Insomnia—the inability to get to sleep or to sleep soundly—can be either temporary or chronic, lasting a few days to weeks. It affects a whopping 54 percent of adults in the UK at one time or another, and insomnia that lasts more than six weeks may affect from 10 to 15 percent of adults at some point during their lives. To get a decent night’s sleep, some people are turning to pills.

“Sleeping pills are not always a cure; they treat the symptom but not the underlying problem,” explains Sat Bir Khalsa, a Kundalini Yoga teacher who’s also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a neuroscientist at the Division of Sleep Medicine. Beneath the symptoms of insomnia are the anxiety, fatigue, and stress that our increasingly fast-paced world seems to be creating. These days, who hasn’t worked long hours without taking a break?

You may feel that you’ve adapted to the intense rhythm that modern life requires, but if you’re experiencing sleepless nights, your nervous system is probably rebelling. It may be stuck in a state known as arousal, where your sympathetic nervous system is triggered. In this state your mind will race or your palms might sweat. Your body will secrete more stress hormones, and your temperature and metabolic rates will rise, as will your heart rate. “There is very good evidence that people with chronic insomnia have elevated levels of arousal in general,” Khalsa says. “And some insomniacs have higher levels right before they go to sleep.” But Khalsa, who is studying how a form of Kundalini Yoga breathing called Shabad Kriya helps people with insomnia, offers good news: “Treating the arousal should treat the insomnia.” By creating a routine of soothing rituals, you can bring your nervous system back into balance and transform your sleep patterns for good.

Rituals for Relaxing

Whether it’s yoga to reduce muscle tension, breathing to slow the heart rate, or an herbal massage to calm a racing mind, a simple routine can be the most effective and safest road to a better night’s sleep. There is growing evidence that small behavioral changes can make a big difference in getting some good shuteye.

To find out which rituals will work best for you, it helps to understand insomnia from an Ayurvedic perspective. Yoga’s sister science and India’s oldest known system of medicine, Ayurveda is based on the idea that the life force that exists in all of us manifests as three different energies, or doshas, known as vata, pitta, and kapha. Though everyone has some of each dosha, most people tend to have an abundance of one or two.

Vata, ruled by air and ether, governs movement in the body. Pitta, ruled by fire, governs digestion and the metabolism. And kapha, ruled by earth and water, governs your physical structure and fluid balance. Ayurveda categorizes insomnia as a vata imbalance, because vata is controlled by air—and air controls the nervous system. Calming yoga and Ayurvedic rituals reduce vata in the body.

Nosh and Nibble

The diet mantra “Don’t eat before bed” isn’t always the best advice. Some folks benefit from nighttime noshing. “When you sleep, you are repairing your tissues,” says Aadil Palkhivala, a certified Ayurvedic practitioner and the founder-director of Yoga Centers in Bellevue, Washington. “The body needs nutrition when it’s going into a state of healing.”

Keep a Journal

When it’s time to go to sleep, do you start replaying the day’s events or think of what you need to do in the morning? A great evening ritual is putting your thoughts on paper: Write down the contents of your mind to get all of your worries out before your head hits the pillow.

Guide Your Relaxation

After getting into bed, try a body scan as you lie in Savasana (Corpse Pose): Progressively tense and then relax each part of your body. If you have trouble doing this on your own, get an audio CD of meditations, guided imagery, or Yoga Nidra (yogic sleep), to help. “This is good for people who have mental chatter,” says Cole. “It takes their mind in a different direction.”

Whichever ideas you take on, we hope you are able to find peace and rest easy.

Happy Sleeping

YWx

The BBC have just launched what is predicted to be one of the most successful children’s programmes. It’s called Waybuloo, and in it, the characters (piplings) practice yoga (or yogo as they call it).

A source said: “It focuses on emotions. Each Pipling represents love, wisdom, happiness or harmony. Put simply, Waybuloo is a journey to happiness.”

Toddler Yoga is an adaptation of traditional yoga and is great fun and can be enjoyed by the whole family. It encourages pre-verbal communication and enhances physical confidence. It teaches both adult and child how to relax together. Waybuloo is a great to get way to get toddlers started on there yoga journey.

A quick and easy curry

Serves 4

Preparation and cooking times

Prep 30 mins

Ready in 30 mins

Ingredients

• 2 orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, cut into chunks
• 200g spinach, washed & roughly chopped
• 4 naan bread , warmed through
• 400g tin coconut milk
• 1 onion, finely sliced
• 2-3 madras curry paste , depending on how hot you like your curry

What to do

1. Fry the onions until very soft, about 8 minutes. Stir in the paste and fry for 2 minutes.
2. Add the coconut milk and sweet potatoes and cook until just tender, about 10 minutes.
3. Stir through the spinach until wilted. Serve with naan breads.

