Chapter 1 Yoga as Medicine
Timothy’s comment: This chapter provides a broad overview of the field of yoga therapy, based on my years of research in India and throughout the United States interviewing, observing and study with many of the world’s leading yoga teacher and therapists. The chapter explores common misconceptions about yoga, such as that it is a religion or that it’s only for the flexible and fit, and describes the numerous tools in the yoga tool box. It also outlines the yogic prescription for replacing unhealthy habits with healthier ones, which begins with a single step from wherever you are right now.
Chapter 2 The Science of Yoga
Timothy’s comment: Although it might seem that yoga would be in conflict with modern medical science, I believe that the two seemingly diametrically opposed systems, can be reconciled, and that the effort to do so can be illuminating. The major topic of the chapter is the forty ways that yoga facilitates healing -- from improving balance to lowering cholesterol readings -- which are supported by scientific evidence. In addition, throughout the book, we’ll be reviewing more than 100 studies of yoga’s ability to help people with a variety of health conditions. For those interested in more detail, the Notes section in the back of the book lists the journal names and page numbers for the various studies described in the book. Readers put off by science, however, can skip this chapter entirely, or just skim it, and still benefit from the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 Yoga for Stress Relief
Timothy’s comment: The chapter reviews the health consequences of stress, and the yogic view of the mind’s role in fueling the fires. It describes a number of yoga practices that can help including breath work, meditation, restorative poses, and guided imagery practices like Yoga Nidra.
Chapter 4 Bringing A Yogic Perspective to Your Health Care
Timothy’s comment: To me, this is one of the most important chapters in the book. It describes yoga’s holistic approach to health, which goes beyond merely trying to eliminate symptoms of disease. The chapter outlines the yogic as well as the Ayurvedic approach to diet, and explains why favoring organic food whenever possible is a good idea. It also offers suggestions on how to safely integrate yoga therapy into other health care, both conventional and alternative.
Chapter 5 Doing Yoga Safely
Timothy’s comment: Yoga can be a force for healing but, when done improperly, can also lead to injuries and a worsening of underlying conditions. The chapter explains which practices seem riskiest and offers a number of suggestions on yoga safety. Readers interested in more detail should also check out Appendix 1, Avoiding Common Yoga Injuries.
Chapter 6 Choosing a Style of Yoga and a Teacher
Timothy’s comment: Although all the different styles of yoga can make things confusing for those trying to figure out where to start -- and to health care practitioners trying to advise them -- the wealth of useful approaches also means almost everyone can find something that will appeal to them. Those with serious health conditions, however, need to select carefully, since some styles may be too strenuous or otherwise contraindicated. In this chapter, I’ll try to make sense of all the choices, and provide tips on what to look for in a teacher.
Chapter 8 Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Rolf Sovik, PsyD, began studying yoga with Swami Rama in the early 1970s. At his guru’s suggestion, he pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology, along the way writing a master’s thesis comparing cognitive therapy to yoga, and completing a research project on the use of breathing in the treatment of anxiety. Rolf practices as a psychotherapist, teaches yoga, and with his wife Mary Gail is co-director of the Himalayan Institute of Buffalo, New York. He is the co-author with Sandra Anderson of the book Yoga: Mastering the Basics and author ofMoving Inward: the Journey to Meditation.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter outlines the critical connection between the state of your mind and the quality of your breath, a relationship that has a surprising amount of support in the scientific research (which is also reviewed). Rolf pratices yoga in the style of his guru Swami Rama, a raja yoga practice deeply informed by Tantra and Ayurveda. The practice he prescribed for the student in the chapter is designed to increase her awareness of her breathing habits and to strengthen the diaphragm. Not only were her panic attacks and anxiety controlled, but she was able to get off of all medications for her asthma.
Chapter 9 Arthritis
Marian Garfinkel first met her teacher, BKS Iyengar, in 1974 and has been going to India every year since then to study with him. She is perhaps best known for her randomized, controlled trial, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, which showed clear benefits for the specifically--adapted program of Iyengar yoga that she created for people with carpal tunnel syndrome. Eight years before that, for her doctoral thesis in education at Temple University, she conducted a study demonstrating the effectiveness of yoga for arthritis. What sparked her interest in therapeutic yoga? “Having grown up with European parents, I’ve always been interested in maintaining good health without doctors,” she says. Now a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Marian finds herself in the company of doctors more than she ever imagined. She directs and teaches at the BKS Iyengar Yoga Studio of Philadelphia.
Timothy’s comment: Marian has the uncanny ability of the most highly experienced yoga teachers to look at a student’s body, and see subtleties of anatomical alignment that go way beyond what even a highly-trained orthopedist could apprehend. In this chapter, she used this ability to adapt yoga poses to help a middle-aged woman who has had to stop running due to progressive degenerative arthritis in her knees. When she first consults Marian, the student is having a lot of difficulty with such everyday activities as going up and down stairs.
Chapter 10 Asthma
Barbara Benagh’s influences are diverse. She studied Iyengar yoga in the 1970s and 80s and later trained intensively with yoga teacher Angela Farmer. Her interest in using yoga for asthma was sparked by her own problems with the disease, including frequent pneumonias, many hospital stays and a near fatal admission to intensive care. It was after that ICU stay that she dedicated herself to learning all she could about breathing. She was inspired by the work of Dr. Gay Hendricks, author of Conscious Breathing, and Dr. Konstantin Buteyko, a pioneer in the use of breath retraining for people with asthma. Her experience with yoga told her that “if I persevere, and I continue to work, I will eventually find things to help me.” After much trial and error she hit upon a series of exercises that slowly transformed her entire relationship with breathing. By a few years ago, she’d improved so much that she was even able to return to a passion she’d had to drop ten years earlier: long-distance bicycling. Barbara has been teaching yoga in the Boston area and internationally for more than 30 years.
Timothy’s comment: Barbara offers a number of breathing practices to correct the half dozen dysfunctional breathing habits she frequently observes in students with asthma. She also offers very practical suggestions for doing yoga if you have the disease, some of which contradict the advice she’d repeatedly been told by other yoga teachers, who themselves do not suffer from the disease. The student in this chapter used the exercises she recommended to wean himself off of steroid inhalers and, in the end, yoga transformed more than just his relationship to his breathing.
Chapter 11 Back Pain
Judith Hanson Lasater calls herself a yoga teacher who also happens to be a physical therapist. She was already teaching yoga when one day, some 35 years ago, it occurred to her she should become a PT, “because I wanted to be a better yoga teacher. My husband asked me, ‘Have you ever been to one?’ No. ‘Do you know what they do?’ No. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ No. But I literally woke up and knew that was what I wanted to do.” This intuition proved to be a good one. Her PT training gave her a much deeper understanding of human anatomy and kinesiology and has allowed her to take what she’s learned back to other yoga teachers to help them to become more professional and able to communicate with doctors more easily. Judith herself regularly gets referrals from M.D.s, some of whom she’s never even met. Judith also holds a doctorate in East-West psychology, and is the author of six books on yoga, including Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times, on the practice and therapeutic aspects of restorative yoga. She teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area and worldwide.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter reviews the importance of posture -- sitting, standing and sleeping posture -- as well as a host of other factors that can either cause or contribute to back pain. Judith offers a gentle practice for a student with herniated lumbar disks, whose pain was so incapacitating that surgery was recommended. The student consulted Judith instead, and more than a decade later she’s remained pain-free -- as long as she remembers to practice her yoga. Judith’s training is in Iyengar yoga, but she is an innovator who incorporates many of her own ideas into her teaching.
