A Yoga Therapy Approach to Relaxation
- Asana – bring your whole awareness into the physical body. Experience the body in a total/global way, as if you could see and feel around the body for 360º.
- Pranayama – Once you have full awareness of the body, fill this form with breath and energy, allowing the breath to flow through every part of your being.
- Pratyahara – Use the breath as a vehicle to allow your awareness to become completely engaged in sensations as they expand throughout your being.
- Dharana – Allow yourself to be fully aware of the body, breath, and sensations while focusing your attention on a single point, such as the Ujjayi breath moving through the throat. Witness all of the experiences in the body, breath and mind.
- Dhyana – Allow body, breath, sensation and feeling to merge together into a synchronous flow. Allow all parts of your being to integrate as you hold the pose as an effortless meditation.
- Samadhi – As you release the pose and come back to Tadasana (standing pose), place the hands in prayer position and relax completely. Release any sense of an individual doing Yoga poses and relax in the space of infinite union.
Yoga Postures/Stretching
Janet has studied extensively with Continuum founder, Emilie Conrad and her associate Susan Harper. Continuum is the practice of using breath as a vehicle for our attention. Attention is one of our greatest tools for making contact with our self on a purely organismic level and how we relate within an ever expanding world of living organisms. The experience of ourselves as part of a greater whole, as only one organism in rhythmic relationship to trillions of other organisms, not only expands our personal sense of “I’, but also creates the potential for increased immunity.
Becoming aware of the way we are breathing, or rather being breathed, can affect the way we feel in more ways than one. It can be like taking a vacation from a life filled with demands and pressures. It can also deepen the experience of being in a body and in living fully moment by moment. Awareness is expanded and our perception of sensation becomes amplified to the point of actually being moved by the Qi or energy innately at work in our lives. Self-produced sounds and observing the resultant waves of movement in naturally held poses assists with de-programming the nervous system and to letting go of negatively held postures (un-posturing), or repetitive movements that lead to degeneration of joints, tendon and bones.
Conscious observation of our breathing patterns and sounding into areas of pain are sometimes invoked into a treatment, especially when our aim is to decrease the frequency of chronic pain and encourage pain-free movement.
