15 million Americans are practicing yoga,
but many are missing the most important
health benefit yoga can offer.

New book, Emotional Yoga,
tells how yoga can also heal the emotions

“Emotional Yoga goes beyond fitness; it is the yoga of emotional healing
and health, teaching you how to actively "stretch" your emotions and
become more emotionally balanced, flexible and strong.”
—Deepak Chopra, M.D. from the foreword of Emotional Yoga

 

(Denver, CO) – Anxiety, Anger, Fear, Stress, Worry, Exhaustion…..According to a recent Time Magazine article, chronic anxiety disorder—anxiety that persists to the point that it interferes with our lives—is the most common mental illness in the United States, afflicting 19 million Americans. We are worrying our selves sick! Unresolved distressing emotions that linger are toxic and a risk factor to health. In her new book, EMOTIONAL YOGA: How the Body Can Heal the Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2002), Bija Bennett offers simple yet powerful solutions to this issue.

While Hollywood celebrities and millions of Americans have embraced yoga as a hot new form of exercise, yoga is actually much, much more than physical exercise. In EMOTIONAL YOGA, Bija Bennett, explains that our thoughts and emotions affect every single cell in our body, and knowing how to change them in a way that is health-enhancing, gives us access to the most powerful and empowering health-creating secret on earth!

“While it’s great to be able to execute a complicated pose, what really counts is what’s going on in your life right now. How are you feeling? How is your sense of well-being? How is your tolerance with your mother? Your boss? Your kids? Your everyday tasks and errands?” asks Bennett.

Everyday the influences of our lives change. Our food, exercise, sleep, and emotional states continuously move us into and out of balance. Everything we feel, smell, hear, see, or taste has an effect. As the balance of these forces change, our life changes. Once we recognize we are out of balance and can identify how, we can do something about it. The challenge is to influence our system in the direction of change for the better.

Bija Bennett can share fast and simple, yet profound steps for eliminating stress and restoring balance to our lives using EMOTIONAL YOGA movements, breathing exercises, meditations, gestures, and healing sounds. For example: Here is Bija’s one-minute recipe for reducing stress, which can be used at work or home.

“Seated Movement and Breathing with Sound”

• Step One: Start sitting in a chair with your feet parallel, head slightly bowed, and hands folded over your heart.

• Step Two: INHALE, slowly raise your arms wide out to the sides, opening your chest, lifting your head and arching your back slightly.

• Step Three: EXHALE slowly, tightening your belly, bringing both hands back to your heart, and pause.

• Step Four: REPEAT 4 times, coordinating your movement with your breath. Then repeat 4 more times, opening your mouth and sounding out the word Ahhh or Ma as you exhale.

If you have five minutes, try doing this simple breathing exercise which is cooling, soothing, and balancing, like sipping lemonade on a hot summer day!

“The Sipping Breath”

• Step One: Start sitting comfortably, either on the floor or in a chair. Close your eyes. Now INHALE, and pretend you are sipping through a straw (make sure you can hear the hiss!), as you slowly raise your chin and head.

• Step Two: Close your mouth, holding your breath as you bring your head down, dropping your chin. Then EXHALE through your nose, breathing from the back of your throat.

• Step Three: REPEAT 12 to 18 times, remembering to lift your head up during inhalation, and down before exhalation.

In EMOTIONAL YOGA, there are two therapeutic processes used for creating overall balance:

1) Reduction therapy which reduces or eliminates any excess from the system, such as too much weight or mental activity and distress. Reduction is useful for reducing conditions of hyperactivity, irritation, agitation, anger, anxiety, or worry.

2) Tonification therapy, which nourishes, adds to, or builds up the system, and is useful for weak conditions, dullness, low energy, lack of confidence, and depression. Tonification increases energy, vitality, courage, and instills more confidence in participating in life.

EMOTIONAL YOGA is yoga of the entire mind-body. Extremely accessible and incorporating an up-to-the-minute synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern science, EMOTIONAL YOGA helps you unlock your deepest potential, and create higher states of health and well being.

Emotional Yoga: How the Body Can Heal the Mind
by Bija Bennett
73 black-and-white photographs by noted photographer Lois Greenfield
Simon & Schuster, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86277-8
224 pages/$15.00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bija Bennett is an internationally renowned yoga teacher and workshop leader with extensive training in yoga, fitness, and mind-body health. For more than ten years she has co-led seminars with Deepak Chopra, M. D. and treated thousands of patients at his Ayurvedic medical center. The author of Breathing Into Life, she lives in Denver, Colorado.

View Emotional Yoga