YOGA: How does it work and what is the secret of its huge popularity

 

Mermaid 1 or Naginyasana 1
Foto: Nurys Carranza
Yogi: Úrsula Carranza Peñaranda

By Ursula Carranza Peñaranda

 

So, Yoga it is. The adepts of yoga around the western world like to talk about the several benefits from its practice. We can divide the benefits in two bundles: fitness and health.  The last one is the most interesting and the one that gets most attention because people claim to not only lose weight where nothing else was helping, but also to diminish symptoms of a number of conditions, or even cure their illnesses. We´re talking about insomnia, paralysis, MS, depression, anxiety, you name it.  Nevertheless, let me ask you this: don´t you get the same results from practicing, maybe, swimming or some other sport? What is so specific about yoga that may be perceived as more effective than other practices?

I have been a sports practitioner my whole life. Let me tell you in every sport I have practiced I had seen improvement in lots of people that have had a first approach to the sport, especially if they came with a prescription or with a specific intention for their health. When I was depressed, running helped me get rid of the sadness. I run every day for 20 minutes so I could have a bit of a normal life. What if instead I had chosen to run one hour? Would my depression had gone in a shorter period? I also practiced synchronized swimming and water polo in my teen years. I was always a very reactive person. Just being underwater without breathing was a very calming practice. Maybe to some other people staying underwater wouldn´t have such a southing effect, but through that practice I could be a social person, and people would kind of love me instead of hating me, which occurred a lot, by the way. Also, I had vertigo and was afraid of heights. All that went away when I started practicing aerial tissues at age 33. My aerial tissue students as well as my yoga students usually come to the class for fun, or because they think it will relax them. Often, in both classes, they tell me they had improved a number of conditions they weren´t expecting to improve at all. Like Juli. She was a student of aerial silks who all of the sudden, every time I was going to take off the silks by the end of the class, would hang herself from her feet on what we call the bat and stay there a couple of minutes. It was in a new year´s reunion with all my students that she told us she tried everything to get rid of the sciatic pain, and some stuff like pills or chiropractic therapy worked for a while, but then the pain came back. Until she discovered the bat. After a couple of months of practice, she never had that condition again. A fifty-year-old yoga student, José, approached me and said, today it´s been a year that I am on your class and I wanted to thank you. I have a heart condition and my physician recommended to lose 30kg. I managed to lose 20kg at the gym, playing football and running, but I couldn´t get rid of the last 10 for years. I want to tell you that today I achieved my goal, and it´s thanks to your yoga.

I don´t remember how I started to practice pole dance. I was already an aerial dance instructor, and it´s possible that the owner of the school I worked for -she is an amazing dancer and pole dancer, Elizabeth Muñoz, had offer me to be in her class for one reason or another. I was kind of leaving depression behind, and the practice of pole dancing accelerated the process of achieving happiness as a normal condition. The secret, that might be as well one of the secrets of Yoga, is that you are most of the time with your feet up and your head down. Since the exercise accelerates your heartrate, you tend to breath more profoundly, and if your instructor is a very good one, she will insist that you breath through your nose. Now, the combination of increased heart rate, increased oxygen intake and being with your head down makes your brain get lots and lots of nutrients and oxygen, and naturally you get what I like to call the happy effect.  All the toxicity is being removed from your brain cells, and it´s now a well-known scientific fact that if your brain is intoxicated, you can´t think well. You´re more likely to take better decisions and think better over all if your brain has a regular practice of cleansing.

Therefore, if instructors tend to favor yoga postures that include head down and feet up, their students will get a boost of cleansing and a very pleasant sensation of lightness on the head and body. Even if they managed to keep their worries in mind through exhaustive exercise, by the end of the class those thoughts won´t feel that heavy.

This is one of the reasons a yoga class can be so powerful: the combination of challenging exercise plus headstands related postures help make anyone feel better. However, what if you already came with the idea that Yoga was going to heal you or help you in anyway? Are we talking about an extended placebo effect around the world?

Let´s look for a moment at the logics inside Yoga through hatha Yoga -or the number of ‘physical’ practices that is closer to the origins of Yoga. The Hatha Yoga, if we talk about style, includes a practice that is focused on a specific series of postures, that in functional training we know as isometric exercise. Each posture affects our emotional level, the function of specific organs and conditions the body for more challenges. There are yoga physicians in India. Maybe you have lower back pain, you go to your yoga doctor, she makes some tests, and she determines that you have sand in your kidneys. She then prescribes you some ayurveda diet and some specific yoga postures that will help you to not only eliminate the excess of matter in your kidneys, but also help you regulate the energy balance in your body, because at a physical level as well as an energetical level, and imbalance is the root cause of any abnormal condition. Then, you may have among your daily series of asanas, Gomukasana or cow face posture, that helps you equilibrate your feminine and masculine energies, Ardha Bujhangasana, or sphynx pose, that stimulates the circulation in the organs inside your lower back area, and Savasana, the corps pose, so the benefits of the previous asanas or postures may sink properly in your body.