Chapter 12 Cancer
Jnani Chapman is a registered nurse who teaches yoga for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, to people with cancer, heart disease and other chronic illness. Her style of teaching and yoga therapy is based on the Integral Yoga of Swami Satchidananda, with a strong influence from her time with TKV Desikachar and his students. As an Integrative Medicine Specialist, Jnani also practices acupressure and massage at UCSF and, at both the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, California and the Smith Farm Center in Washington, D.C. She worked for Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease as a yoga/stress management specialist from 1986-1999, and was the Executive Director of The International Association of Yoga Therapists from 1994-1997. Jnani certifies yoga teachers in adaptive yoga therapy for people with cancer and chronic illness through Yogaville, the Satchidananda Ashram and Teaching Academy in Virginia.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter reviews the yogic approach to cancer. Jnani teaches a class gentle enough for student’s with a wide variety of diagnoses and levels of fitness. The young woman whose story is told started yoga after she was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer, despite lacking major risk factors for the disease. She used yoga and other holistic measures to help her tolerate the side effects of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and improve the quality of her life.
Chapter 13 Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
More than 30 years ago, Tom Alden was a serious yoga student who wanted to learn more about anatomy. After considering the options, he decided to become a chiropractor. His yoga study has been primarily with Iyengar teachers. Over the years, he has combined what he has learned about functional anatomy from both his yoga practice and his clinical work as a chiropractor “to teach people to take care of themselves through yoga.” He teaches yoga and anatomy workshops and runs a private chiropractic practice from his office in the Boston area.
Timothy’s comment: Although Tom’s background is Iyengar yoga, his approach is completely original based on his decades of clinical experience, and his deep understanding of functional anatomy. He’s also a long-term practitioner of Vipassana meditation and this, too, influences the approach he took with a technical writer at a major high tech company who developed arm pain that was making it difficult for her to do her job. Not only did she recover, her growing awareness made her wonder whether she might be a lot happier in another line of work.
Chapter 14 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Gary Kraftsow began his study of yoga in India with T.K.V. Desikachar, son of the legendary Krishnamacharya, in 1974, while still a college student. Although Gary holds a master’s degree in Psychology and Religion, his desire is to demystify yoga and make it relevant to people in the modern world, including those who come to yoga because of a medical condition. The viniyoga approach he teaches is gentle with slow, flowing movements always coordinated with the breath. The emphasis is on home practice with short sessions, say, 20-30 minutes a day, that most people can fit into their busy lives. Gary developed a 12-week practice series for a study that found yoga an effective treatment for back pain, recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (see chapter 11). He is the Founder and Director of the American Viniyoga Institute in Maui, Hawaii, the author of Yoga for Wellness and Yoga for Transformation, and conducts workshops and teacher trainings around the U.S. and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Viniyoga is one of the deepest traditions in yoga and yoga therapy, and Gary is the most prominent representative of this style of yoga in the United States. Gary bases his approach to the student in the chapter on the five layers of existence as described in the Upanishads, ancient Indian sacred texts. In Gary’s experience, many people suffering from chronic fatigue do too much, overruling their bodies’ objections to their unbalanced lives. His approach is to raise awareness not just of the physical body through asana practice, but of the breath, lifestyle choices, and the importance of finding sources of joy in daily life.
Chapter 15 Depression
Patricia Walden suffered from clinical depression in her 20s and early 30s and tried private and group psychotherapy, hypnosis and medication, all of which helped to a degree. “But they left me with a feeling of emptiness, a sense that there must be something more,” she says. When she met BKS Iyengar in 1977, “there was something about his method of teaching, from the very first day, that spoke to me directly. His teaching kind of bypassed my brain and went right into my heart. My first class with him, he said ‘If you keep your armpits open, you’ll never get depressed.’ That made perfect sense to me.” The realization about how the body could affect the mind she describes as “a mini-moment of enlightenment for me, actually life-changing. From that time on I began to see my yoga practice as a way of helping me deal with my depression, and especially the emptiness that I had felt often throughout my life.” Patricia is one of the two senior, advanced teachers of Iyengar yoga in the United States, and is well-known for her best-selling yoga instructions videos. She teaches in the Boston area and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Patricia’s warm and inspirational style, her dedication to her own personal practice and to her students, as well as her personal experience with depression, make her the perfect yoga teacher to feature in this chapter. (For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that I might be a little biased here -- Patricia has been my teacher since 1995 (though unfortunately I don’t get to see her as much since I moved to the San Francisco Bay area)). Patricia outlines her approach to two major types of depression, and designs a classical Iyengar approach, using a number of supported backbends, to help an overachieving graduate student who feels empty despite all her academic success.
Chapter 16 Diabetes
More than 30 years ago Sandra Summerfield Kozak was tricked into teaching her first yoga class by someone desperate to have her take over for him. Circumstances notwithstanding, the yoga stuck and since then, Sandra has had the opportunity to study with many of the field’s most eminent masters including BKS Iyengar, Iyengar’s guru Krishnamacharya, Vanda Scaravelli, TKV Desickachar, Sant Keshavadas, Baba Hari Dass and Swami Muktananda. Hoping to “attract physicians to what yoga was about and its effect on the body,” Sandra wrote a master’s thesis in the late 70s on the physiological effects of asana, pranayama and meditation. Still trying to reach out to a broader audience, her current focus is to take “yoga and Ayurveda and translate them into more western terms.” She teaches yoga and yoga therapy in the San Francisco Bay area and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter shows Sandra’s yogic approach to type 2 diabetes (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), which is heavily influenced by Ayurveda, India’s traditional system of medical care. Since the student in the chapter was heavy, and Sandra adapted the practice to suit her, this chapter serves as a nice complement to the chapter on obesity and overweight. Sandra is the co-author, with David Frawley, of the book Yoga for Your Type, which explains how to adapt yoga practices for people of different Ayurvedic constitutions (doshas).
Chapter 17 Fibromyalgia
Sam Dworkis feels a special affinity for people with chronic pain due to his own experience with multiple sclerosis and the fibromyalgia that followed. A yoga teacher since 1975, Sam was diagnosed with MS in 1994. He had so much pain and became so discouraged, that he completely gave up his yoga teaching as well as his own practice. But a few years ago, after sharing some yoga concepts with a quadriplegic neighbor as a favor and seeing the tremendous progress she made, he reversed course. “When she told me how these exercises had changed her life, I started my yoga up the very next morning after six years of doing nothing.” Since then he’s lost the 20 pounds he had put on and has regained his ability to do many yoga poses that he thought he’d never do again. “I believe today that I have to do whatever I can do to maximize my potential and minimize my liability,” he says. “I’m convinced that the practice of yoga moves me in that direction.” Sam teaches from his studio near West Palm Beach, Florida. He is the author of two books, ExTension and Recovery Yoga.
