As yogis, most of us continually strive to move through life more mindfully. Yet sometimes, despite our best efforts, we run into obstacles and react in ways that don’t serve us. We vow to cut back on sugar, then cave at the sight of cookies; we get down on ourselves for playing the comparison game when looking at social media feeds; we feel frustrated if we can’t balance in Bakasana (Crane Pose) during yoga class. Often, these roadblocks are tied to our samskaras, the Sanskrit term for the mental and emotional grooves, or habits, that we find ourselves falling back into time and time again.
What Are Samskaras?
Whether conscious or unconscious, positive or negative, samskaras make up our conditioning and influence how we respond in certain situations. Changing these deeply ingrained patterns can be difficult—even if those patterns cause us pain. The good news is that we can use our yoga practice to examine our samskaras, identify what may be getting in the way of realizing our best intentions, and work with what we uncover.
By observing our reactive patterns on the yoga mat and meditation cushion, we’re better able to recognize when we react mindlessly in real life—and in turn, consciously shift our feelings, thoughts, emotions, moods, and behaviors. For example, if you lose your balance in Vrksasana (Tree Pose), look at how you talk to yourself. Are you kind? Or do you beat yourself up? Can you dust yourself off and try again, even when you feel like giving up?
The most common roadblocks I see students struggle with on a regular basis are self-criticism, frustration, and lack of willpower. The following sequences will help you cultivate the tools you need to work through your roadblocks, so you can break the patterns that no longer serve you and call in new ones that will help you live more mindfully.
Stand at the front of your mat in Tadasana (Mountain Pose). As you inhale, stretch your arms out to the sides and then overhead, lengthening through your side ribs. As you exhale, sit your hips back and down. Shift your weight toward your heels, and release the tops of your thighs and tailbone toward the mat. Soften the sides of your neck, unhinge your jaw, and quiet your eyes. Stay here for 1 minute. Utkatasana is intense. You’ll notice your mind searching for a way out of the discomfort. Observe what arises, and choose to stay. When it gets hard, let it be hard.
You can fold this mini-sequence into a longer home practice or simply do these five poses followed by a restorative supported Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) and a supine hip opener, such as Sucirandhrasana (Eye-of-the-Needle Pose). Finish in Savasana (Corpse Pose).
A new study presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association found that male veterans who had elevated depression scores before a twice weekly hatha yoga program had a significant reduction in depression symptoms after the eight-week program.
How Yoga Benefits Veterans with Depression
“Yoga is unique in that it combines several things that empirical research has shown to be very helpful for improving depression and other mental health concerns: exercise, mindfulness, and breathing practices, to name a few," says study information co-investigator Lindsey B. Hopkins, Ph.D., a research fellow at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care Center. “All of these things likely played a role in the benefits that these veterans experienced."
The study, which featured 21 male veterans, also found that improvements in depression were significantly correlated with increases in mindfulness and decreases in experiential avoidance—defined as engaging in a particular behavior in order to change or avoid unwanted negative thoughts, emotions, or sensations, even when doing so produces harm. This is consistent with other research, Hopkins says. The social aspect of yoga may also play a role: in interviews, many of the veterans said they derived a great deal of benefit (in terms of mental health and well-being) from having the opportunity to connect with other veterans, she adds.
Not only did the veterans see a reduction in their depression symptoms after participating in the hatha yoga program, they also simply enjoyed it. On a 1–10 scale, the veterans gave the yoga classes an average enjoyment rating of 9.4, and all participants said they would recommend the program to other veterans.
“The most unique aspect of our study is that it focused on male veterans with an average age of 61, whereas most other research has focused on younger and predominantly female populations," Hopkins says. “From my view, our most meaningful finding was how much these men—almost all of whom were practicing yoga for the first time—enjoyed the practice, believed it had improved their physical and/or mental health, and viewed it as a promising treatment option, suggesting that yoga could be a highly acceptable complementary approach for male veterans. I think this is important given that people in the U.S. often think of yoga as a woman’s activity … and, more specifically, a privileged young white woman’s activity. This study lends support that this isn’t the case, given the diversity of these male veterans in terms age, race, and economic status."