However directly related to get a perfect health, this part of yoga is designed to work in many areas of you at the same time. We use isometric exercise in functional training to increase resistance in joints and muscles and create body awareness. I love those type of exercises because, if properly done, the danger of lesion is close to zero. And we´re talking even about flags or levers. If you go gradually, you get all the benefits. It activates certain parts of your brain that movement don´t. So, now you can love a little bit more that tedious exercise your trainer used to put in the mix of your warmup before your machine routine: the chair. You sit without any actual chair against a wall, knees in perfect right angle, and you had to stay there for at least a minute, three series. Accept it. You hated it!

I will be clearer now: Hatha Yoga is the part of Yoga that want´s you to have the perfect health in the perfect body. Remember that old Greek moto: healthy mind in healthy body? As it turns out, that seems to be the hatha yoga moto as well. Every yoga posture was developed with the idea to improve the limits of your body, to work on specific health issues, to work on specific mind abilities, to diminish the voice of your ego, and this I love the most, all of that is accomplished with the help of stretching. Why? Because, being aware of this effect, everytime you get beyond your limits of stretching, you are dissolving energy blocks in your body. This blocks are formed of some sort of dense energy related to karma -whole other story, and to mind as well. Furthermore, if you are conscious of the psychological issues you want to work on during your practice, and middle or hardcore stretching poses are involved -with no pain, you will transform yourself in the way hatha yoga was intended. New mind in new body. That´s it.

What´s the science behind it? Indians, Native Americans, Africans, Australians and Chinese civilizations -among others, have developed their own sciences which include deep understanding of our bodies in levels that go beyond the physical. If you´re starting to put the woo-woo label on the other type of science department, I was with you in this one. Until I asked myself, well, the way I think and the way I perceive was learned by me through highly ignorant humans -and I’m talking about all our systems, from politics to education. What if I have learned to perceive an incomplete reality? By all means, western cultures have put positivism (you may google it but to me is an exess of trust in what we want to think of as facts) in the thrown of knowledge, as if our kind of science is the non plus ultra of the universe, and I think we all have enough information to think otherwise.

There are lots of scientists that have proven in recent decades what Indians have known for centuries or even millennia: that we are more than our physical bodies, that we have energy centers or chakras that regulate our bodily functions along with our main organs, and that the field of energy that surround us shows distinctively how is our mental and physical health. If you want to read about these findings, the book I can recommend you right now is Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza.

Now, if you are a yoga practitioner, and you have come this far, you may ask, okay, but I don´t practice hatha yoga, is extremely boring, I practice Power Yoga and I have all the good results you´re talking about. How is this possible? That´s a very good question! Western yoga is mainly vinyasa, which in functional exercise terms mean you go to a posture, stay for a second, maybe a little more, then flow to another posture and so on. Maybe you get to be longer in some postures depending on your instructor, but they usually design a bunch of series, in a very similar fashion that what we see at the gym or in functional training when you perform  series of circuits. My answer to you would be, yes, the fact that you have certain intention and that your instructor is constantly singing the benefits of each posture, may work as a placebo effect, or, who knows, maybe we get to connect with our bodies in levels that the original gurus of yoga didn´t think about. I honestly am clueless about it. But I do know this. The most amazing effects of yoga on health come from some kind of hatha yoga. And let me tell you why this is in part: the greatest illness of our western societies is anxiety. Anxious people don´t want to think about their problems, they want to forget about them, and being in the same posture, especially if it is kind of an easy one, will get you closer to that specific thing you don´t want to think about. Also, anxiety may make you a very active person. A person that can´t stand wait two seconds for something because they get bored. These are the kind of people that connect easier with vinyasa or sports that are very challenging, because they develop strengths and abilities, but they don´t cultivate patience because it makes them more anxious. People don´t want to talk about Vikram Yoga, because Bikram is known to be a huge sexual predator. Nevertheless, the type of yoga that he made popular is hatha yoga, in a very specific series designed by his master, not precisely by him. And people have really healed from terrible conditions practicing that kind of hatha yoga or other types of hot hatha yoga, mainly because they have developed patience, and that goes along with perseverance. These two qualities are the basis to make you change everything you need to change in your life. It´s not the physical practice per se, it´s all that is involved with it.

Does it mean that you can practice pole dance or functional exercise with the intention to heal and that will happen with patience and perseverance? Maybe. But I can tell you this from personal experience: you only change outside with the help of your practice if you are determined to change inside. If you practice Yoga or whatever as means to transform yourself, and you fall, and you get on your feet again, and keep on practicing, no matter what, I am a hundred percent sure you will succeed.