised it is to be done in the presence of a yoga teacher. Doing it alone is completely to be avoided.

·      Menstruating: For women who are menstruating, practice should be kept lenient for a while. Power asanas, back bends, twisting the body and asanas performed while standing are to be avoided. If felt necessary, complete abandonment of yoga for several days would be advisable.

·      CFS: For practitioners suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, mild asanas are recommendable. Focus more on deep relaxation exercises and practice more pranayama than asanas.

·      Pregnancy: Mostly all the attention is paid on pranayama during pregnancy. Relaxation exercises for the body, especially the uterus and the abdomen along with joint exercises are advisable. The routines are to be adjusted according to the trimester but mostly the exercises are kept soft.

This knowledge plays a crucial role for every teacher and every student. Anybody who wants to start a yoga practice may research contraindications majorly because safety should be ensured while trying to improve health. These contraindications, as you see, can be dealt with by yoga and will not be too much of a problem as long as you are perseverant and patient. Every student, especially who is facing any of these contraindications should find a suitable teacher and in several cases arrange for a private session to have more time for dealing with these contraindications. It is necessary that even students do not go ahead and experiment since that might be very risky. No practice is to be conducted without the teacher’s advice. Any new problem that may arise during the course of practice and learning yoga should be promptly reported to the teacher without any delay.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Hardly ever a contraindication completely sabotages a practitioner’s yoga practice. Bare the knowledge with you, and stay safe.

© Copyright 2016 – Aura Wellness Center – Publications Division

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About Developmental Movement Patterns in Yoga

By Kathryn Boland

Consider how yoga approaches framed with the knowledge of typical developmental movement patterns can lead individuals with specific physical complications, due to traumas in their early childhoods, to overcome those challenges as well as to re-claim other parts of their lives for the better. While reading, as fellow yoga instructors you might have asked “Well, what about working with whole classes of students, all with separate life histories and physical abilities? How could we apply all of this in that context?”

I respond with an encouraging observation that the sequence most traditional asana classes follow align with the described common developmental movement sequence. For instance, we typically focus on keying into breath, and then enter into movements that warm up the spine as well as require contact (touch) with the floor. We then venture into more complex postures that develop balance as well as cross-lateral and body-half sequencing (such as Trikonasana and the Warrior series). Hence, in many ways yoga already aligns with how our bodies have naturally developed and now currently function.

Remaining aware of these patterns, however, can further lead practitioners and instructors to sequence practices, as well as adjust specific postures (on oneself or ones’ students), in ways that make them all the more valuable (see the prior posts for more details on such purposeful adjustments). Knowledge of developmental movement patterns can also serve as an assessment tool for oneself and/or one’s students, which can then lead to beneficial adjustments to yoga practice. For instance, an instructor might notice that a particular student is capable overall, yet has immense difficulties with balancing – indicating lack of vestibular sense building. 

We might notice that others have trouble stabilizing in the core while extending out through the limbs, or vice versa, demonstrating lack of having developed the core-distal movement skill. Even in the midst of busy classes with diverse students, we can give students quick pieces of individual guidance that can help them to begin overcoming difficulties involved with lacking those pieces of their developmental movement “repertoire”. That is even more realistically possible with certain students who regularly attend our classes. See the former post in this series for more on such individual guidance.

 If all of that might seem like a lot of complex information to absorb, as well as complicated to implement, I recommend continuing to trust ourselves in how we lead ourselves and others in practice; if we truly listen to our bodies, hearts, and minds, they will let us know what is best for ourselves and for those we guide. All of that in mind, I would like to offer a short sequence that should be accessible to most moderately-functional and physically able students (yet perhaps not to wheelchair-bound elderly individuals, for instance – though I believe in you readers to have the capable know-how to make any necessary adjustments).

The sequence goes through all of the eight stages of developing movement abilities that I have described in this series (with any questions, I advise you to return to any or all of the prior posts in this series, all available on the Aura Wellness Center Teacher Training Blog and searchable by the first part of this post’s title - if you might have the time and interest). Dance/movement therapy and other somatic practices commonly utilize such sequences for leading varied individuals to greater body-integration, and through that gains including increased pro-sociality, reduced anxiety, and clearer cognition. When we use our bodies in ways that are true to them, the results can truly be astounding in ways that far exceed the physical.

• Breath - Easy Pose with Pranayama (any exercise in the discipline that might be appropriate and beneficial for the students at hand)

• Touch – Lion’s Pose (with gentle thigh massages before and/or after “splayed” fingers common to the pose)

• Head-Tail – Cat/Cow Postures Flow

• Core/Distal – Anjaneyasana (Low Lunge)

* Through Knees-Chest-Chin to execute on the other leg

•  Upper/Lower – Uttana Shishosana (Puppy Pose)

* Reach out arms and bring shoulders over wrists to extend into Full Plank Posture

•  Body-Half – Side-Plank Posture

* Rest back into Child’s Pose to then flow into the next pose

• Cross (Contra)-Lateral – Seated Twist in Baddha Konasana (Tailor’s Pose) or Easy Pose

• Come back to breath in Easy Pose; it all comes back to that most essential element!

Thank you, dear readers, and I wish you the best with any applications (direct or indirect) of this perspective that you might put into practice. Namaste!

© Copyright 2016 – Aura Wellness Center – Publications Division

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