Balancing Your Emotions with Your Breath

by Nina

Close-Up of the Falls by Melina Meza

As I wrote in Your Breath: The Key to Your Nervous System, while you cannot tell your nervous system directly to slow your heart beat, digest your food more quickly or to start relaxing right this minute, you can control your breath. And because your heart rate tends to speed up on your inhalation and your heart rate tends to slow on your exhalation, this enables you to consciously access your nervous system. By intentionally taking in more air (either by speeding up your breath or by lengthening your inhalation) you can stimulate your nervous system. And by taking in less air (by slowing your breath or lengthening your exhalation), you can calm yourself down.

Last week, I wrote about emotional counter-poses that you can use to balance your emotions. You can use various yogic breath practices in the same way. You can use breath practices when nothing serious is wrong but you’re just feeling slightly hyper (see anxiety or stress) or slightly down (see clinical depression). And you can also use them as a supplement to other treatments if you are suffering from anxiety, agitated depression, clinical depression or chronic stress.

(Note that yogic breath practices have evolved over thousands of years as yogis experimented on themselves and passed on discoveries their students. And while some schools of yoga teach yogic breath practices (pranayama) to beginners, the type of yoga that I’m trained in, Iyengar style, considers breath practices to be so powerful that pranayama is introduced very gradually. So if you start experimenting with breath practices to balance your emotional condition, do take it easy.)

Anxiety and agitated depression. Because anxiety and agitated depression—which is anxiety based—are so often related to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, for these two conditions it’s best to focus on your exhalation. You can simply work on exhaling completely or lengthen your exhalation a beat or two (by pausing after your exhalation is complete). Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the exhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted exhalation, where you actually pause twice during your exhalation and once at the end. This is the practice that Iyengar himself recommends in Light on Life in his “Asanas for Emotional Stability” practice.

If manipulating your exhalation causes you to feel any agitation whatsoever, stop the practice. In addition, practices that lengthen your inhalation or even that bring your awareness to the inhalation (which can cause you to unintentionally lengthen or deepen your inhalation) may aggravate your condition, so you may want to avoid them.

If you’ve noticed that you are a chest breather—a type of breathing that seems to be associated with anxiety—and it doesn’t make you feel more anxious to work with your inhalation as well as your exhalation, you could practice abdominal breathing. In abdominal breathing, you focus on slowly inhaling into and exhaling from your belly rather than your chest, as you intentionally keep your abdominal area relaxed. You could lie on your back, and place a block or other light weight, such as a 1 pound bag of rice, on your belly to bring awareness to your abdomen, and keep your abdomen relaxed as you slowly inhale and exhale. Or, if lying on your back makes you anxious, you could lie in Crocodile pose (on your belly with your arms out to the sides, elbows bent, and forehead resting on stacked hands) so you can feel your abdomen moving toward and away from the floor as you slowly inhale and exhale.

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly hyper and want to calm down.

Clinical depression. For clinical depression, which tends to make people feel heavy and lifeless, focusing on your inhalation or breathing more quickly can stimulate your nervous system and bring you out of your lethargy. This is one reason why an active vinyasa practice, such as the Ashtanga series or Sun Salutations, can be helpful to those with clinical depression because when you move with your breath, you tend to breathe more quickly and take in more oxygen. So for you, it may be helpful to focus on your inhalation. You can simply work with inhaling more completely or lengthen your inhalation by holding it for a beat or two. Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the inhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted inhalation, where you actually pause twice during your inhalation and once after. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy McCall recommends Ujjayi breathing, which tends to lengthen both the inhalation and exhalation, as well as the version of Viloma with interrupted inhalation

Some people who are depressed tend to have a slumped posture, with a collapsed chest, so focusing on opening your chest and inhaling into that area can be beneficial. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy quotes Patricia Walden, who herself has suffered from clinical depression, saying:

“When you start focusing on your breath, and taking the breath into your chest and breathing deeply, you begin to feel the presence of your breath. What comes with that is a feeling of life returning, a feeling of warm that percolates throughout your chest at the beginning, but then throughout your entire body.”

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly depressed or blue.

Because stress is often a trigger for clinical depression, it’s possible that working with your exhalation as described for anxiety rather than your inhalation, could be helpful for you. So don’t hesitate to give it a try if you feel so inclined. As I said in my post Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body, when it comes to emotional balance, anything that makes you feel better is working.

