The Antidepressant Antidote: Five Steps to Get Off Antidepressants Safely and Effectively by Butzer Ph.D. Bethany

Author:Butzer Ph.D., Bethany
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781452500447
Publisher: BalboaPress
Published: 2010-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

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What is Yoga?

The practice of yoga is ancient, with its historical roots dating back to 3000 B.C. The word “yoga” is derived from the word “yuj”, which means yoke, union, or connection. The ultimate goal of yoga is to join the individual self with the larger, infinite, universal self. In essence, yoga helps bring us back to our true nature, which is peaceful and full of joy.

In the Western world, yoga is often associated with physical postures that are done in a studio or gym. However, yoga also has a vast philosophical and spiritual component that can be adopted if one chooses. Similar to meditation, yoga is not a religion, and you don’t need to be spiritual or religious to practice yoga. You can choose to explore the spiritual aspects of yoga, or you can simply do physical yoga postures for their stress-relieving benefits. Either way, yoga is an essential tool in your quest toward antidepressant freedom.

Over the past three decades, research on the beneficial physical and mental effects of yoga has steadily grown. Yoga activates our body’s natural capacity to heal itself, and has been found to improve mood, reduce stress, and boost our immune system. Yoga has also been found to alleviate the symptoms of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disorders like asthma, endocrine disorders like diabetes, and several neurological conditions. Yoga benefits all our bodily systems, including our bones, muscles, circulation, respiration, digestion, endocrine system, and nervous system. Yoga also helps the brain release serotonin.

One very important thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to be able to twist yourself into a pretzel to go to a yoga class. I’m a certified yoga teacher with over 200 hours of yoga training, and I can’t even touch my toes! I strongly believe that yoga can be done by people of all shapes, ages, sizes, and levels of flexibility. Sure, you might need to modify the poses slightly to meet your needs, but you can still do yoga.

Types of Yoga

Many, many different types of yoga exist. Some yoga teachers subscribe to only one tradition, while other teachers combine aspects of multiple traditions to provide an eclectic approach. For example, I was trained by teachers who came from the Kripalu tradition, however even as I was doing my training these teachers were exploring Anusara yoga. This is why it’s important to “shop around” until you find a teacher and a style of yoga that works for you. Every teacher is different!

Below I describe a few of common types of yoga. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it will help give you an idea of the variety of styles of yoga that are out there.

• Kripalu Yoga focuses on physical postures, as well as psychological growth and spiritual awakening. Kripalu teachers focus on body alignment, breathing techniques, surrendering into the postures, and trusting the natural intelligence of the body to move and heal itself. For more information, visit www.kripalu.org.

• Iyengar Yoga focuses on the subtle muscular and skeletal alignment of each yoga pose.

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