Author: yogaforall

Posted by: | on October 9, 2015

Special yoga for special people

An article recently published by Jane Reynolds in the newsletter for the British Wheel of Yoga – Wales Region:

I’m a bit in love with the Special Yoga centre and its people. For a while I thought I might keep them as my little secret because they are precious to me…. But then, Gollum never did yoga, did he – otherwise he might have been saved?

 

In September I went to London for a three day intensive workshop, entitled “Yoga for Adults with Special Needs” at the Special Yoga studio in Kilburn Lane. Thirty years ago I had a boyfriend who bought a house near Queens Park (just down the road). If he hung on to it, good luck to him, they now sell for £3,000,000!

Yoga for special needs class photo

The workshop was open to people like me, i.e. yoga teachers with no expertise in teaching special needs students, people who already worked with the special needs population but with little or no knowledge of how yoga might fit in, and finally people who already did both but wanted a deeper understanding.

 

The course leader was Richard Kravetz. Richard is a BWY man – he used to be a County Rep. In 1988 his second son, Matthew, was born with global development delay. Looking after Matthew, and meeting other parents of special children like Matthew, fired Richard’s passion for bringing the benefits of yoga to this very diverse population. You might have read his article in the current issue of Spectrum on the BWY initiative on dementia – Richard is interested in all aspects of special yoga – from children to the elderly, and I warn you now that he is seriously inspiring.

 

The curriculum for the workshop looked at working with both ambulatory and non-ambulatory groups, and for people in high and low arousal. The course looked at providing yoga for people with autism, add and adhd, Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, depression, sensory impairment and dementia.

We were privileged to watch a live class, and view two of Richard’s classes on video. We became his students for one session of chair yoga and we also had a session of touch and simple massage (Tui Na) techniques to support the yoga taught by another Special Yoga tutor, Christine Godwin.

 

Richard explained that adults with learning difficulties are trapped in their bodies, have shallow breathing habits and disorganised mental patterns. He says, ‘The effect of medication, accidents and past trauma often results in a heightened state of stress and reactivity, where the individual is trapped in a state resistant to change, and they exist in survival mode to cope with their fear …. The person can become anxious about minor matters and is unable to listen or respond to stimulus’.

 

So how does yoga help? There are eleven strategic areas:-

  • Improved motor planning and control
  • Improved self-awareness – body and mind
  • Develop ability to self-regulate across environment and demands
  • Develop a sense of balance and perspective
  • Develop ability to relax and release tension, fear and frustration
  • Reduce stress reaction and improve resilience
  • Improve immune function
  • Improve quality and quantity of sleep
  • Enhance respiratory ability and capacity
  • Enhance a sense of wellbeing, calm and peace
  • Enhance a sense of emotional balance

 

Richard stresses the importance of chanting when teaching a special group. It’s good for regulating the breath and improving lung function, but it also promotes connection and integration. We sang the ‘Om Song’, together with hand movements and combined with group members’ names. Chanting someone’s name improves concentration and self-esteem. Not all chants are appropriate, but Hari Om, Om, Om Shanti and Namaste can all be freely used.

 

Positive affirmations are another good way of removing negative energy and promoting self-esteem. I AM HEALTHY! I AM STRONG! I AM FULL OF ENERGY! I AM HAPPY! I AM SAFE. Building flowing sequences can tap into group dynamics, especially when used with counting out loud and sounding the breath. A sense of fun is obligatory.

 

A yoga teacher teaching a special group needs the gravitas to hold the space. Richard emphasised again and again the importance of our own personal practice. ‘The importance of self-practice is crucial for the practitioner. A regular practice of Yoga, Pranayama and Meditation is advocated as it helps the teacher to be physically and emotionally stable and in an optimal state to teach. From a solid and grounded base the teacher is in a position to help others effectively with the intention of supporting the healing of their student using composure, respect, love and compassion.’

 

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Posted by: | on September 19, 2014

Chair Yoga

Extended-Side-Angle

When you picture people practicing yoga, do you imagine impossibly supple, young people bent into all sorts of shapes no human should be able to get themselves into?

If so, then you’d be surprised to hear that yoga can be incredibly beneficial for people with mobility issues, including elderly people and those with disabilities. What’s more, yoga can be practiced not just from the comfort of your own home, but even from the comfort of your own chair!

Star Pose

Benefits Of Chair Yoga

Yoga has been shown to improve overall health, prevent and (even in some cases) reverse disease when practiced regularly as a lifestyle. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that it can therefore lend its benefits to those with mobility issues. Here are some of them:

1. Improved Strength

This means that elderly people will be better able to continue with hobbies and daily activities independently for many more years to come. If they are unlucky enough to suffer a fall or injury, a strong body will be able to withstand this better and sustain fewer injuries.

