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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Yoga for Cancer & Thyroid patients


Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning yoke or union. I interpret it a union of body, mind and spirit - or- a way to achieve wholeness. It is a time-honored system of self care dating back 5,000 years. Yoga involves a gentle series of stretches and poses (or postures), done slowly and with attention to your breath and related sensations. For the healthy population, yoga helps take of your body in the prevention of illness or disease. The benefits are many: physically, it increases flexibility and muscular strength; mentally, it helps us learn to work beyond our physical limits through increasing levels of awareness. With continued practice, yoga helps us read our body signals and helps us honor the messages it send us in order to heal. For those of us with medical challenges, the practice can help us move beyond a restricted mindset of always being sick. Continually thinking of yourself as being sick can evolve into a long-term, negatively reinforcing message to your body on how its supposed to behave. With lack of exercise over time, disuse atrophy or degeneration can set it. Muscle tone is lost, particularly in the legs; the skeletal muscles weaken and become more prone to injury - not to mention depression. The beauty of yoga for cancer patients is it can practice anywhere and from any position - a hospital bed, chair or wheelchair, if standing isn't possible. When starting out, you may wish to limit their practice to 10 minutes a day, as stamina builds. Most seasoned yoga practitioners go 1-1/2 hours or more each day. As a thyroid cancer survivor, found yoga incredibly beneficial from both a mental and emotional standpoint following my diagnosis. It provided me with a wonderful calming feeling and put my stress, and sometime sheer terror, in check. Yoga can help energize - even if you are exhausted! Specific postures can provide help for the following physical symptoms: backachefatigueindigestionheadachestress.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Yoga & Meditation - A healthy life


Yoga for most of the people happens to be a great source of keeping themselves fit with its incredible body postures called asana. However these asanas are only a small part of the yoga. This ancient practice of yoga boasts of its origin from ancient Vedic testaments. We tend to limit the scope of yoga by considering it a mere collection of exercises. But Vedic testaments say that it was originally meant to serve much greater purpose of unifying human souls with eternal power or God. And yoga meditation happens to be the only way of elevating your spirit so that you could unify yourself with Almighty. Your soul's unification with Almighty brings eternal peace and tranquility to you.
If you are not performing meditation instructions of yoga along with your daily asana practice, you are likely to not get much of the yoga benefits. Different yoga practices don't offer you separate solutions instead yoga works well when all its integral parts are practiced simultaneously in an orderly manner. This is the way yoga offers holistic health improvement. That's why meditation must be incorporated in your yoga routine, it works as a stress buster and brings in mental rejuvenation.
Yoga offers various ways of meditation that could be performed with other yoga practice. More higher forms of yoga such as kudnalini Yoga and Raja Yoga are said to offer complex medication practices but once you get accustomed to these practices you would achieve a higher state of mind and soul. Hot yoga offers you to perform meditation in a hot or high temperature ambiance that helps you disassociate yourself from the outside world. This practice helps enhance your mental productivity.
In today's fast moving world every one tries to improve his/her performance to keep up the pace with changes and in turn gets grappled with stress. Some of us simply perish due to our ignorance towards stress management techniques. In such a situation yoga meditation proves of immense help in stress management.
Even for weight shedding it's not only the yoga exercise or postures but meditation and breathing techniques that combine together to give desired level of fat burning. Meditation relevance with yoga postures lies in the fact that you can't remain physically fit if your mind remains unfit.

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