rnijhon

Yoga can be great for back pain, especially lower back pain. I would spend all day on campus carrying a very heavy backpack with my laptop, battery, and giant textbooks, so it wasn’t too surprising when I started to develop some pretty intense aches. I have a friend who is a certified yoga instructor, and she explained to me that a lot of people have weak back muscles in general, so our lower back picks up a lot of the slack. Yoga helps to strengthen and stretch all of your back muscles, so when you use your back, weight is distributed evenly and you use more muscles groups. Your muscles also tend to tighten and tense which cause pain, so the stretching and increased blood flow help to loosen up the tense spots. She worked with me personally and I had amazing results!! (I also lost some of the unnecessary weight in my bag)

It worked great for me, and almost all of her pre-natal yoga clients see immediate results as many of them come in with back pain. Yoga helps to give you better posture and alignment that stays with you for the entire day, so you don’t end up slouching in positions that can cause pain. She also said that yoga can give you tools to breathe into strong sensations. When we feel pain, especially in the back, we tend to tighten and tense, which causes more restriction and pain. Yoga teaches you how to breathe through strong sensations and keep the muscles relaxed, thus reducing the amount of discomfort significantly. You should definitely let your yoga teacher know what your dealing with when you start, and they will totally help to customize a practice best for you!

Meditation has been a huge tool in helping me with my depression. I don’t think many people realize that most of our day is filled with activities that take us out of ourselves, so when you sit with yourself, even for just a few minutes, it can be so incredibly powerful! It helps you to see your thoughts, and to see the way that you think. We are almost always on autopilot and we never question the thoughts that come into our heads. I used to let the negative thoughts dominate me. I would just be going in circles in my head, telling myself the worst stuff about myself, until one day I had this incredibly negative thought, and I was so shocked I just burst out laughing!

I realized that I was letting these thoughts control me, but in reality, I am the one who has the control. Meditation has really helped me gain this incredible capacity to witness myself, and to help me separate all the junk that flows through the constant stream of thoughts. I don’t have to let those heavy dark views attach to me and bring me down. As my meditation skill began to grow, the thoughts would just stop all together (maybe 15/20 min into the meditation) , and when you stop thinking, that is when you can start feeling! You just tap in to all the wonderful energy around you, and it gives you this amazing sense of wholeness, of completion. It’s hard to stay depressed when you feel that universal love! Don’t get me wrong, I still have my dark days, but Its great to have this as a tool!

Meditation takes a little bit of time to build, but that is what I liked about it when I first started. I would say if you have never done it before, take it easy! Try to do it a couple times a week, for like 5 min at a time. It’s like doing a workout – you have to start with the 10lb weights before you can lift the 20lb. Over time you will start to see a shift in your thoughts, in your mood, in the way you react to the world and how you perceive the world. It will become easier to sit for longer without even trying. Don’t take my word for it, just try it! You can see what happens for yourself:)

I first started yoga because I wanted an alternative to going to the gym. They gym cultivated a strange mindset for me. I was never at ease, I was self-conscious, there were so many egos walking around, and I would usually end up more stressed by the time I left. If I wanted to feel better about myself, the gym was not the place to do it. My first yoga class, although challenging, really helped to show me how “working out” was really about honoring myself, and my body. The practice of yoga is born out of a philosophy of Universal love. It is about opening to, and working with our connection with everything around us. I found that by opening my body the way yoga forces you to do, it also started to open my heart. For the first time in a long time, I felt really good about myself, dare I say I even loved myself. I felt more accepted in the world and more present in the world. Yoga keeps me from returning to that dark place of self-loathing that so many of us return to. I can truly say that it changed my life.

When my friends first recommended acupuncture as an alternative to anxiety medication and anti-depressants, my first reaction was skeptical to say the least. How is poking me with needles going to make me LESS anxious?? I wasn’t sure, but I did know that I didn’t want to be dependent on foreign chemicals for the rest of my life. So I tried it, and I was pleasantly surprised to say the least! I was really impressed at the vast amount of medical knowledge that the acupuncturist holds, and how they tailor each individual treatment not only to my physical symptoms, but to my emotional symptoms as well. My acupuncturist told me that many of these symptoms arrive because we are out of balance, and that is exactly how I felt, just out of it. I was out of everything in my life. She tailored my treatment to restoring the energetic balance in my body, and I would leave every session feeling clam, peaceful, and just grateful. I love love love that we were using the power of my body for healing, and not some medical grade narcotic. No matter what it is you are dealing with, I promise acupuncture can help.