2. Improved Flexibility

Chair yoga can help those with mobility issues to undertake activities that they have perhaps been unable to, such as reaching down to tie shoe laces or pick things up.

3. Improved Proprioception

Proprioception is the skill of knowing where your body is in space, and coordinating your movements accurately. This is particularly important for elderly people and can prevent falls. For people with disabilities or conditions such as MS, it may mean having greater control over your body and its movements.

4. Reduced Stress And Improved Mental Clarity

Chair yoga can lessen the impact of chronic illnesses and pain. For elderly people, it may also help them cope with feelings of isolation, if this is a problem. Being calmer and more relaxed inevitably leads to a greater feeling of happiness and well-being, which everyone can benefit from!

5. Opportunities To Meet People And Socialize

Joining chair yoga classes for those with mobility issues and the elderly will also give them a venue to socialize and make friends. However, it’s important that you choose an appropriate class so that the instructor will have specific knowledge about what is appropriate for you to do—they’ll be able to suitably adapt the exercises.

6. Improved Stress And Pain Management

Chair yoga (and yoga in general, really) includes breath work, which can help people not only with stress management but also for coping and managing pain. Through meditation and paying attention to your breath, you can help your body and mind to cope with the pain of an illness or condition you may suffer with.

Chair Yoga Poses

I have provided some examples of yoga poses and postures below that can be done from the comfort of a chair covering a range of abilities. These postures all promote flexibility and strength.

Chair yoga 1

Chair yoga - forward bend

chair yoga - extended side angle

chair yoga - forward bend -shoulder stretch

chair yoga - seated spinal twist

Star pose -2

Chair yoga - table pose

The great thing with yoga is that it can be adapted to suit anyone’s needs. The aim is to work with your body rather than against it, therefore ruling out any competitiveness, which can lead you to push yourself too far and do yourself harm.

It’s an effective and gentle way to improve your strength and flexibility in a way that can compliment your current medical interventions, therapies and exercises. With a regular practice, you will soon be reaping the benefits that go well beyond the ones outlined above.

Have you tried chair yoga?

*All images are courtesy of the author and Multiyork

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Posted by: | on September 19, 2014

Multiyork

We recently teamed up with London’s Special Yoga to gather some great poses together that we can all do from the comfort of our own homes. If you’re not familiar with Special Yoga, they specialise in delivering yoga as a therapeutic treatment in the special needs community and offer training programs for yoga teachers, parents and pediatric professionals to enable them to reach out to and help even more children with disabilities.

Special Yoga showed us that you can enjoy some yoga poses from the comfort of your own, sofa! With yoga’s credentials as a gentle form of exercise that can calm the mind and improve your wellbeing, where better to do it than your sofa… the place in the home where we most often go to unwind after a busy day.

Starting with a gentle warm up in the Siddhasana position you can become aware of any tension in your body, particularly in the shoulders and jaw. Take a nice deep breath in and out as you feel yourself sinking into the sofa. You can do this for a few minutes until you feel truly calm and ready to move on to the other suggested poses. This exercise also works on it’s own as a meditative exercise to help quiet the mind.

Yoga 1   Yoga 2

Yoga is about feeling a nice stretch, breathing naturally, working with rather than against your body and letting go of tension, so when trying out the poses, only stretch as far as feels nice and for as long as feels comfortable. Stop immediately if you feel any pain. Keep checking your body to make sure you aren’t screwing up your face, hunching your shoulders or holding your breath. Repeat poses a number of times and you may find your flexibility increases with each try, particularly as you exhale in each position! It certainly will if practiced regularly over weeks and years.

Yoga 3 Yoga 4

Once you’re familiar with these poses, you’ll always have them available to draw on after a long day at work. They can act as a great way to switch off and loosen up before snuggling up to watch your favourite programme and of course for the more ambitious amongst you, over time yoga can make your body strong, supple and able to perform some amazing feats!

Yoga 5 Yoga 6

Yoga 7 Yoga 8

Create the right mood prior to your Yoga session.  You need a quiet and peaceful setting to practice in with ample space to stretch out. Dim the lights, use soft music and rid your space of any distractions.  The phone ringing, music blaring and children interrupting you might not get you in the right frame of mind for calming, relaxing beneficial yoga.

