Latest / AWAKEN with Dylan Ayaloo: Inner Work, Healing, Yoga & Meditation / [EP8] Healing Anxiety through Yoga & Conscious Movement

Transcript

[EP8] Healing Anxiety through Yoga & Conscious Movement · AWAKEN with Dylan Ayaloo: Inner Work, Healing, Yoga & Meditation

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Welcome. The topic that I want to cover today was yoga, and even that kind of brought some things up in people.
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So I say yoga, but a conscious movement, moving with awareness, incorporating movement into your practices to bring about transformation or healing.
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the student's got a question yoga breathing poses for stress anxiety reduction and then we've got a
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couple of questions from so one from susan she's saying how do you develop greater awareness in
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legs and the other question was lizzie she's saying i have a block with the word yoga because
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to me this practice looks very dynamic and brought me into this work whereas the way i move now is
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completely different, slower, maybe gentler. So I don't call this yoga with quotes and give myself
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a hard time because I never do yoga in quotes, i.e. those energetic flows anymore. Unless I'm
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in the class with you, I get on the mat and move, wise my head telling me that a sequence of pigeons
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and forward folds, etc. is not a yoga practice unless it contains unsalotations. So Stu's asking
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about yoga breathing and postures for stress and anxiety reduction. I can only speak for the
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It is more energetic.
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For some people, it's faster paced.
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When I started teaching years ago, it was actually faster paced and more intense.
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So I have actually slowed down and calmed it down.
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But where we are now is that compared to a lot of other yoga practices, styles of yoga,
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this is still quite an energetic practice.
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There's a lot of engaging of muscles, a lot of fire in the sequence energetically.
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Sometimes it might feel like the posture is set from fire.
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in some of our deeper programs like inspire we go into the sequence and the energetics of the
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sequence i'm training teachers that we go into more depth in those programs but as far as anxiety
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reduction the combination of deep breathing and moving while you're breathing deeply which is what
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we do in our yoga practice when you start to train yourself to breathe deeply in postures
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and use more of your lung capacity,
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the moment we start to take a deep breath in and a full breath out,
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the nervous system switches from fight or flight where anxiety lives
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to rest and digest.
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So straight away we switch into a more restorative place
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within our nervous system, calming, like recovery,
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part of the nervous system.
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The change that we are creating physically
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will have an impact emotionally, energetically.
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We cannot separate that.
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And actually, that's a good thing.
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By switching into deep breath like you did
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and sitting down, even if you're not in a yoga posture per se,
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can have the effect of calming the nervous system down,
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the brain, the nervous system, the body down.
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So the moment we switch into that,
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our emotions will have to match.
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Straight away, you start to feel calmer,
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more grounded, more centered, more at peace, more in your power.
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That's not even doing any yoga postures.
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The yoga postures itself, I haven't come across something more holistic.
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I think it's put together very intelligently.
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Obviously, it's quite old, hundreds and hundreds of years old,
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as far as we can trace it back.
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And the physical postures, we think of yoga as the actual physical movement,
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the postures and the sequence of postures that we go through.
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Yoga is a whole body system when we're talking about the physical practice.
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There's the eight limbs of yoga.
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The yoga posture is one part of the eight.
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As far as we can trace it back, yoga postures were created to get the stress and tension out of the body
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so that we could sit in meditation for long periods.
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In a simplified way, our emotional patterns are stored energetically as tension patterns
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in our connective tissue, muscle tissue.
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So the body holds the emotions we are running through and the thoughts we think have an
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impact on the emotions we feel.
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The kind of breath, the depth of breath has an emotional impact as well.
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When you combine deep breathing and conscious movement, you are systematically moving the
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body.
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You're ironing out the tension in the connective tissue and musculature of the body.
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systematically. What we're used to as natural in our movement, especially in the Western world,
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doesn't feel natural. So when you come into a yoga posture, oh my goodness, what is this weird,
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crazy posture that I'm doing? What should be where? My arms, my legs, and everything feels weird and
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crazy, and I'm falling, and I'm sweating, and I feel like I'm not doing this well enough.
