Healthy Aging & Yoga

    
           Sometimes reliable, considered, first hand information is hard to come by, especially with the proliferation of hype about yoga out there. When I began writing this blog my intent and promise was to share with you some of the life changing teachers I've encountered  as I write my own new story about (that phrase again!) 'aging gracefully.'
            One of these teachers is Tim McCall, M.D. ( www.drmccall.com) whose book Yoga As Medicine has offered inspiration for a number of yoga workshops I've taught. McCall writes a periodic, free, electronic newsletter and I'm re-posting his most recent one for you. I find his (writer's) voice trustworthy and accounts of his healing experience with yoga and a willingness to share information commendable as he pushes boundaries in his quest for health and well being.

 

Rebuilding Immunity with Yoga and Ayurveda

Hi Everybody,

Greetings from Kerala, India, the birthplace of Ayurveda. I'm back to continue my studies of this ancient holistic medical system -- an amazing complement to yoga therapy -- and to get treatments myself. One consequence of all the teaching and traveling I do is that it's tiring and tends to run down my immunity. Correcting the latter is the main thing this year's treatments are designed to do.

 

In Ayurveda, the loss of resistance to illness -- from colds to more serious maladies -- correlates with the concept of Ojas depletion. Ojas [pronounced OH jus] is the healing side of Kapha, the dosha associated with the "water element." Besides healthy immune function, Ojas is associated with stability and groundedness, love and contentment. All the work I've been doing drives up my Pitta, associated with fire in Ayurvedic thinking. All the traveling and talking that goes with teaching increases Vata, associated with wind, or the air element. An excess of heat and wind, as in nature, tends to dry things up, thus depleting the nectar-like Ojas.

So now I'm resting, doing restorative yoga, gentle pranayama and meditation, getting daily oil massages, and eating beautiful vegetarian food, lovingly prepared by the family whose home I'm staying in. It's in the middle of lush countryside, surrounded by coconut palms, banana, papaya and jack fruit trees, and full of the sounds of birds and goats and other animals. Love, rest, time in nature, oil massages, and sattvic food all help restore Ojas, and my Ayurvedic doctor, Chandukutty Vaidyar has other tricks up his sleeve, which I'll be experiencing in the weeks to come. In addition, there's no internet access here without a 45 minute bus ride into town, which is a good thing as frittering away time in cyberspace is another way many of us lose precious Ojas.

 

​ Most of the herbs and oils that Chandukutty employs are homemade, made in the old-fashioned ways. Here, a number of freshly picked herbs are being dried in the sun by Krishna Dasan, my Ayurvedic therapist, who was first taught these techniques by Chandukutty as a teenager, and is extrarodinary at what he does. I'm already really feeling the results, and even better, they say the benefits continue to accrue for two to three months after you complete the treatments.   

***

Before I left for India, I was happy to take part in the Medical Yoga Symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, along with Dr. Dean Ornish, Harvard Medical School's Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa, and a handful of the country's leading yoga researchers and therapists. The event sold out early and was enthusiastically received and, most importantly, is a testament to the growing acceptance of yoga and yoga therapy in governmental and health care settings. If you'd like to read more about the event, I recently wrote about it for the Yoga For Healthy Aging blog.

Dean Ornish's fabulous keynote detailed his work investigating the benefits of a yoga-based program for people with heart disease, which Medicare and some private insurers will now pay for. More recently, he's been studying the same kind of yogic lifestyle intervention on men with prostate cancer, again with very encouraging results. I wrote more on his work in the blog post cited above, as well as in an article for Yoga Journal called Straight to the Heart.
 

I recently did a long interview with Integral Yoga Magazine on yoga therapy that you may be interested in. In addition, you can check out a blog post I did on Keeping Yoga Safe for People with High Blood Pressure. It's also still possible to purchase the recording of the full teleseminar I recently led on Yoga U on working with students with high blood pressure.

When I'm finished with my Ayurvedic treatments in early March, I'll be heading to England where I'll teach Yoga as Medicine (YAM) Level 1 at TriYoga in London. In June, for the first time, I'll be teaching in my hometown of Milwaukee (YAM Level 1), and in July I'll be heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach both YAM Level 1 and the Level 2 YAM course on Yoga Therapy for the Nervous System. Look for more YAM Seminars in Boston, Austin, Rochester and Copenhagen in the months ahead, and in Summit, New Jersey in early 2015.

I hope to see you all sometime soon …Namaste,  Timothy