Yoga for stress reduction

By Pam Walatka, Special to the Town Crier

Town Crier employee and yoga novice Mary Watanabe gets an introductory lesson by writer Pam Walatka.

It may seem that yoga has bloomed overnight, but actually its popularity in America has been growing gradually for decades. Like a late-blooming beauty, yoga is surprising people with grace and dazzle.

Yoga is a daily discipline of stretching with breath awareness. The difference between yoga and other stretching is that yoga emphasizes awareness of breathing, which is the key to synchronizing mind, body and spirit. In that nexus lies the key to health. Research has shown that yoga reduces stress.

Yoga appeals to many different kinds of people. Suwanna Kerdkaew, a firefighter at the Almond Avenue station in Los Altos, said that many local firefighters do yoga. Firefighters Monique Vandenberg and Jim Czerniec do yoga when they are off duty.

When firefighter Debbie Pardue was working in the El Monte fire station, she taught a yoga class now conducted by firefighter Tom Alarcon’s crew. The El Monte station crew went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to demonstrate yoga.

Kerdkaew attended one of the El Monte fire station yoga sessions. “The next day I was terribly, terribly sore,” Kerdkaew said. “It stretches muscles you didn’t know you had. But I’m totally sold. In college, I had developed a weird muscle spasm at the base of my neck. I took a yoga class and midway through, and to this day, I never had that spasm again.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge of yoga is staying within your range of comfort. Participants sometimes push themselves to keep up with someone else, when the idea is to find your own level by listening to your body.

When Americans talk about yoga, they usually mean Hatha yoga, which is just one of the many branches of yoga. Hatha yoga focuses on stretching and breathing, using poses that have been refined over centuries and proven to be the most useful.

Within Hatha yoga are many styles, such as Iyengar, which uses props, or Bikram, which takes place in a heated room. You have to find what suits you and realize that many “truths” are in fact matters of opinion.

Yoga is part of Hinduism, the primary religion in India, but Hatha yoga as taught in America is usually secular. Yoga classes are held in Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, as well as schools, gyms, spas and municipal recreation departments.

Scientific research has confirmed many of the traditional claims about yoga. A study published in “Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback” (Springer Science and Business Media B.V.) backed contentions in ancient yoga texts that “a combination of both calming and stimulating measures may be especially helpful in reaching a state of mental equilibrium.” The study found that a combination of yoga postures interspersed with relaxation diminished stress more than relaxation alone.

I started teaching yoga in 1967 at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. There was no one to teach me - I had to learn from a book. Esalen may have been the first place in America where normal people leading normal lives could come for a weekend and learn yoga without giving up everything to join an ashram.

In the two years before I went to Esalen, I was spending 20 percent of my time in the hospital. I had picked up some bugs in Nepal while I was in the Peace Corps, and just couldn’t get back to normal. I was young, but I had much less energy than I have now at 63.

In my first week at Esalen someone pointed out to me that I was barely breathing. Oh, duh! I had been vaguely aware of feeling suffocated.

I started doing/teaching yoga, have been doing it ever since and still think it’s very valuable. I have taught yoga at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, NASA, and in New York, Chicago and London.

The main thing to remember when you are doing yoga is to be careful - don’t hurt yourself. It’s not a competitive sport. Go at your own pace, and back off if it hurts. It is not supposed to hurt.

You can learn yoga from a book, such as “Yoga: Anytime, Anywhere” (Llewellyn Publications, 2004) by local residents Carol Blackman and Elise Browning Miller, or from a class. Miller has a good yoga studio, California Yoga Center, behind Sears in the San Antonio Shopping Center, Mountain View.

“When you do a yoga pose, you may touch your toes, but you are focusing your attention on body alignment, muscle tension and breath awareness,” Miller said in her recent book. “It becomes much more than just a physical exercise. This is how you learn to reduce stress.”

The photographs show a novice demonstrating some of the basic yoga poses. They can be practiced on any clean floor, but it’s nice to put down a big towel or, better yet, a “sticky mat” which gives you good traction. Sticky mats are available in the sports section of most large discount stores, such as Target. When practicing yoga, wear loose or stretchy clothing that gives you room to bend and doesn’t restrict your waist. You want the movement of your breath to extend into your belly.

If you try the poses shown here, be careful and don’t take yourself too seriously. Always pay attention to your breathing.

Pam Walatka will teach a mind-body fitness class for the Los Altos Hills Parks and Recreation Department, starting Oct. 5. The class will combine yoga with mindfulness meditation and strengthening exercises from Pilates.

Go to www.losaltoshills.ca.gov/recreation to register. The class is suitable for any level of fitness. :