This is a great curry to see you through the Winter months,

Namaste,

Carolx

I don’t go to the gym anymore but when I did there was definitely a feeling of competition coming from fellow members. What happens when we let ourselves become consumed by competition with others, thereby sinking more on the side of comparing ourselves with people around us? Competition and comparison can eventually become synonymous. Strangely, yoga which doesn’t give you a medal of any kind, or have anything resembling a team which can play against another, can end up being an internal competition for ourselves.

Even in a yoga class, which strives to strengthen the person on the inside as well as the outside, you may find yourself watching other students or analysing your instructor. As a student turned teacher, I have caught myself doing both time and time again. Knowing that I have fallen into this pattern while practicing yoga is the signal to making a change. When I catch myself seeking recognition or wishing I could be a little bit bendier, I guide myself back to my mat.

So, why is it important to be non-competitive during our yoga practice? For one thing, we accomplish less when we spend too much time wishing we were something else. The thinking and wishing take away from the process itself. We need to stay in the moment.

Whether we find ourselves wishing we had something more or something less, we can always accomplish more by taking our focus back to our breath and the sensations we are feeling in each moment. We should be inspired by other people’s practice, rather than dejected. Remember that it is natural to compare ourselves to others, but we should try to let those feelings roll off of our backs more often so we can enjoy the moments of our yoga journey more fully.

When it came to the fitness benefits yoga can or can’t provide, yoga teacher John Schumacher had heard it all. A student of B. K. S. Iyengar for 20 years, Schumacher was convinced yoga provides a complete fitness regime. But many people, even some of his own students, disagreed. Yoga might be good for flexibility or relaxation, they’d say, but to be truly fit, you had to combine it with an activity like running or weight lifting.

Schumacher just didn’t buy it.

He knew three decades of yoga practice—and only yoga practice—had kept him fit. He didn’t need to power walk. He didn’t need to lift weights. His fitness formula consisted of daily asanas (poses) and pranayama (breathwork). That’s all he needed.Four years ago at age 52, Schumacher decided to prove his point. He signed up for physiological testing at a lab in Gaithersburg, Maryland. As he expected, Schumacher tested near the top of his age group for a variety of fitness tests, including maximum heart and exercise recovery rates. His doctor told him that he was in excellent physical condition and estimated that Schumacher had less than a one percent chance of suffering a cardiac event. “I’ve always maintained that yoga provides more than adequate cardiovascular benefits,” says Schumacher. “Now I have the evidence that regular yoga practice at a certain level of intensity will provide you with what you need.”

Evidence of yoga’s ability to bolster fitness, however, goes well beyond Schumacher’s personal experience. Yoga Journal’s testing of three yogis also yielded impressive results. Even physiologists who don’t do yoga now agree that the practice provides benefits well beyond flexibility and relaxation. Recent research—though preliminary—shows that yoga may also improve strength, aerobic capacity, and lung function. If you practice yoga, you already knew that. But if, like Schumacher, you’ve been told by friends, family, doctors, or even other yoga students that you need to add some power walking for your heart or strength training for your muscles, here’s evidence that yoga is all you need for a fit mind and body.

What Is Fitness?
Before you can prove yoga keeps you fit, you must first define what “fitness” actually means. This isn’t a simple task. Ask eight different physiologists, and you’ll hear eight different definitions, says Dave Costill, Ph.D., one of the first U. S. researchers to rigorously test the health and fitness benefits of exercise.

Now professor emeritus of exercise science at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Costill defines fitness simply as the ability to live your life without feeling fatigued. “For normal daily living you don’t need the strength of a football player or the endurance of a marathon runner, but you’ve got to be able to perform your normal activities and still have a reserve,” says Costill. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the largest exercise science association in the world, defines fitness as both related to your ability to maintain physical activity and related to your health (for example, people who become more fit reduce their risk for heart disease). According to ACSM, four types of fitness help to bolster health. Cardiovascular fitness, flexibility,muscular fitness and body composition.

Many people know what anxiety feels like, the way it controls the mind, produces achiness or nausea, and creates a sense of disconnect between mind, body, spirit, and the outside world. Under these conditions, relaxation is often a challenge. But yogic breathing practices and asana sequences that slow the heart rate, drop blood pressure, and release muscles can help soothe an anxious mind. When people are anxious, the sympathetic nervous system is revved up. Yoga says calming the breath calms the nervous system, and calming the nervous system calms the mind. A tense mind can lead to tense muscles, and relaxing the muscles can help relax the mind.

It’s worked for Stacey, who has found a source of deep calm in her Yoga home practice. Though yoga hasn’t proved a cure-all, Stacey commented “When I practice, I can feel calmer,” she says, “like there’s a home inside me to go to, that all the safety and peace I need is inside, and that it will always be there for me.” Most of all “Yoga allows me a way out of my brain and into my body.”

Peace and Quiet

So how does it work? Yoga relieves anxiety by inducing the relaxation response. First, active asana stimulates the sympathetic nervous system; then, more-calming poses activate the parasympathetic nervous system. The effect is a rare moment of quiet that is healing to the anxious mind.

