Yoga Can Manage Your Worst Stress
Its Not About Forcing Yourself To Sit Still Either.
You are a being of light. Its best that YOU know how to turn that light on . When you have that skill, the darkness has a hard time manipulating you.
Take back your light. - @myundividedlife
“Yoga is a light, which once lit will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter your flame.” – B.K.S Iyengar
A Misconception
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of yoga? Usually it has something to do with stretching. Perhaps you think of slow movement or not moving at all. You might think about sitting in a cross legged position while breathing with your eyes closed. Perhaps you might think of the relaxed music that is usually playing in a yoga environment. I would agree with you. All those things are part of yoga! But while I may absolutely love the effects of all these elements of yoga and hold each very dear to my heart, you, in an agitated, trapped and bottled up, stressed out emotional place might cringe, and heartily run the other way from it all. And you know what? You might exactly be doing the right thing!
Huh?
You see, when you are extremely agitated, the last thing you want to hear is sit down, shut up and breathe. Right? And someone with only good intentions of helping you saying that’s the best thing at that moment could actually be making things worse for you. Trying to sit quietly, or do a deep breathing method when you are having a very agitated stress cycle in your life could push your stress higher, especially if you are not used to yoga and its process.
When you are agitated and feel internally trapped, your nervous system is on high alert. If you are not skilled at mindful practices, and sometimes even if you are, doing something like sitting still and breathing, or meditating quietly might create even more internal struggling and anxiousness. It just might not be your right starting place to feel better. That’s because sometimes quiet yoga or simply meditating are more like starting at “step two” of the actual process to calm down in such a situation.
What’s step one when you feel that way? In this situation, step one is meeting your mind and emotions where they are. Right now, emotions are elevated, your mind scattered, and perhaps anxious or on the edge of panic. You might be having a hard time controlling your frustration or anger. For a step one when you are tangled up in so much intense, internal energy, meeting yourself where you are is important. When you do that it allows you to stop the stress from escalating and it also allows for discharging the internal explosion. I call it “catching the runaway mind”. But you can’t just pounce on it and force it into submission. Its raging with too much energy and will try to escape. Mental survival is a wild animal at times. So you need to engage it where it is to catch it , focus it, and then calm it.
Having A Peaceful Life Is An Art Form
You have probably thought many times about what you want in life, and from life. Without knowing it, your mental ruminations about it are actually moments of mindfulness where you are creating your internal vision board. You are trying on ideas, testing out how they resonate with you by visualizing, researching, conversing and dreaming about your ideal future. All along the way, there will be stress to balance your intentions. Stress will be a sounding board to force you into choices about life. It will help shape your ideas and knowledge. It will also drive you nuts in the process of all that too! But most of the time you have created your give and take efforts to stay balanced , found your life art form patterns of self help, and can work it out. And once in a while, you get stuck.
This is why I love yoga so much. Its an art form that meets the art form called living your life. Yoga can be molded in a variety of ways to keep the balance of mind, body, and spirit as a working team instead of separate parts that battle between themselves making your life unhappy. You already know there is no one exact way to a peaceful life that works for everyone , let alone for every moment in your life. However, yoga becomes the adaptive bridge between moments and variety. There is always something in its process for you that can flow with you no mater what life challenge you are facing. The way I see it, its because yoga is the art of understanding your mind and emotions. It conditions you to engage with yourself so you can engage in life empowered and disengage from stress.
“As the mind, so the person; bondage or liberation are in your own mind.” If you feel bound, you are bound. If you feel liberated, you are liberated. Things outside neither bind nor liberate you; only your attitude toward them does that.”
― Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: Commentary on the Raja Yoga Sutras by Sri Swami Satchidananda
When you are faced with a highly agitated mental state, doing more active methods of yoga or breathing practices can often be more suitable for you. Something like flowing yoga, or repetitive chanting with arm movements and strong breathing patterns can captivate your agitated nervous system by allowing it to feel satisfied that its automatic stress response has produced actions that finished its job in keeping you alive. In yoga therapy, its called discharging the trauma you are holding.
Here’s what I mean by that..
Know The Whys Know The Whens
It can sometimes be easy to ignore the value of the human nervous system and its purposes for guiding you in life. It can seem like it just gets in the way! In today’s world emotional overloaded is easy to come by. That causes increased mental stimulation. And while you get bombarded with emotional input your logical mind barely has a chance to help you understand yourself. The overwhelm begins, which you can read more about in my article here.
Your nervous system is quite a marvelous bit of biological technology. When you find yourself in a highly agitated mind space, your sympathetic nervous system fires off several hormones such as the power surge of adrenaline which action kicks in your fight or flight survival reaction. When you stay highly stressed, that survival reaction of the sympathetic nervous system has been triggered and is probably stuck in the ON position. The flight or fight instinct is waiting for a response from you that will satisfy it’s job so it can turn off and allow you to switch to your parasympathetic system which manages the calming response of the nervous system. You can read a full explanation about the fight or flight response in the article Understanding The Stress Response.
For a quick visual, here are a couple of pictures that help show you what your sympathetic nervous system is and does when you get stressed - and YES it does these things even for a small stress, so figure the potency of these responses when you have a high stress moment, or are stuck in the agitation. That means your sympathetic nervous system is firing overtime.
As you see in the pictures above, the triggering of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) gets you ready for action. Some parts of you shut down and some parts of you speed up. So when you are stuck in the SNS phase and you feel extremely stressed, a good tactic to redirect the stress you are feeling is to give the sympathetic nervous system action to discharge it and then you can move on to a more direct calming type of yoga with meditation.
