Yoga - The Modern Drug
With the rise of yoga and its popularity worldwide, it is indispensable for one to not understand the benefits; yoga has on our mind and body. Yoga is indeed the modern drug, the only hope and the most powerful self-help tool, we can choose for our well being. Yoga literally means "union" and in an era of fragmented attention and sound bites, the medicine of integrated breath, relaxed body, and a palpable sense of connection with nature has become all the more essential. Yoga is not only about presumably difficult poses but a way of life. It is not about how soon can you master a particular asana, but what you learn while trying to achieve it.
Yoga has been the subject of research in the past few decades for therapeutic purposes for modern epidemic diseases like mental stress, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, indicating that it can be used as non-pharmaceutical measure or complement to drug therapy for the treatment of these conditions.
I am willing to bet, if I ask anyone about improving their quality of life, undoubtedly the answer would be a roaring yes. We spend whopping amounts of money on our well being trying to escape the claws of stress, chronic illness and pain. This could range from any alternative healing practices to modern medicine. In the mental health world, they operate largely for a medical model of treatment, wherein diseases are identified and symptoms are treated. On the other hand, yoga and holistic communities argue that, because they focus on treating the symptoms, sometimes they end up focusing on what is going wrong with people rather than what is going right. On the flip side, in the yoga community, people are guided to foster spiritual and personal development by learning strategies to help decrease one’s susceptibility to any mental illness or stressor in the first place. They look at treating the root of the unhappiness versus just treating the symptoms.
We need to understand the philosophy and mechanisms with how yoga helps people to make these changes. Imagine if we could really integrate these two models, the mental health community as well as the holistic community into one and have proactive supportive strategies and also learn techniques to help treat distress or symptoms when they come up
The Ashtanga Yoga path or the eight limb path as per Patanjali’s yoga sutra has been historically used by teachers as a pathway to enlightenment. In the mental health world, this is called a treatment plan, a list of steps that are taken to make one feel better. The basic understanding of this can be grasped at looking at the similarities between the two modalities. The first two steps of this eight-limbed path are the “yamas” and the “niyamas”. These are behaviours and attitudes that we cultivate to help ourselves improve our quality of life. Examples of behaviours that fall under these categories are things like non-violence (towards self as well as others), moderation and perseverance. The next step, the “asana”, what most people are familiar with when they take up a yoga class. The physical postures and poses. After that we cultivate “pranayama” or breath control, learning to change the way we breathe. We all know the feeling of not being able to catch our breath resulting in anxiety. The next step, “pratyahara” teaches us to draw our senses inward to shut our external stimuli so that we can really look at what are we thinking, feeling and doing. From here we cultivate concentration or “dharana” learning to focus. Once we have drawn the senses inward we can focus on anything. We achieve the witness consciousness “ dhayana” or meditation. We start to observe things and feelings from a place of non-attachment and non-judgment. And finally, if practised holistically we enter into the state of bliss, unity consciousness or “Samadhi”.
Cognitive behavioural therapy ( CBT), the most widely studied form of therapy for mental health issues, developed in the 1950’s has been extensively researched to treat anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, to name a few. CBT basically teaches, “If we change the way we think and change what we do, we can change how we feel”. It’s not just what we think or do that affects how we feel, but also how we feel in our physical body and the environments surrounding us.
Conclusion leaves me and you with a question “what is the difference?” surely, one maybe a linear model and the other may have technically more components, but when we to start to combine them, we see that this eight limbed path actually has a lot to offer to change our emotional state. A combination of both, the mental health community and the yogic sciences, will help us heal, learn and grow holistically.
I hope this article would help you incorporate yoga into your daily lives and not just limit to a one hour of practice of ending up looking like a pretzel grasping for breath.
