What can yoga do very well for health?
Lower back/lumbar, shoulders, neck/cervical curve, I think.
The overwhelming visits to the medical doctor are for flu and then back problems, neither of which can be cured, and where only symptoms can be somewhat mollified, not resolved. You are living longer. In the ‘old days,’ you would like be dead before the more arthritic pain and organ issues arose.
To do lumbar, shoulder and cervical curve well, if you modify your yoga with consideration of the following, you will get another gift: a movement toward calmness, and out of performance and chasing fitness.
Cats stretch smarter than we do.
Coming into a session of an hour-and-one-half (or slightly more) of a softer way, if you pre-tested giving a blood sample and then tested post-practice, your cortisone levels would drop. Those levels represent stress slipping away, and you are training your autonomic neuro- and conscious mental awareness), to be different in a healthful way that extends beyond the practice session. Notice the term ‘practice’ vs. ‘workout.’ We become our words.
Your 400-600 hour certed yoga teacher will want to do headstands and three-based poses and seated “c’-level twists. And yo will become a believer’ and want to chase it. And if you get there to some degree, you will feel as if you are on the “yogi” path—a deep student, like a high level martial black belt..
Good luck with that. But it’s more like running a triathlon as your new quest, and you will pay in the long run, as pressing fitness by pushing muscle and tendon will injure to varying extents.
Yoga’s deep claim to fame is breath and a real change in going from a high speed—hot yoga—lifestyle to calmness that can outspread to compassion to other people, and to a rich landscape of miraculous lifeforms that are overlooked for which you begin to have time.
And so in your vinyasa flow with shifts to harder poses (like a lifter adding weight), who have you become?— a strong little island (that will gradually open to ache and ouch-i-ness as you try to maintain and fight to maintain, and add frustration as you lose abilities that you had achieved.
Soft, doing more with less, grace—perhaps this is the real mountain to summit.
