5 Ways Yoga Benefits Your Mental Health

Yoga teacher and licensed psychotherapist Ashley Turner says yoga is the key to psychological and emotional healing as well as resolving issues with self-confidence, relationships, and more.

Ever notice how good you feel -- mentally -- when you're practicing yoga regularly?

Yoga teacher and licensed psychotherapist Ashley Turner, who is launching a groundbreaking new Yoga Psychology 300-hour advanced yoga teacher training next month, says yoga is the key to psychological and emotional healing as well as resolving issues with self-confidence, relationships, family of origin issues, and more.

"Yoga is a psychology -- the whole practice helps us work with the nature of the mind, the nature of being a human, how emotions live in our bodies, how they affect our behavior and our minds," says Turner, who reveals that yoga helped her recognize and cope with her own low self-esteem. "This course is reclaiming the deeper roots of the practice, not just asana -- the mental and emotional benefits."

Below are 5 ways that yoga can benefit your mental health and well-being and even improve your relationships, according to Turner.

5 Ways Yoga Benefits Your Mental Health

1. It moves you from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system, or from flight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. You typically have less anxiety and enter a more relaxed state. As soon as you start breathing deeply, you slow down out of fight or flight and calm your nervous system.

2. It helps you build your sense of self. Through yoga, you get to know yourself and cultivate a more nonjudgmental relationship with yourself. You are building self-trust. You exercise more and eat healthier, because your unconscious mind tells you, "I'm worthy of this me time, this effort." At the end of the day, everything comes down to your relationship with yourself. When you get more confident and become more rooted in your sense of self and your center, you develop a healthy, balanced ego, where you have nothing to prove and nothing to hide. You become courageous, with high willpower. You're not afraid of difficult conversations -- you know you're still going to be OK at the end of the day.

3. It improves your romantic relationship. When you're more centered and more peaceful with yourself, you'll be the same way with your partner -- you'll view them through the same lens of compassionate, unconditional love. You're less reactive -- for example, you may know that snapping at your partner is not a wise choice.

4. It helps you become aware of your "shadow" qualities. The yoking of solar and lunar (light and dark) in yoga makes us recognize qualities in ourselves that we were not aware of, helping us be more mindful. A lot of my work centers on the shadow concept from Carl Jung. How do we look at those places in our bodies where we hold tension, tightness, knots of energy? That's typically where we are holding our psychological or emotional energy. We work from the outside in, so asana is so important. A backbend will open your heart and release the stiffness between the shoulder blades -- at some point, you will have some sort of emotional release, which you may or may not be conscious of. It's about doing the inner work to shift or change and be open to doing your best with your weaknesses and faults.

5. It helps you deal with family of origin issues. Essentially that's our karma -- we can’t give back our family, we're born into it and that's what you get. It's about owning what I call sacred wounds (rather than blaming) and taking them on more mindfully. You’re the only one that can change -- the only thing you can do is control your actions and your behavior. Other people will inevitably be forced to show up in a different way you’re showing up in a different way. Think of the Warrior poses -- yoga helps you rise up and do your best.

This article originally appeared on yogajournal.com and was written by JENNIFER D'ANGELO FRIEDMAN

Yoga Now Standard Treatment for Vets with PTSD

Yoga's not usually the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about treatment for post traumatic stress disorder in veterans. But from the Veterans Administration to the Pentagon, yoga classes are becoming not just commonplace, but in some rehabilitation programs mandatory.

One of the places in the forefront of change is the Newington Yoga Center, in Newington, Connecticut.

About 20 veterans train to become yoga teachers. Suzanne Manafort of the Veterans Yoga Project, said what began as a small project has burgeoned into programs across the country. Manafort taught yoga for years before using it as a treatment for PTSD. She said she had no idea she might need to make adjustments to her teaching, until she made mistakes.

"Touching is a mistake. In yoga classes we touch all the time. But to somebody whose been sexually assaulted that's a huge violation. Walking behind them is a huge mistake because it feels like they have to pay attention to what's going on in the room instead of just practicing their yoga practice," Manafort said.

She said ultimately it was veterans themselves that guided her, in some cases just by the courage it took simply to stay in class.

"Some of the men and women that I work with are Vietnam Veterans so they've been at home suffering for 40 years," said Manafort. "And when they come into this treatment program and they're told they have to do yoga, 'they're like are you kidding me?'"

"I thought it was a joke," said Vietnam veteran Paul Gryzwinski. "And I remembered actually laughing out loud and they said no we're really not kidding you're going to be going to yoga."

Gryzwinski is training to teach yoga to veterans. Many years after returning from the war, PTSD hit him hard. He ended up turning to the VA. Where he first encountered yoga.

"And I just thought of myself in like, tights with you know a bunch of women. And I know that sounds sexist — and I'm not, so forgive me — but it was such an alien concept to me," Gryzwinski said with a chuckle.

And Gryswinski's early misperceptions are one reason that Dan libby, a co-founder of the Veterans Yoga Project, said the 12 week yoga training for treating vets with PTSD tries to strip all the new-agey stuff out.

"We really emphasize, 'leave all the Sanskrit names at home, right. Leave the candles at home, don't talk about you know moonbeams and chakras and all these things,'" he said. "It's really just about learning about your body and your experience; learning to breathe."

Lt. Col Melinda Morgan deployed right after 9-11 and started teaching yoga to those who had served and those who were preparing to go to Afghanistan.

"So I started teaching veterans 10 years ago and one of those veterans that I taught became an instructor himself. And so in 2007 when he was in Iraq and I was in another location, he writes me a note that said, 'I have to teach yoga and I don't think I can.' So I'm like, 'yes you can.' I wrote it down all of the poses, emailed it to him and helped him on his way to become a certified teacher," Morgan said.

Today, Morgan teaches at the Pentagon, and she said classes once sparsely attended are now full every day. But despite an increased demand for yoga paired with a growing number of alternative treatment programs in the military and the VA, there's scant hard science about why yoga or most of the other alternative programs work.

Yoga instructor Dan Libby hopes the government does some studies soon, because without more data, returning troops won't take the programs seriously.

This article originally appeared on pri.org
Host Marco Werman
Reporter Susan Kaplan

Links

• VetsYoga
• Veterans Yoga Project
• Give Back Yoga