Читать книгу Yoga Therapy as a Whole-Person Approach to Health - Lee Majewski - Страница 53

It seems that many people have many answers to this question. A great yogi from the last century, Paramahansa Yogananda, gave the following answer in his book The Essence of Self Realization: “Most people in the west, and also many in India, confuse Yoga with Hatha Yoga—the system of bodily postures. But Yoga is primarily a spiritual discipline.” Another great teacher, Shivananda, stressed,

Yoga means union. Although many people think this term refers to union between body and mind or body, mind and spirit, the traditional acceptance is union between the Jivatman and Paramatman, that is, between one’s individual consciousness and the Universal Consciousness. Therefore Yoga refers to a certain state of consciousness as well as methods that help one reach that goal—or state of union with the divine.31

Shri Aurobindo said, “Yoga is [the tool for] condensed [human] evolution.”32 And so we, as yoga therapists, are assisting in our clients’ evolution—a huge responsibility!

And yet, although yoga does not require the adoption of religious beliefs or dogmas, its practices aim at the experience of contemplative states of consciousness and offer a promise of spiritual transformation. We believe yoga can rightly be categorized as a practically applied philosophy within the philosophical discipline of mysticism, whose primary goal is the experience of a transcendent, unitive state of consciousness.33 “The evolution of one’s awareness is an integral aspect of yoga as a transformational process,” writes Mark Stephens, “…this process is one of awakening and integrating on the path to more holistic, congruent and healthy experience in being alive.”34

It is interesting to note that yoga as such was never meant to be a healing modality. Yoga’s goal for a human being is to reach enlightenment, or union of one’s individual consciousness with Universal Consciousness. Yoga sets out tools to work with one’s nervous system and brain to expand its capability for higher states. Perhaps, however, such a union cannot be obtained without reaching mastery over the body, over life energy within (prana), over emotions, and over one’s mind or thought processes. And perhaps the process of getting there compels us to correct disturbances on all these levels of our existence. And so, by consistently practicing yogic techniques daily, we can create transformation on all levels—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. According to Turner’s research, that composite transformation, on all levels—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—is what needs to be included in the process if radical healing is to take place.

Unfortunately, it seems that when yoga was introduced to the West at the end of the 19th century, it was only partially adopted—more as physical exercise than the philosophical and practical science of personal transformation. Perhaps in translating yoga from the deeply spiritual culture of India into the highly individualistic culture of the West, slowly, generations were not able to prevent the dilution of the tradition. The spiritual component of practice became very weak and the emphasis of yoga became more aligned with getting fit and the body image-conscious middle-class Westerners. It’s enough to see yoga depicted in printed media to understand this. (To break this pattern, we have included pictures of asanas performed by a 69-year-old female in what follows!)

When we hear someone saying, “I have a yoga class today,” we tend to see in our minds a studio with yoga mats and people doing all kinds of different poses. The common understanding of “yoga” nowadays, in the West and in some parts of India, seems to have been reduced to an exercise practice with perhaps some controlled breathing. Even meditation is usually mentioned separately from yoga or in addition to yoga.

This general reductionist misconception of what yoga is, paired with mistaking spirituality for religion, creates much confusion in yoga practitioners. Even some yoga therapists seem to think that spirituality is beyond the scope of yoga and yoga therapy. It seems that even we, practitioners, yoga teachers, and therapists, cannot agree on this subject. This was the question an anthropologist, Caroline Nizard, tried to answer in her paper titled “Is Yoga a Spiritual Path?” during the recent Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) in June 2018 in Bern, Switzerland.35

In her fieldwork through 2013–2017, Nizard gathered the accounts of 56 long-term yoga practitioners of mixed religions (including some agnostics) from France, India, and Switzerland. She found no significant difference between cultural identities in the practitioners’ understanding of yoga, but she did find significant differences in their relation to the spirituality of yoga, although all participated in the same practices. So even we, as professionals, cannot agree on what yoga is offering us.

An interesting study from Smith and colleagues36 looked at the different effects of an asana-only yoga class and more comprehensive yoga practice (including ethical and spiritual components). Eighty-one students over the age of 18 at one university in the US participated in the study, and over time participants in both studies showed a decrease in depression and stress and an increase in a sense of hopefulness compared with the control group. However, only the comprehensive yoga group experienced a decrease in anxiety-related symptoms and decreased salivary cortisol from the beginning to the end of the study.

In other words, the spiritual component in the yoga protocol created additional and measurable healing value. This is in line with Daaleman et al.’s study on a geriatric population quoted earlier, in which spirituality increased the positive effect on health.37 The importance and additional benefit of the spiritual component in the yoga protocol has been confirmed in the latest meta-analysis from the Mayo Clinic.38 It concluded that yoga is a viable anti-hypertensive lifestyle therapy and produces the greatest blood pressure benefits when breathing techniques and meditation or mental relaxation are included.

This also correlates with research presented in Radical Remission in which Kelly Turner quotes two factors each in the physical, emotional, and mental domains.39 But in the spiritual domain she lists three factors that are needed for radical healing: deepening spiritual connection, having a purpose in life, and embracing social support. Thus the significance of the spiritual component, as stressed by Turner, becomes vitally important in the process of healing. It is also in line with pancha koshas—the Ayurvedic model of the multilevels of human existence—that healing is most effective when it includes the spiritual factor (anandamaya kosha).