Find Your Own Special Sleep Practice
With a variety of age-related, health, and lifestyle factors affecting how we sleep, we need varied approaches to sleeping well. A night owl versus a morning lark, someone with hyperarousal versus emotional depression, or an adolescent versus an older person need different strategies for improving their sleep.
In applying yoga practices to specific sleep issues, it is important to align the effects of the practices with the causes of sleep issues. If you are hyperaroused and your mind tends to jump around like the Energizer Bunny on espresso, this suggests a very different set of yoga sequences compared to the practices that help if you are emotionally depleted or depressed, are subject to timing issues, have a breathing disorder, or are frail.
The sleep diary and other self-assessments listed in appendix II can help you identify your conditions, sleep patterns, and which practices are best for you.
In each of the yoga sequences given in the following chapters, the practices are...
Is Yoga Good for Your Skin?
The top seven results of a Google search for the terms “skin” and “yoga” are all about the most superficial aspect of skin – not the health of the skin, but how it appears.
Search results promise yoga for naturally glowing skin, 6 powerful yoga asanas for glowing skin, 5 yoga poses for beautiful skin and more.
In her book Yoga Cures: Simple Routines to Conquer More Than 50 Common Ailments and Live Pain-Free, Tara Stiles offers practices for four specific skin conditions: acne, cellulite, dark eye circles, and wrinkles.
Working under the theory that stress causes acne, Stiles prescribes stressful asanas—plank, chataranga dandasana, side plank, and bow. By simply learning to stay calm through challenging asanas, Stiles asserts, practitioners will limit the negative impacts of stress, thereby reducing acne.
We can appreciate this idea, and recognize that learning to stay calm in stressful situations is a general benefit of practicing many yoga asanas. But the truth is, the development...
Being Healthy Human Beings
Excerpted from the "Introduction" to Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Methods, and Practices (712 pages, forthcoming November 2017, North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random House)