Loving relationships

Having people around you that are supportive and are there to simple give you a hug can boost your immune system. So stay warm this Autumn and make sure that you manage to give everyone you love a little hug. Most importantly, if you don’t get to that yoga class then develop your home practice and enjoy that feeling of inner peace.

Yoga for dogs is becoming more and more popular. It seems to be a growing trend or is it just barking mad, excuse the pun. I read alot of articles about the benefits of a yoga practice with your furry four-legged companions. I’ve read the stories, but I’ve never quite come to terms with how exactly a dog yoga class (AKA Doga) might work.

Take a sneaky peek at this video, the little sausage dog looks quite yogic.

What do you think? Would you take your furry friend along to a yoga class?

What are Chakras?

Inside every human being there is a network of nerves and sensory organs that interprets the outside physical world. At the same time, within us resides a subtle system of channels (nadis) and centers of energy (chakras) which look after our physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual being.

There are seven chakras, or energy centers, in the body that become blocked by longheld tension and low self-esteem. But practicing poses that correspond to each chakra can release these blocks. Together in a central column from the crown of your head to the base of your spine, when we open the centres and align them, we allow our vital energy (also known as Ki or Prana) to flow freely.

These centres can be instrumental in our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energies – relating and working with them. The purpose of working with these energies is to integrate all aspects of your life to create a more holistic being. 

The chakra system provides a theoretical base for fine-tuning our yoga practice to suit our unique personality and circumstances. Traditionally, Indians saw the body as containing seven main chakras, arranged vertically from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Chakra is the Sanskrit word for wheel, and these "wheels" were thought of as spinning vortexes of energy.

Each chakra is associated with particular functions within the body and with specific life issues and the way we handle them, both inside ourselves and in our interactions with the world. As centers of force, chakras can be thought of as sites where we receive, absorb, and distribute life energies. Through external situations and internal habits, such as long-held physical tension and limiting self-concepts, a chakra can become either deficient or excessive—and therefore imbalanced.

These imbalances may develop temporarily with situational challenges, or they may be chronic. A chronic imbalance can come from childhood experiences, past pain or stress, and internalized cultural values. For instance, a child whose family moves every year to a different state may not learn what it’s like to feel rooted in a location, and she can grow up with a deficient first chakra.

A deficient chakra neither receives appropriate energy nor easily manifests that chakra’s energy in the world. There’s a sense of being physically and emotionally closed down in the area of a deficient chakra. Think of the slumped shoulders of someone who is depressed and lonely, their heart chakra receding into their chest. The deficient chakra needs to open.

When a chakra is excessive, it is too overloaded to operate in a healthy way and becomes a dominating force in a person’s life. Someone with an excessive fifth (throat) chakra, for example, might talk too much and be unable to listen well. If the chakra were deficient, she might experience restraint and difficulty when communicating.

Yoga for kids is on the increase. Most you would probably have heard about the Dragon’s Den experience with the Yoga Bugs team, for those of you who haven’t the team turned down £200,000 of invest. Fenella Lindsell is founder and director of Yoga Bugs, which brings yoga into schools, working with children up to the age of 13 – currently about 40,000 of them a week. Lindsell believes that the growing interest is down to teachers and parents looking for ways to help their children handle the constant stimuli of our technology-driven culture. Today’s children are dealing with so many issues including obesity. Yoga is truly holistic. Children get physical, emotional and mental benefits from it. Sporty ones can improve their performance. Not-so-sporty children can find a flexibility they didn’t know they had.

The yoga-for-kids trend is “massive” – perhaps because London is packed with yoga mum’s whose pressurised, overscheduled kids badly need calming down. The characters on BBC children’s programme Waybuloo now practise ”yogo” and yoga teachers are setting up classes in schools across the country.

Yoga teachers are also working with children with special needs. Jo Manuel runs London-based Special Yoga. She sees children with anything from emotional problems to autism, ADHD and cerebral palsy. She prefers not to use imaginative games and focuses solely on the body. Children, she says, find yoga fascinating without all the animal noises.
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As the cold, dark nights draw in, November is the month for hunkering down in the kitchen and cooking up comforting vegetable stews and curries. November brings with it a frost that works wonders on parsnips. It is also the season to enjoy tart cranberries and buttery chestnuts. Lots of seasonal tasty delights to get stuck into.

Flapjacks are a lovely snack to make for your mid week. Just to make sure you always have something healthy to nibble on.

Preparation time less than 30 mins

Cooking time 10 to 30 mins

Ingredients

100g/3½oz oats
3 tbsp honey
50g/1¾oz self-raising flour
1 free-range egg
4 tbsp dried cranberries
5 tbsp butter

What to do

1. In a bowl mix together the oats, honey, self-raising flour, egg and dried cranberries. This should form a thick batter.
2. Melt the butter in a thick based non-stick frying pan. Spoon the mixture into small rounds.
3. Fry for 2-3 minutes on each side until golden.
4. Serve the flapjacks warm. Mmmmmm.

Enjoy your healthy and above all tasty snack,

Namaste

Lx