Stress Isn’t The Bad Guy
If you take the information from the previous diagrams and article link, you might come to the conclusion that the purpose of stress is to help you. Its to help you survive in a perceived dangerous situation and live a good life. One of the ways I like to think about it in our everyday world, is that stress lets you know when you are headed in the wrong life direction and need to make a choice or change. The thing is, you don’t like being stressed because its unpleasant, it interrupts you, and you have to take action to fix it because it usually doesn’t go away on its own and can keep increasing if you don’t address it. The thing is , most of us have not been taught how to not stress about stress. And you were probably not taught how to harness the cascade of stress responses from the sympathetic nervous system to push you into a positive place either. So while stress CAN be bad, its not the bad guy we always think it is.
The Yoga Way To Destress High Agitation
First, take a quick view of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) in this quick video. You will see that it is directly engaged by yoga activity.
In your average stress moments almost any yoga will help because it turns ON the PNS. But when you are in elevated stress and high agitation, going directly to the PNS , in my experiences with clients, may not be appropriate because a trauma release needs to happen first to be able to engage fully with the PNS yoga activation. The emotional trauma can get stuck in the body when you get stuck in the high agitation. Doing a more active type of yoga can help get you engaged in a refocusing process easier because it satisfies meeting you where you are to catch the runaway mind, and turns on the PNS response to get you out of your agitation smoothly with a continued soothing of the emotional mind and emotional trauma.
There are a multitude of yoga styles to choose from to satisfy the sympathetic nervous system so it can be turned off. As I said earlier, yoga has the ability to take care of you no matter how your emotional mind is feeling. Its good to get familiar with more than one style of yoga so you already have a working knowledge of what several feel like to you when you want to pick one for a high agitation stress.
As I said before, I have found with my clients, an elevated, agitated mind and emotional state will do well with more of a flowing yoga rather than a yoga that is mostly about holding postures. The linked sequences of positions in flow yoga becomes a movement therapy.
There are many styles of yoga that can be active and flowing. Here are four to choose from to help you get started.
1. Ashtanga yoga
An energetic style that is more physical.
Ashtanga is a very dynamic and athletic form of hatha yoga, made up of six series or levels, with a fixed order of postures. It is rooted in vinyasa, the flowing movements between postures, with a focus on energy and breath. While it is a very physical practice, it also promotes mental clarity and inner peace. ~Timothy Burgen , Ashtanga Yoga: Definition, Principles, Practices & History
2. Power Yoga
Another dynamic form of yoga modeled after the Ashtanga style that is a favorite gym class style.
Power yoga is a general term used to describe a vigorous, fitness-based approach to vinyasa-style yoga.1 Though many consider power yoga to be superficial "gym yoga," this style of yoga practice was originally closely modeled on the Ashtanga method.
Power yoga incorporates the athleticism of Ashtanga, including lots of vinyasas (series of poses done in sequence) but gives each teacher the flexibility to teach any poses in any order, making every class different. With its emphasis on strength and flexibility, power yoga brought yoga into the gyms of America as people began to see yoga as a way to work out. ~Power Yoga History and Health Benefits, By Ann Pizer, RYT
3. Vinyasa Yoga
One of my favorite yoga’s to teach and do as an everyday practice. Power yoga is another flowing yoga with postures linked together. This style can be easily adapted for all abilities and still provide your over active sympathetic nervous system some action to discharge stress while shifting you into the calm you want.
Vinyasa yoga is also called “flow yoga” or “vinyasa flow”. It is an incredibly common style.
It was adapted from the more regimented Ashtanga practice a couple of decades ago. The word “vinyasa” translates to “place in a special way,” which is often interpreted as linking breath and movement. You’ll often see words like slow, dynamic, or mindful paired with vinyasa or flow to indicate the intensity of a practice.
“Vinyasa flow is a style of yoga where the poses are synchronized with the breath in a continuous rhythmic flow,” says Sherrell Moore-Tucker, RYT 200. “The flow can be meditative in nature, calming the mind and nervous system, even though you’re moving.”
Vinyasa yoga is suitable for those who’ve never tried yoga as well as those who’ve been practicing for years. ~From Types of Yoga: A Guide to the Different Styles ~By Yoga Medicine
4. Yoga Therapy
This is my go to when anxiousness and panic are edging in. For some people, the nervous system needs calibrated and retrained after emotional trauma gets stuck in the body. Especially if the emotional stress is repetitive, ongoing, or rooted in physical harm. While all yoga is a form of mental and emotional therapy, actual yoga therapy is one of the newer applications of yoga that consists of specific techniques using movement, breath, and meditation to target specific things for a specific group, person, situation, or condition.
Rather than focusing on yoga methods and practices, yoga therapists fundamentally focus on their clients’ needs. Their job is to understand why their clients have come to see them and determine what they can do to support them. To help them in their work, therapists are trained to assess clients through listening, questioning, observing, and appropriately touching. Therapists look for ways to help their clients reduce or manage their symptoms, improve their function, and help them with their attitude in relation to their health conditions. After assessing clients, therapists establish appropriate goals, develop a practice intervention, and then teach clients to practice that intervention. In this sense, therapists choose yoga techniques in relation to how they will specifically benefit individual clients.
The Distinction Between a Yoga Therapy Session and a Yoga Class ~ Gary Kraftsow
Here is my video of a yoga therapy routine to help discharge your stress.
Until next time,
Love Laughter and an Undivided Life.
Mariangela