Yoga for mental health

HOW TO HELP YOURSELF WITH ANXIETY WITH YOGA?

A synonym for anxiety is anxiety or tightness. Who is tight and where? Is it a feeling of being “tight” in your own skin, an discomfort of being due to internal pressure, as if you would like to jump out of your skin? Wikipedia says “The cause of anxiety disorders lies predominantly in psychological factors, although there is evidence of genetic influence and a neurophysiological basis.”

I would venture to say that everything we experience is a psychosomatic experience. The psyche (mind) affects the body in the same way that the body’s chemistry affects the psyche. We can cause fear in the body with our thoughts, and the physical sensations of fear also result in fearful thoughts. So, the experience of fear can be awakened from both directions. It is important to distinguish between these two aspects of the same experience.

Lately, “having positive thoughts” has been popular. Of course, positive thoughts create positive feelings in the body, which reduce our “grip”, but it is not that simple. If a “negative thought” appears to us, which we want to forcefully remove and negate, we actually react out of aversion to that negative thought, which is in itself a negative thought. First, we need to recognize that negative thought, accept it, feel it and relax with it, in this way we have a positive thought – a thought of acceptance and understanding for the negative. The “negative thought” is still there, but our attitude towards it and its energetic physical aspect is accepting and aware.

In other words, we learn to be calm with restless, calm eyes to look restlessly – this is the art of joyful living and true freedom.

An enlightened yogi or Buddha also feels “negative” states of body and mind, but their freedom lies in having the ability to choose whether to believe them or not, and in the ease of letting them go. That’s great in theory, but what happens when we are gripped by an anxious panic attack in which our attention is narrow and constricted, fear washes through our entire body, we shake, our breath shortens and everything seems so real?

Yoga practice says – through the body. We choose to return to the physical aspect of anxiety and feel the flow of that powerful energy through the body. Allowing the body to let the energy flow through itself at its own rhythm, while we keep a clear head (while knowing that there is breadth and we have an awareness of the transience of experience). The body always tends to let go, restore balance, strive for health and equilibrium, like everything in nature. With thoughts of fear and identification with difficult emotions, we trap anxiety in our system and in fact, by fighting to let it pass, we don’t let it pass.

As long as we don’t truly agree that this state/emotion is present, as long as we push it away and try to remove it, we create more and more unrest and anxiety.

And how to agree? The language that both the body and the mind understand is the breath. With yoga, we learn to slow down our breathing, expand our lung capacity, and regulate our nervous system with our breath. A deep breath with full attention to our body can give us a break from the whirlwind of thoughts that has already taken hold. Yoga is training to remember and choose to return to our body in these intense situations. Through practice, we awaken our body awareness, “mindfulness of the body,” our presence with our body. Yoga exercises work to stretch our muscles and create space that is lost in “anxiety” and stress, and restore openness and flexibility. They help us see things from a different, broader perspective, so little by little we begin to experience experiences more through our bodies, and less through ideas and concepts. Yoga is a path that offers a way to strengthen our capacity for self-regulation and the ability to choose which thoughts we want to believe. In the videos below, you can watch a few yoga classes, specifically designed to relieve anxiety and improve mental health by working with the body.

Note: I put “negative thoughts” in quotes because there are no negative and positive thoughts, there are only different psychosomatic intensities and our capacity to let them go without believing them. This article does not suggest stopping therapy if it is prescribed for a condition, nor working independently in acute conditions!