More Evidence That Yoga May Help Reduce Symptoms of Depression
While this was a small study, others presented at the APA convention also highlighted the role that yoga may play in reducing symptoms of depression.
In one study, co-authored by Hopkins, eight weeks of hot yoga significantly reduced symptoms of depression compared with the control group for 52 women, ages 25–45.
Another pilot study of 29 adults showed that eight weeks of at least twice weekly hot yoga significantly reduced symptoms of depression.
In another study, 12 patients who had experienced depression for an average of 11 years participated in nine weekly yoga sessions. Scores for depression, anxiety, and stress decreased.
And in another study, 74 mildly depressed university students were asked to perform a yoga or relaxation exercise at home for eight days. Two months later, participants in the yoga group had significantly lower scores for depression, anxiety, and stress than the relaxation group.
18 Inspiring Poses: How Yoga Helps Treat Veterans and PTSD
Photographer Robert Sturman honors and celebrates American veterans of war by featuring several active duty and retired service members practicing yoga.
To prep for our upcoming Yoga for Stress and Anxiety online course, we’re giving you weekly doses of tranquil asana, pranayama, meditation, and yoga nidra. Don’t miss our six-week course that’ll make a lasting change in the way you work, love, and live. Enroll now and be the first to know when it launches.
In the United States, up to eight percent of the total population will experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in their lifetime. PTSD can occur after a traumatic event like the loss of a loved one, combat, a terrorist attack, or natural disaster. Someone who has experienced trauma may feel stressed or frightened even when danger is not imminent. For veterans of war, the percentage is greater. About 11 to 20 percent of those who served in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan suffer from PTSD, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
The VA also reports that 27 percent of veterans diagnosed with PTSD under Veterans Affairs hospital care will experience some form of substance abuse. But that is changing. More veterans are opting out of opioids to self-manage their chronic pain, stress, and depression, according to a recent study at the Washington, D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center. In the study, Integrative Restoration Yoga Nidra, or “iRest,” a yoga practice that utilizes relaxation techniques and meditative inquiry, was used among a small group of participants to help them manage their musculoskeletal pain levels. Meditation and mindfulness practices will evidently allow a person to respond to their pain with less reactive stress, because the parasympathetic nervous system—the body’s relaxation response— becomes activated. The same mechanisms could be employed to calm symptoms of PTSD.
And the trend is catching on nationally. A Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Denver replaced their bar with free yoga classes for instance, and groups like the Light it Up Foundation and the Give Back Yoga Foundation use the transformational power of yoga to help treat veterans with PTSD.
Here, photographer Robert Sturman honors and celebrates American veterans of war by featuring several active duty and retired service members practicing yoga. “It is my moral obligation to pay attention to those who are crying out for healing,” he said.
Handstand
Adho Mukha Vrksasana
“If I could ask you to do anything, it would be to invite a veteran to yoga. It might just save their life,” said Staff Sergeant Dan Nevins last year at Coronado Beach, California. The veteran-turned-yoga-teacher served in the U.S. Army during the second war in Iraq, where he lost his legs in an explosion when his vehicle caught fire. Both yoga and the Wounded Warrior Projecthave been integral to his healing.
Meditate in vibrant chakra gardens (shapes and plants coincide with the seven energy centers), soak in outdoor herbal baths, and participate in sacred rituals with local healers at this wellness retreat ($3,100–$3,800 for an eight-day package, including day trips to ancient Machu Picchu and the city of Cusco, willkatika.com).
Yin Yoga 101: The Functional Alignment Principle That Helps Prevent Injury
Understanding where movement should originate is key to keeping the body safe in Yin Yoga and beyond. Here, Josh Summers workshops Swan Pose to help you explore.
Want to learn a style of yoga that’s focused on bringing balance—physically, energetically, and mentally? Join Josh Summers, founder of the Summers School of Yin Yoga, for our new online course Yin Yoga 101—a six-week journey through the foundations and principles of Yin Yoga, along with asana practice and meditation. Click here to sign up!
In an earlier post, we looked at aesthetic alignment vs. functional alignment. In short, aesthetic alignment tries to establish whether a pose is correct and safe by the way it looks: Are the thighs parallel? Are the hands shoulder-width apart? In contrast, functional alignment considers where and how a practitioner intends to stress (exercise) the target areas in the body, and then evaluates whether that intention is served when entering and while in the pose. (You can explore that with Dragon Pose here.) And practitioners are encouraged to test modifications to see which best achieves their intention, keeping in mind that modifications are different for all based on their unique anatomy.