Timothy’s comment: Sam understands, as someone with fibromyalgia himself, how important it is to not overdo when you’ve got this condition, and he prescribes a deceptively simple routine to help his student. In fact, before she’d met Sam, the student had tried a vigorous power yoga class that left her bedridden for two days afterwards. With Sam’s approach, however, she slowly improved, and was later able to add stronger practices like sun salutations, making a few modifications that Sam suggested to make them safer.
Chapter 18 Headaches
Before becoming a yogi, Rodney Yee danced professionally with the Oakland Ballet Company and the Matsuyama Ballet Company of Tokyo. One day in 1980, Rodney and a fellow dancer decided to try a class at the Yoga Room, an Iyengar yoga studio upstairs from the Berkeley Ballet Theatre where they were rehearsing, to see if it might help with their flexibility. Rodney remembers telling his friend afterwards, “I can’t believe how good I feel.” Not only did his body feel fabulous but he was touched in an emotional and spiritual way as well. A short time later, Rodney began to phase out his dance career in order to pursue yoga full-time. At the time, his family thought he was crazy and would never amount to anything because his earnings from teaching yoga were so meager, he needed to work as a waiter to pay the bills. Rodney is featured in over twenty yoga videos and has co-written two books (with Nina Zolotow), Yoga: The Poetry of the Body and Moving Toward Balance. He teaches at the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California, and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Rodney used his perceptive abilities to notice subtle details about the student’s body and her style of practicing that allowed him to craft a personalized approach to her frequent migraines. In fact, Rod felt that some of the yoga practices that this serious student had been doing were likely contributing to her headaches, and he suggested she cut some of them out entirely. He felt her strong practice was otherwise fine, though he suggested she balance her vigorous poses with more restorative work.
Chapter 19 Heart Disease
Nischala Joy Devi says “Before yoga, I realized the American dream.” Despite all the material advantages, however, she still wasn’t happy. She met her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga, in San Francisco in 1973 and connected with him immediately. She was working as a physician's assistant in a cardiologist’s office at the time, but gradually became disillusioned with the narrow approach to healing found in western medicine. When she moved to the guru’s ashram in Connecticut in 1979, she started to teach yoga to a number of seriously ill patients in its holistic health clinic. “It was a natural way for me to combine both parts of my life,” she says. A few years later, she met the physician, medical researcher and author Dean Ornish, another disciple of Satchidananda. When he put together the Lifestyle Heart Trial, a groundbreaking study of a multi-faceted program to reverse heart disease, Dean asked her help design the yoga portion of the program. Nischala taught yoga to the participants as well as training the other yoga teachers, and subsequently served as Director of Stress Management. Nischala was also a co-founder with Dr. Michael Lerner of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, in Bolinas, California, a residential retreat for people with cancer that includes yoga, massage and other healing modalities. She has gone on to write two books, The Healing Path of Yoga and The Secret Power of Yoga, and created and directs Yoga of the Heart, a yoga therapy training program for yoga teachers and health professionals working with people with life-threatening diseases. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and teaches internationally.
Timothy’s comment: In this chapter, Nischala outlines the yogic approach taken in the Ornish program with a man who’d already had one angioplasty and whose recurrent symptoms had led doctors to recommend a second one. Instead he went into the Ornish program, despite his reservations about yoga, and ended up becoming a convert. He not only completely eliminated his symptoms of heart disease, but by relaxing and getting over some of his anger started to enjoy his life a lot more.
Chapter 20 High Blood Pressure
Aadil Palkhivala was seven years old when he began his formal studies with BKS Iyengar in Pune, India. You could say, though, that his first exposure to the master’s work was actually in the womb. His mother could not conceive even after seven years of trying, so, after exhausting all the medical options, she worked with Iyengar, who developed a special set of practices designed to enable her to conceive and then carry her pregnancy to term. Since Aadil was the result, something seems to have worked! Aadil worked closely with Iyengar throughout his teens, and was certified as a senior teacher of the Iyengar method in his early twenties. Since then he has gone on to study law, naturopathy, Ayurveda and natural cooking, among a wealth of other interests, and his work has been deeply influenced by the Indian spiritual master Sri Aurobindo. Aadil is the founder and director of Yoga Centers as well as The College of Purna Yoga, both in suburban Seattle, and teaches there and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Aadil, a man of numerous talents, outlines his approach to hypertension, for a high-powered executive, who was diagnosed with high blood pressure after suffering an unexpected stroke. Diet, exercise and medication helped bring the numbers down, but it was the addition of yoga that got his numbers back into the normal range despite a reduced dosage of medication. The chapter also outlines some yoga practices that may not be appropriate for those with high blood pressure.
Chapter 21 HIV/AIDS
Shanti Shanti Kaur Khalsa describes her decision to work with people with AIDS in the mid 1980s, as “a calling within a calling,” and one her guru, Yogi Bhajan, encouraged at every step. “I knew that I needed to be a yoga teacher when I had my first yoga class, and later realized that I needed to do this,” she says, although “it was difficult to find places to teach, because people didn’t want people with HIV in their building. They didn’t want them using their toilets. It was a challenging time.” She felt compelled to teach this vilified population after experiencing, a “strong, palpable sense,” that this was to be her work while attending a celebration for Guru Ram Das, a 16th century Sikh (whom she describes as the “patron saint” of Kundalini yoga). “We all get messages from inside,” she says. “Sometimes we listen to them and sometimes we ignore them. But I said yes to this one, and I’m grateful because it brought me into a much deeper sense of my practice and who I am and what I’m on the planet for.” Shanti Shanti Kaur holds a Ph.D. in Health Psychology, and is the founder and director of the Guru Ram Das Center for Medicine & Humanology in Espanola, New Mexico, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving those with chronic or life-threatening illnesses, conducting research on the medical effects of Kundalini yoga, and training health care professionals to use it in their practice. Her Ph.D. thesis was on using meditation to facilitate healthy behavioral changes in people who are HIV positive. She teaches yoga people with HIV, a class for people with diabetes, and one for women with breast cancer at the Guru Ram Das Center, and conducts teacher training workshops internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Shanti Shanti Kaur, a pioneer in teaching yoga to those with HIV and AIDS, brings her wealth of experience to this chapter. She addresses issues such as dealing with medication side effects and adapting the practice to the needs of people at different stages of the disease from asymptomatic to full-blown AIDS.
Chapter 22 Infertility
John Friend’s mother introduced him to yoga as a child, reading to him from a book that described yogis and their supernatural powers. “My mother was my main mentor and main guide in my life,” John says. “She believed that when you aligned with nature, good things would happen.” She also encouraged John at every step. “As I started to practice asana at the age of 13, she would say ‘You can do the Handstand’. We’d do it on the driveways and she would be cheering me on. ‘I told you so,’ she would say. It afforded me a really positive outlook on life so that now when people come to me with problems like infertility, I think, ‘Let’s just do the best we can and see what happens.’ Even if the doctors say a woman can’t get pregnant, I try to be open-minded about her chances. My mother was a great example of that kind of thinking.” John has studied a variety of styles of yoga over the years, and prior to founding Anusara Yoga in 1997 was a certified teacher of Iyengar yoga. Anusara combines the alignment-oriented focus of Iyengar yoga with a life-affirming philosophy shaped by Tantra (see Chapter 6). He has been teaching yoga since 1980. He is based in the Houston, Texas area and teaches internationally.