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That's all part of the practice. But just on a purely physical level, simply by switching a
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breath to deeper breath and moving the body through the sequence of postures. It is systematically
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ironing out, clearing out the tension patterns stored in the body. So not only are you using the
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breath to de-stress and relax, which is the opposite of anxiety, we're also clearing out
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tension patterns. Our life story is told by our body, by way of how we hold tension in our body,
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by way of our posture. So you're quite literally rewiring your nervous system and rewriting the
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story of your life or unwwriting it so that you have a blank canvas to rewrite it. Every time we
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Konman to the yoga mat and work ourselves through a system of postures. Even if the system is just
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one posture or five postures over an hour or half an hour or 20 minutes, it will still have this
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healing effect. Healing as in it is resolving something, clearing something, reorganizing,
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if nothing else, at least the tension patterns in the body, right? Therefore, how we hold ourself
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posturally after yoga practice is very different to maybe how we would have gone in to the practice,
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maybe holding certain kind of tension patterns in our body, in our connective tissue and our
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musculature. Anxiety reduction can be facilitated by switching into deep breathing. If you couple
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deep breathing with conscious movements, which is what our practice is, our yoga practice,
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then you are exponentially increasing the chance of, as you call it, stress reduction,
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or it's not the cure, but it's managing it. It does have a healing effect when it comes to
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stress. It has an impact on de-stressing because pretty much all our diseases can be traced back
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to stress in some form or another. We all know that on a simple logical level, yet we don't deal
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with it on the root cause level. The yoga practice is another way of dealing with the effects we
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carry in our body, sometimes in the form of unease, dis-ease, tension, pain, injuries,
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as a result of our movements and how we've been moving in our body for however long we've existed.
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And we accumulate certain habits and the habits accumulate certain results,
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which then can result in injury, pain, unease, dis-ease.
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In general, how the yoga practice affects.
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I was doing a little bit more on our practice and our style of practice.
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why I haven't calmed our practice down from something that was much more energetic is that
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I find most of us, whether you're younger or growing in your years, it's still highly effective
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to have some amount of energy that we bring in, certain amount of intensity.
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and when we look at the healing effect of the practice itself even though we're moving at a
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certain pace it is slower i have slowed it down over the years holding and breathing is another
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way of stoking the fire within in a way the pressure cooking not just the physical tension
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in the body but also the ego so to speak by the time you're done with your yoga practice it should
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be medium rare or well done or just cooked so you can digest right and can just move through it
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it doesn't have a grip on you as you move through a day it's difficult to be joyful when there's
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pain in the body tension we're carrying as a result of years of moving in a certain way because
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we think that's how it is it's actually undoing all of that and freeing us up from a physical level
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and the physical body can not be separated from our emotions, from our minds.
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They're all very intimately connected.
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Therefore, when you affect change on a physical level, like with conscious movement,
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it has an effect that carries on to these other parts of our life,
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emotionally, mentally, because it can't be compartmentalized.
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How do you develop greater awareness in legs?
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you're asking that question from the head saying okay how do i develop awareness right connection
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to the legs if you've practiced for any amount of time as you start to go through your journey of
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conscious movement right your practice you might delve into these layers okay i don't feel very
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grounded so i want to feel more grounded in my life right i'm up in my head a lot in my thoughts
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run a lot, so I'm very floaty in my mind, or I'm very heady, let's say, right? So how do you then
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get more grounded in your body? One way is to get more into your legs, right? So Susan's asking that
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because she's been to inspire. She's been working on this, so this is like the next part of it.
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In most postures, they're on the ground, right? The most stable, grounded part of your posture
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is whatever is in contact with the ground, because the ground, the earth energy, that's what
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want to bring. You don't have to imagine it or manufacture it. You simply need to connect with
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the ground because we're on the ground generally, right? There's some sense of ground. We're not
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floating in space, which would be harder to ground then. So whatever is on the ground, let's say your
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feet are on the ground. Start with that. Most of us, our feet are asleep. Our toes don't wake up.
