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Yoga practice reduces anxiety and impulsivity in prison populations

ALAMY

Incarcerated thieves, drug dealers and murderers may not be the typical group you imagine doing yoga, but recent studies show that the ancient discipline might be able to play an important role in reducing prison violence. Several studies have shown that yoga helps to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression in prisoners, and now a study at the University of Oxford has found that it also increases focus and, crucially, decreases impulsivitya known factor in much prison violence.

The Oxford researchers studied 100 prisoners from seven U.K. prisons. About half the prisoners practiced yoga once a week for 10 weeks; the other half were told they were on a waitlist for the yoga class and encouraged to go about their regular exercise routines. Prisoners in the yoga programtwo women and 43 menbecame less aggressive toward their fellow inmates and felt less stress, as measured by standard questionnaires. The yogis also performed better than the waitlisted group on a computerized test of executive control, suggesting they had become more attentive to their surroundings and more thoughtful about their actions.

Attention and impulsivity are very important for this population, which has problems dealing with aggressive impulses, says Oxford psychologist Miguel Farias, one of the study's authors. With less anxiety and aggression, he notes, prisoners should be better able to reintegrate into society when they are released.

This article was originally published with the title "Prisoner's Escape."

2014 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

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Yoga Lowers Inmates' Aggression and Anxiety

As the afternoon sun dappled across the checkerboard floor, hands came together forming a steeple and rose above their heads in unison.

In a small group, the handful of mobility-challenged attendees of the first-ever Wheel In Yoga class in the Community Wholeness Centre (in the former Community Care Access Centre or CCAC building) on Maple Avenue, were quietly following yoga instructor Joanne Lougheed's movements.

We do a modification of the same poses you would do on a mat, Lougheed said as the attendees readied themselves for their first yoga lesson.

It's both mind and body awareness. It's meditation with movement.

It's one of many classes founder Yolanda Gallo has scheduled at the Wholeness Centre. Holistic programming classes include Zumba, meditation and Qi Gong Thai Chi classes, as well as similar children's courses in a smaller format.

Using the former offices and clinical rooms of the CCAC, Gallo is renting out space to practitioners of massage, acupuncture, reflexology, Reiki, and naturopathic medicine. There will also be a therapeutic component in yoga, music and art therapy, Thai Chi, as well as large community gymnasium for rent.

Gallo's vision is to charge a low membership fee of $50 a month for the large volunteer base active in Barrie, while charging practitioners to rent the office space.

We're confident we'll sustain the volunteer centre and programs through the space rentals, Gallo said.

Focusing on natural and holistic wellness, Gallo said having the various practitioners under one roof offering a one-stop-wellness-shop will encourage people who offer their services freely to others to help themselves.

In my opinion, if we don't start taking care of those human resources and help them take care of themselves, we'll lose them, she said.

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Yoga class at Barrie centre the first of its kind in region

When her son was a toddler, Deena Blumenfeld started teaching yoga, partly out of a need for adult contact. When she started branching out to prenatal yoga, a funny thing happened.

"What I found from the mothers because I started seeing them regularly was they started feeling comfortable asking me questions that they didn't feel comfortable asking their doctors," she said. "But they weren't things that werewithin the scope of the practice of yoga."

The mothers-to-be wanted Ms. Blumenfeld's guidance for a range of childbirth and baby-related things, such as Lamaze and breastfeeding.

"I came to realize that women needed more than prenatal yoga or a childbirth class. They needed continuity, a community with a consistent message of support," she said.

After conducting classes for a couple of years, she opened Shining Light Prenatal Education on Butler Street in Lawrencevillein 2012 as a place to help educate and guide women through pregnancy, childbirth and beyond.

Her motivation came from her personal experiences. Her son Owen was born via Caesarean section, which was not what she had planned.While she was still earning her yoga teacher certification, she discovered she was pregnant with her second child.

At that point, she enrolled in an intensive prenatal yoga teacher training, and has since become a certified Lamaze and prenatal yoga instructor. Classes at Shining Light now include pre- and post-natal yoga, family yoga, and baby sign language. There also is a support group for new mothers.