Timothy’s comment: John, the founder of one of the fastest growing styles of yoga, outlines his approach to infertility. He teaches that learning to release chronic tension in the pelvis as well as relaxing the mind can change blood flow to the reproductive organs to help facilitate conception and pregnancy. The student in the chapter also found that the pelvic relaxation and breathing John taught her also were useful during childbirth.
Chapter 23 Insomnia
Roger Cole, Ph.D. is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher who has taught yoga since 1980, and a research scientist who studies the physiology of sleep, relaxation and biological rhythms. When Roger was a teenager, his sister came home from college with a book that showed a yogic breathing exercise. He recounts that when he first tried that practice, he didn't think it was doing anything, but then he noticed that "in times of stress it made me more calm." This realization “had a profound effect on me.” While an undergraduate at Stanford a couple of years later, he began an asana practice, which he also initially learned from a book. Gradually his interest in yoga found expression in his academic work. While in graduate school in health psychology at the University of California, San Francisco he did studies of brain waves in various yoga poses and also demonstrated how a common blood pressure reflex (the baroreflex) makes reclining and inverted body positions promote sleep while standing positions inhibit it. Roger teaches yoga in San Diego and gives workshops throughout the United States.
Timothy’s comment: Roger uses his expertise in the physiology of sleep to design a routine to facilitate falling asleep for a physician whose anxiety, high stress job, and erratic call schedule made sleeping a challenge. Roger also offers suggestions on practices you can try if you find yourself unable to sleep in the middle of the night.
Chapter 24 Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Thirty years ago, Michael Lee was working for the South Australian Public Service Board studying how people behaved in the workplace, and running workshops on how to effect change. But gradually he came to realize that the human behavior principles that were the basis of his workshops were insufficient. “I felt the piece that was missing was the body,” an insight he thinks had been awakened by starting a yoga practice. “When I first began to practice yoga, I realized that there was a real connection between what was going on in my body and in my life.” One day his young daughter had said to him, “Daddy, I like when you do your yoga. When you do your yoga you don’t get so mad at me.” That was a powerful confirmation he says. In 1984, he took a sabbatical from the work he was doing for the government of Australia and went to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts for the express purpose of developing new programs. Michael admits that the Australian government never got their money back on that investment. “I got so into yoga that I went back and resigned.” He developed Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy in 1986 and ran their center and teaching programs until 2006 when he stepped down to pursue writing and other interests. Michael has written two books: Turn Stress Into Bliss and Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. He has two master’s degrees, one in behavioral psychology, the other in holistic health education.
Timothy’s comment: Michael offers a program that combines gentle yoga poses along with mindfulness meditation to relieve stress and lessen the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. In Phoenix Rising yoga, students are encouraged to explore the emotional and psychological themes that inevitably arise in the process of doing this work, and in doing so, often find relief of previously bothersome symptoms.
Chapter 25 Menopause
Elise Browning Miller was a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil more than 30 years ago when her back muscles went into painful spasms. Although she’d known for several years that she had scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, this was the first time she’d had any serious pain related to the scoliosis. Another Peace Corps volunteer, a handsome blonde surfer, offered to teach her some yoga stretches, and it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. The poses helped her, and upon returning to the States she became a follower of Integral Yoga’s Swami Satchidananda. Later, she was drawn to BKS Iyengar’s focus on anatomical alignment, which she found particularly helpful for her back. Elise now hold a master’s degree in Therapeutic Recreation from the University of North Carolina, is a Senior Certified Iyengar Yoga teacher, and has been teaching yoga since 1976 in Palo Alto, California, throughout the United States and internationally. She is featured on the instructional videos, Yoga For Scoliosis and Intermediate Yoga in Fiji.
Timothy’s comment: Elise designed a program to help a long-time student who developed incapacitating hot flashes when she needed to suddenly discontinue estrogen pills after a breast cancer diagnosis. The chapter also discusses certain yoga practices that should be avoided as they may make menopausal symptoms worse.
Chapter 26 Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
When Eric Small says he comes from a long line of horse traders, he means it literally. From a very early age Eric learned how to look a horse in the mouth. “You never believed what the owner told you; you had to make your own evaluation.” It was under his horse-trading father’s tutelage that Eric first became a teacher—at the age of six. “My father would put me on a box in the middle of the ring – a little kid, blond hair, big, thick glasses, skinny as a rail – and I could teach people how to ride horses. And I could project my voice. I knew what to look for.” When he began practicing yoga more than 50 years ago after developing MS at the age of 22, the transition to teaching was natural. It was what he’d been doing all his life. His commitment to teaching yoga became even stronger when he studied with BKS Iyengar, whose work forms the basis of what he now gives to his students. Eric says Iyengar’s approach is so powerful that “You don’t want to keep this to yourself.” He runs the Beverly Hills Iyengar Yoga Studio, is the co-author of Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis, and is featured in the video Yoga with Eric Small. Eric and his wife Flora Thorton have funded two major yoga programs The Eric Small Adaptive Iyengar Yoga Program, available nationally through local chapters of the MS Society, and The Eric Small Living Well with MS program, offered in Southern California.
Timothy’s comment: Not only did Eric act as the yoga teacher featured in this chapter, but he modelled the poses as well. Seeing someone who has had MS for so long who is doing so well, and looking so good, is an inspiration to students, and a testimonial of the healing power of yoga.
Chapter 27 Overweight and Obesity
Richard Freeman first got interested in yogic philosophy at the age of 13 when he read Henry David Thoreau's Walden. In Richard’s soft-spoken presence, you can readily envision him as a shy teenager drawn to the writings of the ascetic writer, himself inspired by a copy of the Bhagavad Gitahe’d brought with him to that cabin in the woods. In 1970 Richard took his first trip to India, studying with many teachers including BKS Iyengar. After spending eight years in Asia learning yoga and meditation, Richard moved back to the United States where he met the man who would become his principal teacher, Pattabhi Jois of Mysore, India, the central teacher in the lineage of Ashtanga yoga. Richard continues to teach this system, in his own unique way, deeply informed by his study of Sanskrit and yogic philosophy. Richard is the director of the Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and teaches there and internationally. He is featured on the instructional videos Yoga With Richard Freeman and the audio series The Yoga Matrix.
Timothy’s comment: At first it might seem odd that Richard Freeman, skinny as a rail as he is, is the yoga teacher featured in the Overweight and Obesity chapter. But Richard’s knowledge of yogic philosophy is deep, and I wanted this chapter to include a spiritual approach to body weight -- an element that is often missing in other approaches. Richard’s knowledge of the subject is bolstered by his marriage to Mary Taylor, a gourmet chef whose own struggles with an eating disorder inspired her to co-write (with Lynn Ginsberg) the excellent book, What Are You Hungry For?: Women, Food, and Spirituality.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter provides a broad overview of the field of yoga therapy, based on my years of research in India and throughout the United States interviewing, observing and study with many of the world’s leading yoga teacher and therapists. The chapter explores common misconceptions about yoga, such as that it is a religion or that it’s only for the flexible and fit, and describes the numerous tools in the yoga tool box. It also outlines the yogic prescription for replacing unhealthy habits with healthier ones, which begins with a single step from wherever you are right now.