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Like you try to lift your toes and spray out the toes. Most people, their hands will do funny things.
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to face will do funny things when they start to move their toes because that neural pathway that
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connection hasn't really happened so you can start just as i'm talking to you right now by lifting
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your toes spreading out the toes right and as you do that you're spreading out the bones in your
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feet i'm using my hands to show eight eleven feet spreading out the bones as well as the toe imagine
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my fingers as toes and you're feeling the padding underneath your feet to the ground
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I'd say connection to the earth. And to do that, set muscles around your calves, right? Your shins,
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the musculature around that will need to start to work. Straight away, you're starting to get a
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sense of your feet and your connection to the earth. From your feet up, into your ankles,
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into your shins and calves, into your knees, into your upper legs, right? And there's bigger
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muscle groups. You're really starting to use all of them. And it's not just about engaging all
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muscles. The thing about the yoga practice in any posture, as you start to deepen into your
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practice, at least for what I teach, certain muscle groups will engage and certain muscle
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groups will relax. I see you're doing worry one pose, the top of your thighs, your quads will
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engage, but your hamstrings will relax, right? In anatomy, you call it agonist antagonist.
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How do you develop greater awareness of your legs?
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Start to bring awareness from ground up, from your feet, right?
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The padding on your feet touching the ground and you're bringing that energy up.
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Imagine you're sucking up the energy of the air through your feet up into your legs,
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up into your body, through your spine, into your whole body.
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So your body then tends to, you get more grounded in your body and you have a sense of the earth.
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How do you do that?
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Bring your awareness, right?
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So body scan, you're starting to scan and also engage muscle groups from ground up as you move through your postures.
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So this is what I mean by conscious movement.
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You're consciously engaging different muscle groups by choice.
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Most of the time, we are not conscious, right?
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Most of them are not even in their body.
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We don't have a sense of connection to our body.
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And one of the ways to bring back connection to the body is bring awareness to different body parts like your feet, your legs,
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and engaging where you can certain muscle groups
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and relaxing certain muscle groups.
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If you're doing it in a yoga posture, it takes awareness.
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You're developing awareness by doing this,
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by consciously engaging certain muscle groups,
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by relaxing others very consciously.
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It's all a choice and you are in the driver's seat,
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therefore conscious movement.
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I'll go to Lizzie's question.
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Lizzie, you said, I'm blocked with the word yoga
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because to me this practice looks dynamic,
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one that brought me into this work,
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A moubhla is completely different, slower, maybe gentler.
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I don't call this yoga and give myself a hard time because I never do yoga.
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It doesn't really close anymore unless I'm in a class.
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My head is telling me that sequence of pigeons and forward folds is not yoga unless it contains
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symptoms.
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If yoga is something that doesn't fit in any box, just because you're not doing what I
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would say is our practice doesn't mean you're not doing yoga.
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But if you pay attention, I'm always going on about taking the practice and modifying it for where your body's at right now, as in giving your body what it needs.
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If you need to slow down because you're working with something in your body, because you're healing something, then do that.
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And it's not always slow down.
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For some people, I'm not saying I'm talking to everyone here.
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For some people, it is slow down.
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And for some people, it is actually bring more energy into it.
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So especially as you start to get on in your years, so to speak, our muscles tend to relax.
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If you don't work your muscles, they start to atrophy, which we observe as aging.
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We call it aging.
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Age is, to me, a lack of movement.
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And movement is not just stretching.
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In yoga, we do stretching and strengthening together.
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It's a balance of stretching and strengthening work.
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So for some people need to do more strength work.
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And for other people, they need to do more stretching, right?
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So mobility work.
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And for others, they need both.
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However your body is built, it's a result of how we've moved or not moved to this point.
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You will need to do something, one of those things that works.