Stress. Because chronic stress is the result of an overactive sympathetic nervous system, it makes sense to focus on pacifying your nervous system by working with your exhalation as I described for anxiety. However, from my observations of people doing pranayama, some people find any kind of pranayama relaxing (I, myself, do not, by the way). If you do find all breath work relaxing, go ahead and do whichever breath practice quiets your mind and relaxes you. Simply slowing your breath in general, with long, slow inhalations as well as exhalations, could be helpful in reducing stress. Practices where you speed up your breath will no doubt stimulate your nervous system. So if you are doing an active vinyasa practice to burn off your excess energy, end your yoga practice with a calming breath practice or an emotional counter-pose (see Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses) that triggers the relaxation response.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Yoga

by Baxter

As I am preparing for my upcoming web talks on Yoga for Healthy Digestion for YogaU Online scheduled for July 23rd and 25th, I am rediscovering a lot about  both our digestive health and illness. Of particular interest is a very common gastro-intestinal (GI) condition called Irritable Bowel Syndrome, sometimes abbreviated IBS. The last time statistics were taken for this condition in the US, it was estimated that 15.3 million people suffered with IBS. It accounted for three million doctors office visits in 2004, 212,000 hospitalizations the same year, and 5.9 million prescriptions. Before we look at yoga’s potential impact on IBS, let’s take a look at how IBS shows up and what we know about its causes. According to the Mayo Clinic website:

“Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common disorder that affects your large intestine (colon). Irritable bowel syndrome commonly causes cramping, abdominal pain, bloating gas, diarrhea and constipation. Despite these uncomfortable signs and symptoms, IBS doesn't cause permanent damage to your colon.” 

For most students and patients of mine with IBS, it is a chronic condition that they have had since childhood or teenage years that fluctuates from day to day, week to week or month to month. I want to bring special attention that last comment in the quote: IBS does not cause permanent damage to your colon. This in contrast to the less common but more serious GI conditions like Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory bowel diseases that do damage the gut and can have life-threatening consequences. Maybe because IBS does not have such serious consequences, some health care professionals may minimize the impact of IBS. But those who suffer from it know it can be a source of daily discomfort and challenge.

Another aside: since the recent recognition of Celiac disease, gluten allergy and sensitivity and the ability to test for them, many patients previously with an IBS diagnosis have been found to actually be gluten allergic, or have Celiac Disease. This has resulted in a huge improvement in symptoms for these folks as they eliminate gluten-containing foods from their diets. So, if you have been told you have IBS and have not been tested for gluten, do so soon. Also, know that there are newer and more sensitive tests for Gluten allergy, and to learn more, listen to this KPFA broadcast from last week. The discussion is on Lyme disease, but gluten allergy/Celiac testing is also addressed at the start of the program from minute 8 through 22.

It is unclear what the cause of IBS is, but it may have something to do with the smooth muscle lining of the gut walls that helps to move digesting food downstream. In some people the wave of contractions may be too fast or too slow.  It may also be that the neurotransmitter serotonin may play a role in IBS, as a lot of it is found in the gut. The balance of gut bacteria may also be off in IBS. Triggers for IBS are varied and variable from person to person, and include gas or pressure on your intestines, or certain foods, medications or emotions. Hormone fluctuations, especially female ones (IBS is more common in women than men) and stress are also common triggers. The risk factors for IBS include age of onset before 35, being a woman, and having a first degree relative with IBS.

The yoga approach to IBS is similar to some of the posts where we have discussed healthy digestion and eating (see Healthy Eating and Your Digestive System, Meditation and Healthy Eating, and other posts under the label "healthy eating". 

• If you think you may have food triggers, the increased awareness of your body and its reactions to foods you eat that develops with regular yoga practice can help you identify and eliminate your personal food triggers.
• In my practice, I noticed that flares of symptoms are very often related to increased periods of stress in my students’ lives. The effective stress reducing benefits of yoga, either via a well balanced yoga asana practice, or a more focused restorative practice, yoga nidra or simple mindful meditation practices could all help bring your gut into better balance and reduce your symptoms. (See The Relaxation Response and Yoga.)
• For a sluggish gut, with bloating and constipation, try Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclined Cobbler’s pose or Queen’s pose), and for an overactive gut with cramping and tendency for diarrhea, try Viparita Karani (Legs Up the Wall pose). 
• If you have not taken the “tour of your GI tract” we posted a while back, you could use it as a guided meditation while setting yourself up in a supported Savasana (see the Audio Tracks tab at the top of the page to find this audio track). 

And if you want to learn more about Yoga for Healthy Digestion, look for the free interview coming up in the next week or so on YogaU Online, and my more detailed two-night lecture on July 23 and 25th, 8:30-9:30 EST (see here).

Coming to Yoga Later in Life: A Personal Story

by Andy

Beach Road Adventure by Melina Meza

In 2006, life handed me a double whammy. I was diagnosed with both emphysema and Crohn’s disease. I had probably been living with these two conditions for years, but because I had grieved so long and hard after the loss of my husband to cancer in 1998, I had not paid attention to the slow but relentless worsening of my symptoms.

Also that year, two different friends told me, during two separate lunch conversations, “You need yoga!” Me? Yoga? I hadn’t even gone for a walk in nearly eight years. But the universe works in mysterious ways, and as luck would have it, in late 2007, I moved into a condominium that had a fitness center, Anytime Fitness, next door to my building. My 61-year-old body joined the gym, and I began working with a trainer twice a week. Over about six weeks, I was able to gradually increase my hold time in a forearm plank from five seconds to 20 seconds. (This was no picnic, believe me. After 20 seconds, I was completely out of breath and had to rest.)