Chapter 2 The Science of Yoga
Timothy’s comment: Although it might seem that yoga would be in conflict with modern medical science, I believe that the two seemingly diametrically opposed systems, can be reconciled, and that the effort to do so can be illuminating. The major topic of the chapter is the forty ways that yoga facilitates healing -- from improving balance to lowering cholesterol readings -- which are supported by scientific evidence. In addition, throughout the book, we’ll be reviewing more than 100 studies of yoga’s ability to help people with a variety of health conditions. For those interested in more detail, the Notes section in the back of the book lists the journal names and page numbers for the various studies described in the book. Readers put off by science, however, can skip this chapter entirely, or just skim it, and still benefit from the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 Yoga for Stress Relief
Timothy’s comment: The chapter reviews the health consequences of stress, and the yogic view of the mind’s role in fueling the fires. It describes a number of yoga practices that can help including breath work, meditation, restorative poses, and guided imagery practices like Yoga Nidra.
Chapter 4 Bringing A Yogic Perspective to Your Health Care
Timothy’s comment: To me, this is one of the most important chapters in the book. It describes yoga’s holistic approach to health, which goes beyond merely trying to eliminate symptoms of disease. The chapter outlines the yogic as well as the Ayurvedic approach to diet, and explains why favoring organic food whenever possible is a good idea. It also offers suggestions on how to safely integrate yoga therapy into other health care, both conventional and alternative.
Chapter 5 Doing Yoga Safely
Timothy’s comment: Yoga can be a force for healing but, when done improperly, can also lead to injuries and a worsening of underlying conditions. The chapter explains which practices seem riskiest and offers a number of suggestions on yoga safety. Readers interested in more detail should also check out Appendix 1, Avoiding Common Yoga Injuries.
Chapter 6 Choosing a Style of Yoga and a Teacher
Timothy’s comment: Although all the different styles of yoga can make things confusing for those trying to figure out where to start -- and to health care practitioners trying to advise them -- the wealth of useful approaches also means almost everyone can find something that will appeal to them. Those with serious health conditions, however, need to select carefully, since some styles may be too strenuous or otherwise contraindicated. In this chapter, I’ll try to make sense of all the choices, and provide tips on what to look for in a teacher.
Chapter 8 Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Rolf Sovik, PsyD, began studying yoga with Swami Rama in the early 1970s. At his guru’s suggestion, he pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology, along the way writing a master’s thesis comparing cognitive therapy to yoga, and completing a research project on the use of breathing in the treatment of anxiety. Rolf practices as a psychotherapist, teaches yoga, and with his wife Mary Gail is co-director of the Himalayan Institute of Buffalo, New York. He is the co-author with Sandra Anderson of the book Yoga: Mastering the Basics and author ofMoving Inward: the Journey to Meditation.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter outlines the critical connection between the state of your mind and the quality of your breath, a relationship that has a surprising amount of support in the scientific research (which is also reviewed). Rolf pratices yoga in the style of his guru Swami Rama, a raja yoga practice deeply informed by Tantra and Ayurveda. The practice he prescribed for the student in the chapter is designed to increase her awareness of her breathing habits and to strengthen the diaphragm. Not only were her panic attacks and anxiety controlled, but she was able to get off of all medications for her asthma.
Chapter 9 Arthritis
Marian Garfinkel first met her teacher, BKS Iyengar, in 1974 and has been going to India every year since then to study with him. She is perhaps best known for her randomized, controlled trial, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, which showed clear benefits for the specifically--adapted program of Iyengar yoga that she created for people with carpal tunnel syndrome. Eight years before that, for her doctoral thesis in education at Temple University, she conducted a study demonstrating the effectiveness of yoga for arthritis. What sparked her interest in therapeutic yoga? “Having grown up with European parents, I’ve always been interested in maintaining good health without doctors,” she says. Now a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Marian finds herself in the company of doctors more than she ever imagined. She directs and teaches at the BKS Iyengar Yoga Studio of Philadelphia.
Timothy’s comment: Marian has the uncanny ability of the most highly experienced yoga teachers to look at a student’s body, and see subtleties of anatomical alignment that go way beyond what even a highly-trained orthopedist could apprehend. In this chapter, she used this ability to adapt yoga poses to help a middle-aged woman who has had to stop running due to progressive degenerative arthritis in her knees. When she first consults Marian, the student is having a lot of difficulty with such everyday activities as going up and down stairs.
Chapter 10 Asthma
Barbara Benagh’s influences are diverse. She studied Iyengar yoga in the 1970s and 80s and later trained intensively with yoga teacher Angela Farmer. Her interest in using yoga for asthma was sparked by her own problems with the disease, including frequent pneumonias, many hospital stays and a near fatal admission to intensive care. It was after that ICU stay that she dedicated herself to learning all she could about breathing. She was inspired by the work of Dr. Gay Hendricks, author of Conscious Breathing, and Dr. Konstantin Buteyko, a pioneer in the use of breath retraining for people with asthma. Her experience with yoga told her that “if I persevere, and I continue to work, I will eventually find things to help me.” After much trial and error she hit upon a series of exercises that slowly transformed her entire relationship with breathing. By a few years ago, she’d improved so much that she was even able to return to a passion she’d had to drop ten years earlier: long-distance bicycling. Barbara has been teaching yoga in the Boston area and internationally for more than 30 years.
Timothy’s comment: Barbara offers a number of breathing practices to correct the half dozen dysfunctional breathing habits she frequently observes in students with asthma. She also offers very practical suggestions for doing yoga if you have the disease, some of which contradict the advice she’d repeatedly been told by other yoga teachers, who themselves do not suffer from the disease. The student in this chapter used the exercises she recommended to wean himself off of steroid inhalers and, in the end, yoga transformed more than just his relationship to his breathing.
Chapter 11 Back Pain
Judith Hanson Lasater calls herself a yoga teacher who also happens to be a physical therapist. She was already teaching yoga when one day, some 35 years ago, it occurred to her she should become a PT, “because I wanted to be a better yoga teacher. My husband asked me, ‘Have you ever been to one?’ No. ‘Do you know what they do?’ No. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ No. But I literally woke up and knew that was what I wanted to do.” This intuition proved to be a good one. Her PT training gave her a much deeper understanding of human anatomy and kinesiology and has allowed her to take what she’s learned back to other yoga teachers to help them to become more professional and able to communicate with doctors more easily. Judith herself regularly gets referrals from M.D.s, some of whom she’s never even met. Judith also holds a doctorate in East-West psychology, and is the author of six books on yoga, including Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times, on the practice and therapeutic aspects of restorative yoga. She teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area and worldwide.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter reviews the importance of posture -- sitting, standing and sleeping posture -- as well as a host of other factors that can either cause or contribute to back pain. Judith offers a gentle practice for a student with herniated lumbar disks, whose pain was so incapacitating that surgery was recommended. The student consulted Judith instead, and more than a decade later she’s remained pain-free -- as long as she remembers to practice her yoga. Judith’s training is in Iyengar yoga, but she is an innovator who incorporates many of her own ideas into her teaching.