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So more strength work, more flexibility work, more of both.
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so it's not always the answer for every sometimes i hear people say just relax or just come out of
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the post or just don't do the practice and actually i don't believe in that because if you
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come onto the mat and let yourself modify the practice you are affecting the healing from the
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physical level as well as whatever else it is that you're doing but i've had all sorts of things over
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the years and I would bring myself to the mat and my mind will resist that it will just say no way
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stay in bed I've got a blocked nose I can't breathe and I know when I've just done a few
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sun salutations I can suddenly breathe because I've grown up but I'm done I'm done I know it's
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like more through my sciences and suddenly I can start to breathe or like my digestive system my
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lungs my back or whatever is going on and morving in a way that responds to what feedback the body
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is giving in each moment.
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That's what I mean by conscious movement.
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When you can respond to the body in the moment,
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there needs to be a listening.
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There needs to be an awareness
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to have your finger on the pulse,
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to know what your body is saying to you.
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That is also part of the training.
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In the yoga practice, the body is always speaking
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and it's speaking in sensations.
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It's just whether you can see it, hear it, feel it.
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It's like a radio.
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You tune into a certain station
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The station that the body is broadcasting on is called sensation.
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It's always speaking through sensation.
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It's always giving feedback.
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So when you're in a posture, most people are not connected to their body.
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Therefore, the listening is shut off.
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What we're doing is conscious movement, waking up your senses, paying attention,
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so you can start to tune in to what feedback the body is giving you by way of sensation.
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The moment you've got that feedback mechanism,
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suddenly you can take the stuff that you learn about a posture or the practice
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and customize it, adjust it to what feedback you're getting from your body.
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Therefore, now your practice is completely customized.
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It's fixed.
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The body sounds like you step into a river.
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Every day, the river is different.
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Even if you think you're standing in the same part of the river,
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it's a different part that's always flowing.
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When you get onto the yoga mat, the body today is going through something
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The emotion we're experiencing is reflected in the body.
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Thoughts that we're having is reflected in the body, for example.
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But we're always responding to our environment.
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We're always responding to our situations.
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So no two moments is the same.
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One of the most important things in my experience is listening to the body.
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That's where the whole feel in order to heal comes from.
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When you practice and develop this tuning into the body, you can customize based on
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moment, you can customize what you're doing in the postures. Now, let's say you're doing downward
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facing dog. Downward facing dog is going to look different in each person. You know, down dog might
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not look hugely different, but those little tweaks that you're making based on the feedback you're
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getting. Let me give you an example. Let's say there's more tightness in my shoulders and upside
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down arms, right, in downward facing dog. I might feel that in my shoulders. So from there, I'm like,
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tightness. So maybe if I'm pulling my shoulders back and down, if I'm wrapping the shoulder blades
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around, or like rotating the arm bones in, rotating them out a bit more, facing the fingers out,
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facing the fingers in, having blocks under my hands. Like there's many different options in
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each moment, in each part of the posture for me to bring something different, to customize
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the posture based on the feedback that I'm getting in my body. So it's an endless amount of
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adjustments, modifications that you can go through.
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That's why in our trainings, our nine-day intensives, I could teach postures for
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nine days and it won't be enough.
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And we don't, by the way, like postures, one part of it.
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So just to give you an idea of the depth, I'm just barely skimming the surface here.
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I wanted to give you some kind of broad overview that can answer the question.
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So how do I get into this?
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Let me go back to Lizzie's question.
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Why is my head telling me the sequence of pigeons falsehoods, not neuropractice?
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guess is you're looking for some kind of stamp of approval and you don't need that right because
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if you listen to what i'm saying i'm always talking about taking the practice and making
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work for you especially if you're going through some kind of healing journey which i think pretty
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much everyone in our communities doing through some kind of transformation because this is
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right this work is about transformations transforming your life one of the ways we
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affect transformation in our life is through the physicality of the body that's one of the
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dimensions i've kept that while we do all that helps thank you for the question lots of time