Therapeutic Yoga Workshops

Stress is a the body’s reaction to your perceiving something – a person, situation, even a memory or imagine scenario – as challenging. What follows is a physical cascade involving hormones and nerve circuits that prepare your body  to fight or fly

Short term stress is healthy. It motivates, and keeps you sharp. Problems only arise when stress doesn’t give way to rest, but persists to become chronicç

Chronic stress is related to problems including high blood pressure, poor digestion, and emotional dysregulation. By driving inflammation, stress contributes to tissue damage and pain

Practicing yoga helps reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, and improve cardiovascular health. Yoga has a similarly positive impact on your mental health, reducing stress, anxiety and depression, and promoting a positive experience of calm wellbeing

These physiological effects are largely related to yoga’s ability to shift the balance from fit-flight to rest-and-digest digest. This inbuilt anti-stress response is mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system

The relative shift from arousal to rest is profoundly healing. In addition to improving cardiovascular health, parasympathetic activity stimulates digestion, enhances immune function, and supports tissue healing and repair

Rest-and-digest is equally beneficial for your mental wellbeing. Studies have shown that practicing yoga promotes emotional regulation and mental clarity, with measurable improvements in mood, anxiety levels, and cognitive function, as well as sleep

The principle messenger for signals from the rest-and-digest parasympathetic nervous system, vagal activity reduces arousal, slowing the heart, stimulating digestion and generally helping your body replenish resources

As danger activates the fight-flight stress response, the Vagus is activated by a felt sense of safety

In addition to nurturing the vital organs, the vagus works systemically to regulate your mental state, immune and inflammatory response, pain sensitivity, and other essential life functions

Yoga has been found to activate the vagus nerve, helping you access its calming and healing powers and restoring balance to your whole mind and body.

By promoting mental ease, stillness, and a felt sense of safety, yoga activates the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) nervous system, and it’s principle messenger, the vagus nerve

Yoga brings you into your body, letting you experience the safety of your physical self in the present moment

The evidence places the total practice of yoga over and above any specific effect of individual exercises. Research shows that holding any comfortable yoga pose for 4 – 5 minutes is enough to produce vagal activation. As so often, it’s less what you do, and more how you do it!

The classes are an excellent way to manage a number of common pain syndromes

Yoga has been found to help with chronic type pain. This type of main is poorly related to physical injury and has a strong psychological component. It may start following an injury, inflammatory episode, or for no apparent reason. Importantly, the pain is real, but it exists largely in the nervous system, where pain pathways remain sensitized and active after the initial cause has resolved

With its holistic mind-body perspective, yoga and mindfulness help relax the nervous system, calm anxiety, and reset pain sensitivity

Yoga has also been found to help with back and neck pain

The commonest back pain type, non-specific or mechanical low back pain, is particularly multi-factorial, being related to poor posture, inefficient body use and psychological stress. It is often recurrent

With its focus on mind-body connectivity, yoga is particularly well suited to approach this complex pain syndrome from all relevant angles

Yoga has also been shown to help with tension related neck pain, shoulder pain, tension-type headache and migraine

Contact Manuel for more information and advice on how yoga can help you

You can also check Manuel’s other live online-yoga classes, including osteopathic yoga and one-on-one private yoga classes