Chapter 12 Cancer
Jnani Chapman is a registered nurse who teaches yoga for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, to people with cancer, heart disease and other chronic illness. Her style of teaching and yoga therapy is based on the Integral Yoga of Swami Satchidananda, with a strong influence from her time with TKV Desikachar and his students. As an Integrative Medicine Specialist, Jnani also practices acupressure and massage at UCSF and, at both the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, California and the Smith Farm Center in Washington, D.C. She worked for Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease as a yoga/stress management specialist from 1986-1999, and was the Executive Director of The International Association of Yoga Therapists from 1994-1997. Jnani certifies yoga teachers in adaptive yoga therapy for people with cancer and chronic illness through Yogaville, the Satchidananda Ashram and Teaching Academy in Virginia.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter reviews the yogic approach to cancer. Jnani teaches a class gentle enough for student’s with a wide variety of diagnoses and levels of fitness. The young woman whose story is told started yoga after she was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer, despite lacking major risk factors for the disease. She used yoga and other holistic measures to help her tolerate the side effects of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and improve the quality of her life.
Chapter 13 Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
More than 30 years ago, Tom Alden was a serious yoga student who wanted to learn more about anatomy. After considering the options, he decided to become a chiropractor. His yoga study has been primarily with Iyengar teachers. Over the years, he has combined what he has learned about functional anatomy from both his yoga practice and his clinical work as a chiropractor “to teach people to take care of themselves through yoga.” He teaches yoga and anatomy workshops and runs a private chiropractic practice from his office in the Boston area.
Timothy’s comment: Although Tom’s background is Iyengar yoga, his approach is completely original based on his decades of clinical experience, and his deep understanding of functional anatomy. He’s also a long-term practitioner of Vipassana meditation and this, too, influences the approach he took with a technical writer at a major high tech company who developed arm pain that was making it difficult for her to do her job. Not only did she recover, her growing awareness made her wonder whether she might be a lot happier in another line of work.
Chapter 14 Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Gary Kraftsow began his study of yoga in India with T.K.V. Desikachar, son of the legendary Krishnamacharya, in 1974, while still a college student. Although Gary holds a master’s degree in Psychology and Religion, his desire is to demystify yoga and make it relevant to people in the modern world, including those who come to yoga because of a medical condition. The viniyoga approach he teaches is gentle with slow, flowing movements always coordinated with the breath. The emphasis is on home practice with short sessions, say, 20-30 minutes a day, that most people can fit into their busy lives. Gary developed a 12-week practice series for a study that found yoga an effective treatment for back pain, recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (see chapter 11). He is the Founder and Director of the American Viniyoga Institute in Maui, Hawaii, the author of Yoga for Wellness and Yoga for Transformation, and conducts workshops and teacher trainings around the U.S. and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Viniyoga is one of the deepest traditions in yoga and yoga therapy, and Gary is the most prominent representative of this style of yoga in the United States. Gary bases his approach to the student in the chapter on the five layers of existence as described in the Upanishads, ancient Indian sacred texts. In Gary’s experience, many people suffering from chronic fatigue do too much, overruling their bodies’ objections to their unbalanced lives. His approach is to raise awareness not just of the physical body through asana practice, but of the breath, lifestyle choices, and the importance of finding sources of joy in daily life.
Chapter 15 Depression
Patricia Walden suffered from clinical depression in her 20s and early 30s and tried private and group psychotherapy, hypnosis and medication, all of which helped to a degree. “But they left me with a feeling of emptiness, a sense that there must be something more,” she says. When she met BKS Iyengar in 1977, “there was something about his method of teaching, from the very first day, that spoke to me directly. His teaching kind of bypassed my brain and went right into my heart. My first class with him, he said ‘If you keep your armpits open, you’ll never get depressed.’ That made perfect sense to me.” The realization about how the body could affect the mind she describes as “a mini-moment of enlightenment for me, actually life-changing. From that time on I began to see my yoga practice as a way of helping me deal with my depression, and especially the emptiness that I had felt often throughout my life.” Patricia is one of the two senior, advanced teachers of Iyengar yoga in the United States, and is well-known for her best-selling yoga instructions videos. She teaches in the Boston area and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Patricia’s warm and inspirational style, her dedication to her own personal practice and to her students, as well as her personal experience with depression, make her the perfect yoga teacher to feature in this chapter. (For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that I might be a little biased here -- Patricia has been my teacher since 1995 (though unfortunately I don’t get to see her as much since I moved to the San Francisco Bay area)). Patricia outlines her approach to two major types of depression, and designs a classical Iyengar approach, using a number of supported backbends, to help an overachieving graduate student who feels empty despite all her academic success.
Chapter 16 Diabetes
More than 30 years ago Sandra Summerfield Kozak was tricked into teaching her first yoga class by someone desperate to have her take over for him. Circumstances notwithstanding, the yoga stuck and since then, Sandra has had the opportunity to study with many of the field’s most eminent masters including BKS Iyengar, Iyengar’s guru Krishnamacharya, Vanda Scaravelli, TKV Desickachar, Sant Keshavadas, Baba Hari Dass and Swami Muktananda. Hoping to “attract physicians to what yoga was about and its effect on the body,” Sandra wrote a master’s thesis in the late 70s on the physiological effects of asana, pranayama and meditation. Still trying to reach out to a broader audience, her current focus is to take “yoga and Ayurveda and translate them into more western terms.” She teaches yoga and yoga therapy in the San Francisco Bay area and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: This chapter shows Sandra’s yogic approach to type 2 diabetes (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), which is heavily influenced by Ayurveda, India’s traditional system of medical care. Since the student in the chapter was heavy, and Sandra adapted the practice to suit her, this chapter serves as a nice complement to the chapter on obesity and overweight. Sandra is the co-author, with David Frawley, of the book Yoga for Your Type, which explains how to adapt yoga practices for people of different Ayurvedic constitutions (doshas).
Chapter 17 Fibromyalgia
Sam Dworkis feels a special affinity for people with chronic pain due to his own experience with multiple sclerosis and the fibromyalgia that followed. A yoga teacher since 1975, Sam was diagnosed with MS in 1994. He had so much pain and became so discouraged, that he completely gave up his yoga teaching as well as his own practice. But a few years ago, after sharing some yoga concepts with a quadriplegic neighbor as a favor and seeing the tremendous progress she made, he reversed course. “When she told me how these exercises had changed her life, I started my yoga up the very next morning after six years of doing nothing.” Since then he’s lost the 20 pounds he had put on and has regained his ability to do many yoga poses that he thought he’d never do again. “I believe today that I have to do whatever I can do to maximize my potential and minimize my liability,” he says. “I’m convinced that the practice of yoga moves me in that direction.” Sam teaches from his studio near West Palm Beach, Florida. He is the author of two books, ExTension and Recovery Yoga.
