Word: yoga
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...only are your mental health and mood dependent in large part on physical factors like exercise, but also unchecked stress, anxiety and depression can affect physical health, increasing blood pressure, heart disease and even risk of death. So it was perhaps inevitable that patients would start bringing their yoga mats into therapy...
...practice is quickly gaining popularity. There are now close to 50 schools of yoga offering yoga-therapy training in the U.S. And the International Association of Yoga Therapists has more than tripled its membership from 2003 to 2009, to about 2,500 members. "Now we have more licensed health-care providers, including psychologists, coming in who are interested in using yoga in their work," says Kelly McGonigal, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy...
...fact, yoga therapy may even offer some aid to psychiatry's most intractable patients. Visceglia is in the process of analyzing data from a recent study she conducted at Bronx State Psychiatric Center on the effects of yoga therapy in people with chronic schizophrenia, some of whom have been hospitalized for 15 to 20 years. Her study suggests a decrease in negative symptoms and an increase in quality of life. The endocrine system and parasympathetic nervous system are out of whack in schizophrenia patients; yoga affects these systems, Visceglia says, leading to an increased overall feeling of calm...
...That sense of peace is what Joan Stenzler, a licensed clinical social worker and a yoga teacher in Fresh Meadows, N.Y., tries to create in her sessions. In addition to using physical yoga poses, Stenzler teaches her clients about the five koshas, or layers of consciousness, in yoga: physical, energetic, mental-emotional, wisdom and bliss. "Each kosha represents one aspect of our existence or consciousness and can potentially be open and accessible to the individual, or blocked," says Stenzler, who helps patients identify and free themselves from their areas of blockage...
...When I first came [to therapy] I was having a lot of anxiety and physical symptoms that made me feel trapped," says Rachel W., a special-education teacher. "Through yoga, Joan helped me witness what I was experiencing and train myself to think past my body...