You can also practice Yoga whilst seated in a chair.  For more details and for 6 benefits of Chair Yoga + 8 new poses sitting down to help with mobility problems visit  http://www.doyouyoga.com/6-benefits-of-chair-yoga-8-poses-to-get-you-started/
Read more at http://www.multiyork.co.uk/blog/september-2014/yoga-at-home#I64grmGkmfhBEb3v.99

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Posted by: | on May 21, 2013

Yoga – MidLife and Beyond

While many yoga classes across the country seem to cater to the youthful enthusiast who wants to sweat his or her way through an hour-and-a-half workout, a growing number of longtime yoga devotees are raising questions about the best way to safely continue a yoga practice into midlife and beyond.

“I suspect that yoga was at times an old person’s sport, and that it has prolonged the life and liveliness of people over the millennia,” said Dr. Loren Fishman, a back-pain specialist in Manhattan who uses yoga in his rehabilitation practice and has written extensively about yoga as an adjunct to medical treatment.

“Designed appropriately and taken in proper dose,” he said, “it is certainly safe.”

Carrie Owerko, a New York-based teacher of Iyengar yoga who has been a yoga student for decades, agreed. “Yoga can be practiced fully and deeply at any age,” she said, with an added caution that “the practice has to change as the body changes.”

Dr. Fishman noted that aging brings impairments of range, motion, strength and balance that can require modifications, even among veteran yogis, like using the support of a chair or the wall for many poses. In addition, students may begin to feel the effects of arthritis, injuries and other ailments that may require students skip certain poses altogether.

Someone with osteoporosis, for example, may want to avoid headstands and poses requiring extreme spinal flexion or extension, while someone with glaucoma may want to avoid taking the head below the heart in poses like headstand, handstand, shoulder stand and standing forward bends. When in doubt about the safety of practicing with any specific medical condition, Dr. Fishman recommended working with a doctor.

Generally speaking, a warm-up sequence is important for the veteran yogi, Ms. Owerko said. “Our bodies may need more time to warm up properly, especially if we are experiencing stiffness or arthritic changes in the joints or in areas that may be more vulnerable to previous injuries,” she said.

It is also important to include various one-legged standing poses — Tree Pose or Eagle Pose are examples — that challenge one’s ability to balance, even if you need the support of the wall, Ms. Owerko said. Weight-bearing poses, like Plank Pose and Forearm Plank, and standing poses like Warrior pose variations, are also important to help counteract the decline in muscle mass and strength as we age, she said.

To help maintain flexibility, poses like standing or seated forward bends and hip openers, like Bound Angle Pose or Pigeon Pose, are also important, said Roger Cole, a longtime Iyengar yoga teacher and research psychobiologist in San Diego.

Mr. Cole emphasized that a regular yoga practice can help the body maintain a high level of flexibility into midlife and beyond. If a student continues the same practice as much as possible without interruption through the 50s and beyond, he or she will see a gradual decline in certain abilities, but not necessarily a decline in flexibility, he said.

“I think the average person probably does get stiffer as they age,” he said, “but I believe that it’s mainly because they stop doing the things that keep them flexible.”

The passage of more and more baby boomer yogis, teachers as well as students, into and past middle age has sparked interest in creating a new kind of peer yoga community as well.

Desirée Rumbaugh, a longtime yoga teacher who passed the 50-year mark a few years ago, started a class in Del Mar, Calif., aimed at yoga veterans 50 and over. Called Wisdom Warriors, it was intended to offer veteran yogis the chance to keep learning in an environment that is comfortable and encouraging.

“People want to be pushed, but not in the same way they did in their 30s,” she said. “They want a little slower pace.”

Slower pace or not, Ms. Rumbaugh includes a full range of poses in her classes, including backbends and inversions. A recent Wisdom Warriors workshop, presented by Ms. Rumbaugh and Cyndi Lee at the Yoga Journal Conference in New York in April, would have been a vigorous day of yoga for students of any age.

Debra Hodgen, 61, of Vista, Calif., is a student in Ms. Rumbaugh’s class. A former dancer, she said that she began a consistent yoga practice when she was 48. She said she has become “stronger and more fearless” as a result of the class, despite having osteoarthritis, no cartilage in her right knee and joint pain throughout her body.

“I may have trouble just sitting in simple cross-legged pose, but I did full Monkey Pose recently,” she said.

The most important way a seasoned student will be able to continue to practice safely, many teachers say, is to listen to signals their body sends them in class, and know when to back off.

“In my experience, older students often bring a mature wisdom to the practice,” said Ms. Owerko, who turned 51 this week and has for many years attended an advanced yoga retreated for women over 40. “They have lived long enough to have a sense of humor about themselves. And they are often more compassionate toward themselves and other students.”

yoga over 50 – Dr. Loren Fishman ..  NY TIMES 1ST MAY 2013

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