Timothy’s comment: Sam understands, as someone with fibromyalgia himself, how important it is to not overdo when you’ve got this condition, and he prescribes a deceptively simple routine to help his student. In fact, before she’d met Sam, the student had tried a vigorous power yoga class that left her bedridden for two days afterwards. With Sam’s approach, however, she slowly improved, and was later able to add stronger practices like sun salutations, making a few modifications that Sam suggested to make them safer.
Chapter 18 Headaches
Before becoming a yogi, Rodney Yee danced professionally with the Oakland Ballet Company and the Matsuyama Ballet Company of Tokyo. One day in 1980, Rodney and a fellow dancer decided to try a class at the Yoga Room, an Iyengar yoga studio upstairs from the Berkeley Ballet Theatre where they were rehearsing, to see if it might help with their flexibility. Rodney remembers telling his friend afterwards, “I can’t believe how good I feel.” Not only did his body feel fabulous but he was touched in an emotional and spiritual way as well. A short time later, Rodney began to phase out his dance career in order to pursue yoga full-time. At the time, his family thought he was crazy and would never amount to anything because his earnings from teaching yoga were so meager, he needed to work as a waiter to pay the bills. Rodney is featured in over twenty yoga videos and has co-written two books (with Nina Zolotow), Yoga: The Poetry of the Body and Moving Toward Balance. He teaches at the Piedmont Yoga Studio in Oakland, California, and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Rodney used his perceptive abilities to notice subtle details about the student’s body and her style of practicing that allowed him to craft a personalized approach to her frequent migraines. In fact, Rod felt that some of the yoga practices that this serious student had been doing were likely contributing to her headaches, and he suggested she cut some of them out entirely. He felt her strong practice was otherwise fine, though he suggested she balance her vigorous poses with more restorative work.
Chapter 19 Heart Disease
Nischala Joy Devi says “Before yoga, I realized the American dream.” Despite all the material advantages, however, she still wasn’t happy. She met her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga, in San Francisco in 1973 and connected with him immediately. She was working as a physician's assistant in a cardiologist’s office at the time, but gradually became disillusioned with the narrow approach to healing found in western medicine. When she moved to the guru’s ashram in Connecticut in 1979, she started to teach yoga to a number of seriously ill patients in its holistic health clinic. “It was a natural way for me to combine both parts of my life,” she says. A few years later, she met the physician, medical researcher and author Dean Ornish, another disciple of Satchidananda. When he put together the Lifestyle Heart Trial, a groundbreaking study of a multi-faceted program to reverse heart disease, Dean asked her help design the yoga portion of the program. Nischala taught yoga to the participants as well as training the other yoga teachers, and subsequently served as Director of Stress Management. Nischala was also a co-founder with Dr. Michael Lerner of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, in Bolinas, California, a residential retreat for people with cancer that includes yoga, massage and other healing modalities. She has gone on to write two books, The Healing Path of Yoga and The Secret Power of Yoga, and created and directs Yoga of the Heart, a yoga therapy training program for yoga teachers and health professionals working with people with life-threatening diseases. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and teaches internationally.
Timothy’s comment: In this chapter, Nischala outlines the yogic approach taken in the Ornish program with a man who’d already had one angioplasty and whose recurrent symptoms had led doctors to recommend a second one. Instead he went into the Ornish program, despite his reservations about yoga, and ended up becoming a convert. He not only completely eliminated his symptoms of heart disease, but by relaxing and getting over some of his anger started to enjoy his life a lot more.
Chapter 20 High Blood Pressure
Aadil Palkhivala was seven years old when he began his formal studies with BKS Iyengar in Pune, India. You could say, though, that his first exposure to the master’s work was actually in the womb. His mother could not conceive even after seven years of trying, so, after exhausting all the medical options, she worked with Iyengar, who developed a special set of practices designed to enable her to conceive and then carry her pregnancy to term. Since Aadil was the result, something seems to have worked! Aadil worked closely with Iyengar throughout his teens, and was certified as a senior teacher of the Iyengar method in his early twenties. Since then he has gone on to study law, naturopathy, Ayurveda and natural cooking, among a wealth of other interests, and his work has been deeply influenced by the Indian spiritual master Sri Aurobindo. Aadil is the founder and director of Yoga Centers as well as The College of Purna Yoga, both in suburban Seattle, and teaches there and internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Aadil, a man of numerous talents, outlines his approach to hypertension, for a high-powered executive, who was diagnosed with high blood pressure after suffering an unexpected stroke. Diet, exercise and medication helped bring the numbers down, but it was the addition of yoga that got his numbers back into the normal range despite a reduced dosage of medication. The chapter also outlines some yoga practices that may not be appropriate for those with high blood pressure.
Chapter 21 HIV/AIDS
Shanti Shanti Kaur Khalsa describes her decision to work with people with AIDS in the mid 1980s, as “a calling within a calling,” and one her guru, Yogi Bhajan, encouraged at every step. “I knew that I needed to be a yoga teacher when I had my first yoga class, and later realized that I needed to do this,” she says, although “it was difficult to find places to teach, because people didn’t want people with HIV in their building. They didn’t want them using their toilets. It was a challenging time.” She felt compelled to teach this vilified population after experiencing, a “strong, palpable sense,” that this was to be her work while attending a celebration for Guru Ram Das, a 16th century Sikh (whom she describes as the “patron saint” of Kundalini yoga). “We all get messages from inside,” she says. “Sometimes we listen to them and sometimes we ignore them. But I said yes to this one, and I’m grateful because it brought me into a much deeper sense of my practice and who I am and what I’m on the planet for.” Shanti Shanti Kaur holds a Ph.D. in Health Psychology, and is the founder and director of the Guru Ram Das Center for Medicine & Humanology in Espanola, New Mexico, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving those with chronic or life-threatening illnesses, conducting research on the medical effects of Kundalini yoga, and training health care professionals to use it in their practice. Her Ph.D. thesis was on using meditation to facilitate healthy behavioral changes in people who are HIV positive. She teaches yoga people with HIV, a class for people with diabetes, and one for women with breast cancer at the Guru Ram Das Center, and conducts teacher training workshops internationally.
Timothy’s comment: Shanti Shanti Kaur, a pioneer in teaching yoga to those with HIV and AIDS, brings her wealth of experience to this chapter. She addresses issues such as dealing with medication side effects and adapting the practice to the needs of people at different stages of the disease from asymptomatic to full-blown AIDS.
Chapter 22 Infertility
John Friend’s mother introduced him to yoga as a child, reading to him from a book that described yogis and their supernatural powers. “My mother was my main mentor and main guide in my life,” John says. “She believed that when you aligned with nature, good things would happen.” She also encouraged John at every step. “As I started to practice asana at the age of 13, she would say ‘You can do the Handstand’. We’d do it on the driveways and she would be cheering me on. ‘I told you so,’ she would say. It afforded me a really positive outlook on life so that now when people come to me with problems like infertility, I think, ‘Let’s just do the best we can and see what happens.’ Even if the doctors say a woman can’t get pregnant, I try to be open-minded about her chances. My mother was a great example of that kind of thinking.” John has studied a variety of styles of yoga over the years, and prior to founding Anusara Yoga in 1997 was a certified teacher of Iyengar yoga. Anusara combines the alignment-oriented focus of Iyengar yoga with a life-affirming philosophy shaped by Tantra (see Chapter 6). He has been teaching yoga since 1980. He is based in the Houston, Texas area and teaches internationally.