She said there are about 25 or 30 similar centers like hers around the country, and there are other places in Pittsburgh where pregnant women can get childbirth classes, Lamaze classes or even prenatal yoga. "But this is the only place where they can get all those things together," she said.

Even the type of yoga she teaches is a niche within its field. "It's very tailored to the pregnant body," she said, "no abdominal work and you're not going to sweat bullets. We're indirectly preparing the moms for labor, so we do a lot of positions that will be helpful, like squats. Even the breathing and relaxation skills can carry into labor with them."

She has even been called upon to teach other yoga instructors how to accommodate pregnant women into traditional classes, Ms. Blumenfeld said.

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Prenatal yoga instructor expands business to meet growing demands

LITTLE ROCK, AR -- Donna Terrell has been on a mission all month long to bring awareness to colon cancer. A treatable, curable disease that took the life of her daughter, Queah, three years ago.

That is why she created the "Donna Terrell's Yoga Warriors Fighting Colon Cancer" event which is this Saturday, March 29th.

If you do not know much about yoga or are afraid to give it a try, yoga instructor Breezy Osborne explains how it can help you heal mind, body and soul.

"Inhale, arms up and you'll exhale fold. You're only going to fold as far as it's available to you. You don't have to touch the floor," explains Breezy.

Breezy has been teaching yoga for ten years and owns Barefoot Studios in Riverdale and West Little Rock. She believes the workout has the power to change your life.

"Yoga brings you what reality is. What the truth is. Can you touch your toes? Maybe not today but can you tomorrow? Maybe, I don't know. so whatever you do on the mat, that's teaching you acceptance," says Breezy.

But yoga has been recognized in the medical community as another tool to help people heal.

"We are learning more and more about spirituality, laughter and nutrition, appropriate rest. The thing about Yoga is not only is it physical, it puts the body in a state of relaxation and we know that when the body is not stressed that is when it can optimally heal itself."

Donna Terrell's daughter, Queah, found the healing power of yoga when she was fighting colon cancer. Which Breezy explains, makes sense.

"There's a healing aspect to yoga whether you're a student or a teacher. To see everyone have these 'aha' moments and their journey because everyone has a different story. Everyone has a different body and background and that's what on their mat," explains Breezy. Breezy teaches all different levels. She says whether you've never tried yoga before or you've been doing it for years, there is something in it for everyone.

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Yoga Warriors Welcomes Everyone From Beginners to Experts

Eckhart Tolle (born Ulrich Tolle on 16 February 1948) is a German / Canadian spiritual teacher, motivational speaker, and writer.

A New Earth came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of 'a new heaven and a new earth'. We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. 'A new heaven' is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and 'a new earth' is its reflection in the physical realm.

(The Core of the Ego) - Chapter Three

Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head--the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it--that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. As long as you are completely unaware of this, you take the thinker to be who you are. This is the egoic mind. We call it egoic because there is a sense of self, of I (ego), in every thought--every memory, every interpretation, opinion, viewpoint, reaction, emotion. This is unconsciousness, spiritually speaking. Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on. The central core of all your mind activity consists of certain repetitive and persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patters that you identify with most strongly. This entity is the ego itself.

In most cases, when you say "I," it is the ego speaking, not you, as we have seen. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you identify with as "me and my story," of habitual roles you play without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race, social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal identifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure.

The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation. When you live through the mind-made self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other." The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic patter lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" At the other end of the scale, there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the Bible, Jesus' question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Complaining & Resentment

Complaining is one of the ego's favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don't have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining, especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don't know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either to their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego's need to be right and triumph over others: jerk, bastard, bitch"--all definitive pronouncements that you can't argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness, you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that, physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people's greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn't have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the "fault" that you perceive in another isn't even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself right or superior. At other times, the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Non-reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection, however, is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.

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Eckhart Tolle - Wikiquote