Now, the second important facet of functional alignment is not stressing an area of the body you don’t intend to stress. Whenever you do a pose, you want movement to originate from the joints that are proximal to the axial skeleton—in other words, closest to the body’s core. So when you move your legs, you initiate from the hip socket, not the knee. Or when you move your arms, you initiate from the shoulder girdle, not the elbow. When movement is restricted at proximal joints, distal joints (joints further from the the core), like the knee, try to compensate. As Yin Yoga pioneer Paul Grilley says, you don’t want to punish the distal joints for what the proximal joints can’t do. A good way to understand this is through Swan, the Yin version of Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (Pigeon Pose).
Preventing Injury in Swan Pose
Potential Target Areas: External rotators of front leg’s outer hip; front leg’s adductors and inner hamstrings; back leg’s hip flexors
Not Targeting (Don’t Intend to Stress): Front knee
The Anatomy of Swan Pose
In Swan, the front thigh and femur are moving with a combination of flexion, abduction, and external rotation. When this happens and the knee is flexed, the collateral ligaments of the knee loosen, allowing for more movement at the knee joint. But if the hip is restricted, the knee will try to compensate for what the hip can’t do—potentially leading to injury. The increased mobility can send signals of distress (i.e. pain) to your knee’s medial meniscus if the stress is too significant.
When the knee is flexed and the thigh externally rotates, many factors will contribute to when and where the knee experiences stress, including:
Soft-tissue tension in any of the hip’s muscle groups can restrict the thigh’s degree of external rotation, shifting movement downstream to the knee.
Skeletal variations influence the hip’s range of motion; the hip socket (acetabulum) plays a major role, and the hip socket’s orientation, angle, and depth will determine when and where the knee comes to a point of stress.
The length and size of the femur’s neck, the angle of the femoral neck shaft, and the amount of twist in the femur (femoral torsion) determine the range of femoral external rotation that can be achieved before deleterious stress is placed on the knee.
Let’s now dive into how different styles of alignment can help you eliminate stress on the knee.
Aesthetic Alignment in Swan My right knee is lined up behind my right wrist, my right heel is just forward of my left hip, my hips are level. By many standards, I’m in the “correct” alignment. But functionally, I’m courting disaster. My right knee hurts. That’s because in this particular alignment, I can’t generate enough external rotation of my thigh, and my knee is trying to compensate, painfully squeezing my medial meniscus. What may look “correct” and safe is functionally bad and unhealthy. To remedy my knee pain, a well-intentioned teacher my prop my right hip. And it’s true that, by supporting my hip, this may allow the thigh to externally rotate less (relieving my knee), but this may not work. It also may remove all advantageous stress that I was seeking for my hip.
Functional Alignment in Swan Now look at my collapsed Swan: I let my right hip come all the way to the ground, tilting both my hips. In this position, my right thigh and femur aren’t being asked to externally rotate as much as in the aesthetic version. My knee is no longer stressed, but I’m still experiencing the desired stress in my outer right hip. Ugly as collapsed Swan may be, it is functionally best for my body.
Remember, what’s functionally optimal for my body might not be for yours. This is why in Yin Yoga we give students so much freedom to explore variations. And in learning how and why your body experiences limitation in Yin Yoga, you’ll be able to apply that firsthand knowledge to your other yoga practices. After all, your skeleton doesn’t change when you walk through the doors to a vinyasa class.
Whether you’re setting up for morning practice or just need a little boost, this mix of fluid melodies will inspire you to feel relaxed, present, and enlightened.
Meet the Inspiring Woman Teaching Yoga to Caregivers of U.S. Military Service Members & Veterans
Pamela Stokes Eggleston lost herself when caring for her husband, a U.S Army veteran and Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient. Now, she’s on a mission to teach other caregivers the yogic practices that helped her find her soul again.