Timothy’s comment: John, the founder of one of the fastest growing styles of yoga, outlines his approach to infertility. He teaches that learning to release chronic tension in the pelvis as well as relaxing the mind can change blood flow to the reproductive organs to help facilitate conception and pregnancy. The student in the chapter also found that the pelvic relaxation and breathing John taught her also were useful during childbirth.
Chapter 23 Insomnia
Roger Cole, Ph.D. is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher who has taught yoga since 1980, and a research scientist who studies the physiology of sleep, relaxation and biological rhythms. When Roger was a teenager, his sister came home from college with a book that showed a yogic breathing exercise. He recounts that when he first tried that practice, he didn't think it was doing anything, but then he noticed that "in times of stress it made me more calm." This realization “had a profound effect on me.” While an undergraduate at Stanford a couple of years later, he began an asana practice, which he also initially learned from a book. Gradually his interest in yoga found expression in his academic work. While in graduate school in health psychology at the University of California, San Francisco he did studies of brain waves in various yoga poses and also demonstrated how a common blood pressure reflex (the baroreflex) makes reclining and inverted body positions promote sleep while standing positions inhibit it. Roger teaches yoga in San Diego and gives workshops throughout the United States.
Timothy’s comment: Roger uses his expertise in the physiology of sleep to design a routine to facilitate falling asleep for a physician whose anxiety, high stress job, and erratic call schedule made sleeping a challenge. Roger also offers suggestions on practices you can try if you find yourself unable to sleep in the middle of the night.
Chapter 24 Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Thirty years ago, Michael Lee was working for the South Australian Public Service Board studying how people behaved in the workplace, and running workshops on how to effect change. But gradually he came to realize that the human behavior principles that were the basis of his workshops were insufficient. “I felt the piece that was missing was the body,” an insight he thinks had been awakened by starting a yoga practice. “When I first began to practice yoga, I realized that there was a real connection between what was going on in my body and in my life.” One day his young daughter had said to him, “Daddy, I like when you do your yoga. When you do your yoga you don’t get so mad at me.” That was a powerful confirmation he says. In 1984, he took a sabbatical from the work he was doing for the government of Australia and went to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts for the express purpose of developing new programs. Michael admits that the Australian government never got their money back on that investment. “I got so into yoga that I went back and resigned.” He developed Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy in 1986 and ran their center and teaching programs until 2006 when he stepped down to pursue writing and other interests. Michael has written two books: Turn Stress Into Bliss and Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. He has two master’s degrees, one in behavioral psychology, the other in holistic health education.
Timothy’s comment: Michael offers a program that combines gentle yoga poses along with mindfulness meditation to relieve stress and lessen the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. In Phoenix Rising yoga, students are encouraged to explore the emotional and psychological themes that inevitably arise in the process of doing this work, and in doing so, often find relief of previously bothersome symptoms.
Chapter 25 Menopause
Elise Browning Miller was a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil more than 30 years ago when her back muscles went into painful spasms. Although she’d known for several years that she had scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, this was the first time she’d had any serious pain related to the scoliosis. Another Peace Corps volunteer, a handsome blonde surfer, offered to teach her some yoga stretches, and it was an offer she couldn’t refuse. The poses helped her, and upon returning to the States she became a follower of Integral Yoga’s Swami Satchidananda. Later, she was drawn to BKS Iyengar’s focus on anatomical alignment, which she found particularly helpful for her back. Elise now hold a master’s degree in Therapeutic Recreation from the University of North Carolina, is a Senior Certified Iyengar Yoga teacher, and has been teaching yoga since 1976 in Palo Alto, California, throughout the United States and internationally. She is featured on the instructional videos, Yoga For Scoliosis and Intermediate Yoga in Fiji.
Timothy’s comment: Elise designed a program to help a long-time student who developed incapacitating hot flashes when she needed to suddenly discontinue estrogen pills after a breast cancer diagnosis. The chapter also discusses certain yoga practices that should be avoided as they may make menopausal symptoms worse.
Chapter 26 Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
When Eric Small says he comes from a long line of horse traders, he means it literally. From a very early age Eric learned how to look a horse in the mouth. “You never believed what the owner told you; you had to make your own evaluation.” It was under his horse-trading father’s tutelage that Eric first became a teacher—at the age of six. “My father would put me on a box in the middle of the ring – a little kid, blond hair, big, thick glasses, skinny as a rail – and I could teach people how to ride horses. And I could project my voice. I knew what to look for.” When he began practicing yoga more than 50 years ago after developing MS at the age of 22, the transition to teaching was natural. It was what he’d been doing all his life. His commitment to teaching yoga became even stronger when he studied with BKS Iyengar, whose work forms the basis of what he now gives to his students. Eric says Iyengar’s approach is so powerful that “You don’t want to keep this to yourself.” He runs the Beverly Hills Iyengar Yoga Studio, is the co-author of Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis, and is featured in the video Yoga with Eric Small. Eric and his wife Flora Thorton have funded two major yoga programs The Eric Small Adaptive Iyengar Yoga Program, available nationally through local chapters of the MS Society, and The Eric Small Living Well with MS program, offered in Southern California.
Timothy’s comment: Not only did Eric act as the yoga teacher featured in this chapter, but he modelled the poses as well. Seeing someone who has had MS for so long who is doing so well, and looking so good, is an inspiration to students, and a testimonial of the healing power of yoga.
Chapter 27 Overweight and Obesity
Richard Freeman first got interested in yogic philosophy at the age of 13 when he read Henry David Thoreau's Walden. In Richard’s soft-spoken presence, you can readily envision him as a shy teenager drawn to the writings of the ascetic writer, himself inspired by a copy of the Bhagavad Gitahe’d brought with him to that cabin in the woods. In 1970 Richard took his first trip to India, studying with many teachers including BKS Iyengar. After spending eight years in Asia learning yoga and meditation, Richard moved back to the United States where he met the man who would become his principal teacher, Pattabhi Jois of Mysore, India, the central teacher in the lineage of Ashtanga yoga. Richard continues to teach this system, in his own unique way, deeply informed by his study of Sanskrit and yogic philosophy. Richard is the director of the Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, and teaches there and internationally. He is featured on the instructional videos Yoga With Richard Freeman and the audio series The Yoga Matrix.
Timothy’s comment: At first it might seem odd that Richard Freeman, skinny as a rail as he is, is the yoga teacher featured in the Overweight and Obesity chapter. But Richard’s knowledge of yogic philosophy is deep, and I wanted this chapter to include a spiritual approach to body weight -- an element that is often missing in other approaches. Richard’s knowledge of the subject is bolstered by his marriage to Mary Taylor, a gourmet chef whose own struggles with an eating disorder inspired her to co-write (with Lynn Ginsberg) the excellent book, What Are You Hungry For?: Women, Food, and Spirituality.