What is National Yoga Awareness Month?
National Yoga Awareness Month is a month-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness about yoga.
Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are happy to sing yoga’s praises, far and wide! In many ways, yoga represents the heart of our program. Our founder, Kay White, credits her recovery from substance addiction in very large part to yoga.
No matter who we are, where we’ve been, or what we’re staring down in our life’s journey, yoga is a viable, supportive path for finding a way through.
What are the benefits of yoga?
Yoga is a healing resource that goes far beyond what it can do for physical body strength, balance, and flexibility. Yoga is a comprehensive system that heals mind, body, and soul, through breath work and lifestyle philosophy as much as through physical postures. This ancient system is scientific and methodical, tested and refined by thousands of practitioners over thousands of years.
Many people start yoga these days because they are looking to improve their physical fitness. Yoga strengthens the core of the body, extends the range of motion, corrects alignment, improves balance, and tones muscles.
Yoga also brings deep peace, by healing internal organs and glands. Yoga accesses the part of our physiology that hosts our mental and emotional experiences. In modern parlance, yoga can be said to rewire pathways of the brain and nervous system, anchoring us into habits of happiness, peace, and freedom.
How can yoga help mental health, addiction, and trauma?
At Villa Kali Ma, we have observed that trauma, addiction, and mental health imbalances are intertwined. Yoga is a phenomenal resource for all three because it gets to the very root to repair our deep damage and disconnection. By restoring the physiological functioning of the body, the emotional processing ability of the heart, and the clarity of the brain and nervous system, yoga gets to the bottom of it all.
Studies conducted on the role of yoga in mental health treatment suggest that yoga reduces symptoms associated with conditions of anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders, through its ability to reduce the impacts of stress on the entire physiology.
Trauma lives on in the body mind and spirit through a damaged nervous system, such that we are trapped in frightening moments of the past. Through yoga’s many regulating, harmonizing, and toning impacts on the nervous system, as well as through its kind and humanistic approach to suffering, yoga can easily be used as an effective trauma treatment, restoring safety and now-moment orientation inside our bodies.
Yoga helps in part because it does not separate the physical body from thought and feeling. Rather, yoga expresses a basic unity, that thought, emotio, and body cannot be fully teased apart. Isn’t it true that it’s easier to think clear, sane thoughts when our mood is positive? Isn’t it easier to feel positive emotions when our bodies are also healthy?
The word yoga, which translates as “joining” or “union”, reflects yoga’s basic mechanism, which is to reunify us with our source of being. Whatever we believe in our hearts about where human beings come from and what we’re doing here, most can agree that to be cut off, lost, and fragmented feels lonely and bad.
Without saying exactly what it is that we are reunifying with, necessarily, yoga erases our existential isolation and reconnects us to the hub of the wheel of life, healing our cosmic attachment trauma.
Then everything else gets better too. When we are in harmony with the higher music of our own lives, we think sane thoughts, feel our emotions inside our heart space, and experience our physical bodies as strong and alive.
This makes us resilient. We feel safe, curious about life and other people, and strong enough to face expected and unexpected challenges. We become unconditionally centered and connected. Even when external events are not what we prefer, we feel our basic goodness, are able to observe our own thoughts without identifying with them, and have trust that whatever transformations will be asked of us, we will come out the other side stronger.
Yoga benefits our mental and emotional bodies as much as our physical ones, bringing us into a state of clarity of mind, while stimulating the heart center to bloom and do its job well, too. When our hearts are working, we are able to feel deep feelings of love, inspiration, and connection. We are also able to move through the darker shades of emotion, experiences like grief and anger, with grace.
What are some ways to practice yoga?
The wonderful thing about yoga is that there are many branches and paths to it. Some ways to explore yoga this month include:
1. Shop around: take a class at each yoga studio near you
Many studios offer a starting deal for you to get the lay of the land. You could take this month as an opportunity to find a “home” yoga studio that’s just right for you.
2. Experiment with different kinds of yoga
Try early morning energizing classes and evening relaxation oriented classes. Try kundalini yoga and yin yoga. Give yourself the month of September to experiment and try everything that sounds intriguing and even intimidating to you. Let your body lead and pay attention to how you feel, what excites you and rises and opens your energy, or what doesn’t.
3. Try yoga online
On YouTube and other channels, many yoga teachers offer free classes, guided meditations, and information about yogic philosophy. Make a goal for yourself for this month, committing deeply to one teacher or trying out different channels. You could do one practice a day for the 30 days of September, or just one practice a week, whatever feels like the right level of challenge for you, that you can genuinely commit to.
4. Create your own practice
If you know a little bit about yoga already and have mastered some poses, design your own routine, making it exactly what you love and need most. It can be short – just 15 minutes long as a start. If you want to, share your pose sequence with others, record a class as a video, and gift it to friends.
5. Mix up the pace
You might like to try holding only a very few poses, but holding them for a longer time, to get the deepening experience. You could dedicate your September to be a restorative, yin yoga month, centered on helping you find greater levels of nurturance and safety. On the flip side, if you’re looking to take your life up a notch, you can try moving through poses more swiftly than you normally do, as a faster, more aerobic experience. Whatever you do, try it for a month and take note of the effects, as a way to find your own, personal path through this ancient healing system.
With any of these, please pay attention to your body, be mindful of its signals, and don’t injure yourself! It’s always better to start slow and build up at a sustainable pace than to rush or push.
What yoga programs do we offer at Villa Kali Ma?
Villa Kali Ma is a holistic treatment program for women struggling with substance abuse, mental health disorders, and trauma. Yoga is a core component of all of our programs.
We use a gentle, trauma-informed therapeutic approach to yoga that accepts all women just as they are coming to us, without judgment or any kind of pressure. At the heart of yoga lies the understanding that each person alive contains a seed of the divine, and is infinitely precious. We feel the same, and we treat each woman who comes through our doors as such.
The way we use yoga is as a key for carefully unlocking the bonds and chains that have shackled a woman to her misery. From our own experiences and our years working with women to recover, we know the special combination of softness and firmness that is required, to be strict in banishing addiction or self-destruction, and yet loving and encouraging to the human heart.
In each of our programs, we hold group yoga classes, meditation, and breath work, with options for individual yoga therapy in one-on-one sessions. In addition, yoga deeply informs our approach to coaching lifestyle changes in mindfulness, sleep, diet, and exercise. We rely on the insights of yoga to help women learn to re-pattern their hearts and minds to more connected, healthy thoughts and emotions.
We invite you to read more about how we use yoga as part of our program for achieving sustainable recovery.
So many of us are looking for peace of mind, to feel better in our bodies, and to have deeper emotional resonance within the structures of our lives – yoga is a way to find these things.
Villa Kali Ma Acknowledges National Yoga Month
Without yoga, Villa Kali Ma wouldn’t be here! As our founder Kay shares in her story, yoga can save a person’s life. If yours needs saving, too, come check us out, sister.
