Yoga Can Ease Lower Back Pain

Practicing yoga can help ease chronic lower back pain, a new study shows. Read more

Patanjali Yoga Peeth phase II inaugurated

Haridwar: Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev on Friday added another milestone in efforts to spread the Yoga and Ayurveda across the world with the inauguration of Patanjali Yog Peeth II phase here.Mother of Baba Ramdev, Gulab Devi, and mother of Acharya Balkrishna Sumitra Devi inaugurated the Yogpeeth and blessed the duo for their success. Read more

Morning Routine – exercise

Vyayam or exercise can be defined as a systematic body activity aimed at increasing strength and stability. Muscular contraction and relaxation constitute the main part of exercises. Exercise keeps the body fit and strong. The mind also concentrates on the parts of the body involved in the exercise.

Go Nuts! - Hollywood's Healthiest Snacks

Judy Reyes , who plays nurse Carla on Scrubs , is health-conscious off-camera, too. Reyes keeps fit with yoga and hiking. Fave Snack? Nuts,... Read more

Yoga

As a sister science of Ayurveda, Yoga is an excellent exercise and spiritual practice to incorporate in your daily routine for balancing your individual constitution. Continue Reading >>

Meditation, Yoga Might Switch Off Stress Genes

(HealthDay News) -- Researchers say they've taken a significant stride forward in understanding how relaxation techniques such as meditation, prayer and yoga improve health: by changing patterns of gene activity that affect how the body responds to stress.

The changes were seen both in long-term practitioners and in newer recruits, the scientists said.

"It's not all in your head," said Dr. Herbert Benson, president emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "What we have found is that when you evoke the relaxation response, the very genes that are turned on or off by stress are turned the other way. The mind can actively turn on and turn off genes. The mind is not separated from the body."

One outside expert agreed.

"It's sort of like reverse thinking: If you can wreak havoc on yourself with lifestyle choices, for example, [in a way that] causes expression of latent genetic manifestations in the negative, then the reverse should hold true," said Dr. Gerry Leisman, director of the F.R. Carrick Institute for Clinical Ergonomics, Rehabilitation and Applied Neuroscience at Leeds Metropolitan University in the U.K.

"Biology is not entirely our destiny, so while there are things that give us risk factors, there's a lot of 'wiggle' in this," added Leisman, who is also a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel. "This paper is pointing that there is a technique that allows us to play with the wiggle."

Benson, a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine, is co-senior author of the new study, which is published in the journal PLoS One.

Benson first described the relaxation response 35 years ago. Mind-body approaches that elicit the response include meditation, repetitive prayer, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, biofeedback, guided imagery and Qi Gong.

"Previously, we had noted that there were scores of diseases that could be treated by eliciting the relaxation response -- everything from different kinds of pain, infertility, rheumatoid arthritis, insomnia," Benson said.

He believes that this study is the first comprehensive look at how mind states can affect gene expression. It also focuses on gene activity in healthy individuals.

Benson and his colleagues compared gene-expression patterns in 19 long-term practitioners, 19 healthy controls and 20 newcomers who underwent eight weeks of relaxation-response training.
More than 2,200 genes were activated differently in the long-time practitioners relative to the controls and 1,561 genes in the short-timers compared to the long-time practitioners. Some 433 of the differently activated genes were shared among short-term and long-term practitioners.

Further genetic analysis revealed changes in cellular metabolism, response to oxidative stress and other processes in both short- and long-term practitioners. All of these processes may contribute to cellular damage stemming from chronic stress.

Another expert had a mixed response to the findings.

Robert Schwartz, director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center's Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston, noted that the study was relatively small. He also wished that there had been more data on the levels of stress hormones within the control group, for comparison purposes.

However, Schwartz called the study "unique and very exciting. It demonstrates that all these techniques of relaxation response have a biofeedback mechanism that alters gene expression."

He pointed out that the researchers looked at blood cells, which consist largely of immune cells. "You're getting the response most probably in the immune cell population," Schwartz said.

"We all are under stress and have many manifestations of that stress," Benson added. "To adequately protect ourselves against stress, we should use an approach and a technique that we believe evokes the relaxation response 20 minutes, once a day."

More information
There's more on meditation at the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Becoming One With the Toilet

By Jennifer Garam

Yoga means “union” in Sanskrit, and students are encouraged to take the peace they achieve in yoga class home with them. If you’re all Zen and become full of compassion when the world has been reduced to your little mat, hold on to that. Try not to, say, steal a subway seat from an elderly woman on the way home afterward when the world is the world again.

Problem is, it’s easier to experience equanimity on your back in the final resting pose, known as corpse pose, than down on your hands and knees in your bathroom, trying to look behind your toilet to see why water is leaking onto the floor.
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Influance of yoga to body joints and muscles

If you practice yoga regularly, to the degree and level that is right for you, it will influence your entire body. It will benefit your joints and muscles, your nerves and internal organs, and your mental and spiritual well-being.
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When it comes to obesity prevention and management, Ayurveda has much to offer, with daily and seasonal regimens that include healthy foods, yoga exercise, panchakarma and medicines. For obese patients, according to the symptoms of ama, digestive (dhatwagni deepan) and carminative (pachan) medications are given. Ayurvedic formulations of a guggulu kalpa decoction are also advised with […]