Soon after I started strength training, Anytime Fitness started offering yoga classes. It was as though the advice of my friends had dropped from heaven into my lap! From the moment I found the mat, I felt like a duck in water. What amazed me was that the negative stories I had been telling myself about my physical abilities seemed irrelevant when it came to yoga. I’ve never been particularly athletic; I’ve never been good at sports. Back then, I spent most of my day at my desk or in meetings, and in the evening, I turned into a couch potato. But yoga changed all that.

The teacher, a gifted young yogi named Maren Marks, had the patience of a saint and the instincts of a master teacher. I studied with her for almost three years, even when I was taking classes from other teachers. On the mat, the optimist in me overcame the inner critic. I still don’t fully know why, but here is what I believe. Even though Hatha yoga is an embodied practice, it is facilitated by the breath and mind in concert. I had happened on an open-hearted discipline that required me to pay attention to my breathing, and that attention turned out to be critical to living well with emphysema. At the same time, yoga was teaching me to fully focus my mind on the activity at hand—I had no choice if I didn’t want to topple over!—and that helped me emerge from a seven-year funk following the death of my husband.

As I just suggested, when I started yoga in early 2008, I could not balance on one foot, so classic poses like Vrkasana (Tree Pose) and Warrior III were unavailable to me, and even front-facing, two-legged poses like Warrior I and crescent lunge—a high lunge with arms overhead or in namaste—had me swaying from side to side while my toes kept grasping for the mat. Adding a twist to a crescent lunge was unthinkable for me.

In every class I took, I immediately fell out of every balance pose I tried. And me with significant osteoporosis! So, one of the first things I learned as an older student was that I had to take care of myself, and that meant increasing my body awareness. After years of self-avoidance, I finally found a reason to reconnect with my body—to get to know it in age, and to use that knowledge to help keep me safe and confident. If I have learned anything at all from starting yoga at an older age, it is that.

Just as I learned that I could improve from five to 20 seconds in forearm plank, I began to realize that yoga was something I could get better at through practice. This was a profound realization for me, and offered a deep motivation to stay with my practice, to be persistent and patient, and to let greater comfort and proficiency come naturally over time. I discovered that in yoga, it always does. Over time, not only can you literally see and feel the positive changes in your body, you also find yourself feeling better in general—enjoying enhanced well-being. 

What I learned in class offered the healthy foundation I needed, but my deepest learning came in private, at home, where I could practice at my own pace. I was always years older than the next oldest person in my classes, and with my breathing and balance issues, I was often not able to keep up with my teacher. But she made me feel so welcome and supported that I didn’t care. I simply thought, “Oh, goodie! Here’s something I can practice at home.” For me, that was a completely new approach to learning. Truly, yoga had allowed me to let go of my ego (my younger self?) in order to open myself to deeper self-knowledge.

If you come to yoga in your 50s, 60s, or 70s, you’ll carry the richness of your life history with you to the mat. There, to my surprise, I learned that my history didn’t limit me at all, nor did my age, nor did my myriad diseases and conditions. But to keep myself safe as an older beginner, I did need to pay closer attention to the postural alignment of my body and the rhythms of my breath, both in movement and stillness, than my younger, softer-boned classmates.

If you are teaching older beginners, know that as we age, our body’s balance systems don’t work quite as well, and people new to yoga need help to safely reclaim those skills. For example, I have learned that for older beginners, one-legged Utkatasana (Chair pose) is an easier one-footed balance than Vrkasana (Tree pose). Know that your older students will have more complicated and diverse physical histories than your younger ones—as we age, our bodies become more unique and less like each other’s. But know, too, that older students are wise and have learned to make thoughtful decisions about themselves. Practice sensitive watchfulness and offer individual guidance, but respect the fact that older students know their bodies better than you.

It’s now been six years since I found yoga, and guess what? I can now enjoy Vrkasana any darn time I please! And Warrior III! And for dessert, I think I’ll have a crescent lunge with a gentle twist. Yoga is for all of us. May your yoga experiences be as fulfilling and sustaining as mine, no matter your age when you start.

Andrea (Andy) Gilats, Ph.D., R.Y.T., is an educator, writer, and certified yoga instructor. She specializes in working with people seeking a body-sensitive, age-appropriate approach to practice. She calls her approach Third Age Yoga  (www.thirdageyoga.net) as a welcome mat to all of us in the Third Age, a sustained era of life beyond midlife but before true old age, in which active engagement and personal fulfillment take center stage. As a writer, Andy has published a variety of articles on wellness and positive aging, and she is the author of Life Slices, a lushly illustrated card deck that invites us to contemplate eight timeless life themes and 52 pathways toward creating a life of purpose and meaning.