Wounded warriors have their own heroes at home. There are 5.5 million caregivers looking after a former or current U.S. military member, according to a 2014 RAND study, which also found that 17% of them reported spending more than 40 hours per week providing care. In honor of Memorial Day and Mental Health Awareness month, Yoga Journal is kicking off this series, which features the unique experiences of caregivers finding—and sharing—well-being through yoga.
Pamela Stokes Eggleston hadn’t heard from her then fiancé in three days, and had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. Charles Eggleston, a computer engineer and a U.S. Army reservist, was summoned to Iraq a year earlier. And sure enough, Pamela’s intuition that Charles’ radio silence was a sign that something was wrong proved to be true: An improvised explosive device (IED) had struck his vehicle. The accident was so serious, Charles was initially pronounced dead. Thankfully, he survived. Though today—15 years and 60 surgeries later—his wounds are still debilitating.
Pamela, now executive director at Yoga Service Council, recalls the three-and-a-half years her husband spent at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C. as a difficult eternity. “I had to navigate a system I wasn’t used to navigating,” she said. “If you were engaged to a service member, you were treated differently because you weren’t a wife. I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t conditioned to fall in line.”
Pamela Stokes Eggleston and Charles Eggleston
Greg Blakey
They eventually married, and Pamela, along with fellow military spouses, cofounded Blue Star Families (BSF), an organization providing resources for families and partners facing the unique challenges of military life. (Charles, a Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient, still sits on the board.)
Acronyms like TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) became part of her vernacular. “But we weren’t saying that Charles had PTSD, because the military would have snatched up the security clearance he needed to continue working. We had a good psychologist who said he had ‘anxiety.’” It wasn’t until he was transferred to Washington D.C. VA Medical Center that Charles was formally diagnosed with PTSD, which manifested as extreme insomnia.
From Secondary PTSD to Self-Care
Taking care of Charles took a toll on Pamela, who says she didn’t reach out for the help she needed.
“I didn’t want to burden people, so I took it all on,” she says. “When things happen, we’re supposed to get on our yoga mats. And I didn’t do that; I didn’t do anything. I was fostering illness instead of wellness.” As the daughter of an Air Force veteran and granddaughter of an Army veteran who served in WWII, Pamela also had transgenerational trauma that was triggered by Charles’s PTSD, and she began to mirror his symptoms. What Pamela was dealing with is called secondary PTSD, and it’s common among caregivers. Plagued with sleepless nights, Pamela took low-dose, snapped-in-half Ambien pills—and still felt exhausted.
That’s when she picked up yoga again. “Asana helped me process and move energy through my body,” she says, “and pranayama helped as well. I started doing a lot of yoga nidra. But meditation was the answer. I was like, ‘If this works for me, it has to work for other people.” Over time, Pamela completed her 200-hour, 500-hour, and yoga therapy certifications. In 2012, she incorporated 5-minute movement and breath sessions into the caregiver program she co-created for BSF.
Pamela Stokes Eggleston and Michelle Obama at the White House.
That same year, Pamela launched Yoga2Sleep, a program offering yoga sessions to help veterans, caregivers, and families overcome sleep deprivation. In 2014, she partnered with Hope for the Warriors—a national community-based organization supporting post-9/11 military service and family members through transition services, art therapy, and more—which started using Pamela’s therapeutic yoga protocol in its curriculum.
The Evolving Roles of Caregivers—and Why They Need Self-Care
Caregivers face a variety of challenges. At first, they navigate an unfamiliar bureaucratic system to find the right medical care for their wounded warriors. They may have to physically look after partners. Even after a decade, they may have to cope with invisible wounds, turbulent emotional states, and “soul” injuries that surface in veterans as their TBIs worsen or as they process what happened in combat and what it means for the future.
As a result, it’s even more important for caregivers to take care of themselves with nourishing foods, movement, and breathwork, says Pamela. “It’s selfish not to take care of yourself and run ragged, because if something happens to you, then everybody else has to deal with that,” she says. What you don’t want to do is give so much energy that it becomes a badge. “When you get too enmeshed with another person, even if it’s your spouse or son, you stop having your own life. I don’t believe the universe wants you to live that way.”
Urging caregivers to hold space for themselves is at the heart of Pamela’s teaching. Most caregivers are sleep-deprived, so she teaches a lot of yoga nidra. “I also teach Yin Yoga because it’s good for sleep. I’ll pick one or two postures, like Child’s Pose to help caregivers drop into themselves, and Mountain Pose with arms extended overhead for strength. And I focus on teaching breathwork.”
Many caregivers in her classes love her practices but say they don’t have time to do them at home. Pamela insists they can fit it in—even if it’s taking two minutes in the shower to do a standing meditation.
Reclaiming the Soul in Order to Heal
Doctors used to say that PTSD couldn’t be cured. Yet these days, there’s a lot of talk about post-traumatic growth, which excites Pamela.
“I believe in the power of mindfulness and meditation to get back into your body, breath, and soul,” she says. “Resiliency is an overused word in the military, but it means having agency in your life. The only way to do this is to practice radical self-care every day. It’s critical.”
If the new emissions continue they could set back the recovery of the ozone layer by a decade. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA
A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world.
Unless the culprit is found and stopped, the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from damaging UV radiation, could be delayed by a decade. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation.
CFC chemicals were used in making foams for furniture and buildings, in aerosols and as refrigerants. But they were banned under the global Montreal protocol after the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in the 1980s. Since 2007, there has been essentially zero reported production of CFC-11, the second most damaging of all CFCs.
The rise in CFC-11 was revealed by Stephen Montzka, at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Colorado, and colleagues who monitor chemicals in the atmosphere. “I have been doing this for 27 years and this is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I was just shocked by it.”
“We are acting as detectives of the atmosphere, trying to understand what is happening and why,” Montzka said. “When things go awry, we raise a flag.”
Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment, said: “If these emissions continue unabated, they have the potential to slow down the recovery of the ozone layer. It’s therefore critical that we identify the precise causes of these emissions and take the necessary action.”
CFCs used in buildings and appliances before the ban came into force still leak into the air today. The rate of leakage was declining steadily until 2013, when an abrupt slowing of the decline was detected at research stations from Greenland to the South Pole.
Scientists then embarked on an investigation, published in the journal Nature, to find out the cause. The detective work began by assessing whether there had been changes in how the atmosphere distributes and destroys CFC-11 that could explain the changed measurements. But this factor was mostly ruled out and in the most recent data – 2017 – it appears to have played no role at all.
Advertisement
Next, the researchers looked at whether the release of CFC from older materials could have doubled, as required to explain the data. “But we don’t know of any folks who are destroying buildings at a much more dramatic rate than they were before,” said Montzka.
Lastly, the team considered whether the new CFC-11 was being produced as a by-product of some other chemical manufacturing process. But they ruled this out too, as the quantities involved are too high, representing a 25% rise in global emissions.
“You are left with, boy, it really looks like somebody is making it new,” said Montzka, who noted that the less damaging replacement for CFC-11 is more expensive to make.
“If the increased emissions were to go away [soon], it’s influence on the recovery date for the ozone layer would be minor,” he said. “If it doesn’t go away, there could be a 10-year delay, and if it continued to increase, the delay would be even longer.” The last option is a possibility, as if the new CFC-11 is being used in foams, then only a small fraction will have made it to the atmosphere so far and more could leak out for many years into the future.
Michaela Hegglin, at the University of Reading, UK, and not part of the research team said researchers had taken rigorous steps to rule out alternative explanations for the rise in CFC-11 when reaching their conclusion that new production must be occurring.
She said: “The study highlights that environmental regulations cannot be taken for granted and must be safe-guarded, and that monitoring is required to ensure compliance.” Prof Piers Forster, at the University of Leeds, UK, said: “This new study is atmospheric detective work at its finest.”
Paul Young, at Lancaster University, UK, said: “The Montreal Protocol has been rightly hailed as our most successful international environmental treaty, so the suggestion that there are possibly continued, unreported emissions of CFCs is certainly troubling and needs further investigation.”
Montzka said the world’s nations are committed to its enforcement. “I have a feeling that we will find out fairly quickly what exactly is going on and that the situation will be remedied,” he said. Even just the publicity about the new CFC-11 production could lead to its shutdown, he said: “Somebody who was maybe doing it purposefully will realise – oh, someone is paying attention – and stop doing it.”
【◎心靈研磨坊 – 曼陀羅藏(Ⅲ)◎】 
【容大千量】