A Simple Yoga Sequence for an Afternoon Break

The Key is Breathing

        The simple routine in the video embedded below is great for getting up from your computer, disengaging your neck, arm, and shoulder muscles, as well as your eyes, from that static "computer pose."  The key here is to breathe deeply in concert with each gentle movement.  Linking the breath to the movement is what makes it so relaxing.  You don't have to be a regular yoga practitioner to do it.  This routine would also work well as a morning warm-up upon arising, or as before-bed decompression from the day's stresses.

        If you're at work, you won't be breaking a sweat with this so you could do it in your work clothes (you might have to tuck your shirt back in afterward, though).  If you don't have a private office to work out in, just do the standing sequence only at the first part of the video, which you could at your chair or outside in the smoking area, and then skip to the final meditation.  Save the floor sequences for home.

        If you do the whole routine it would take all of fifteen minutes or so.  The video itself is over twenty minutes long, but that's because the instructor is pausing frequently to give direction.  Once you learn it yourself, it could go a lot quicker.

        I find it very balancing and centering.  I feel regrouped, and ready to continue with the rest of the day.  Hope you find it beneficial, too!

 Yoga as Therapy

        Yoga wasn't meant to be a competitive activity where he who could fold himself into a pretzel wins.  There are actually yoga "competitions" held akin to weight lifting competitions, which traditional yoga teachers from India view as a gross bastardization of the practice.  That's a Western twist on yoga practice, but it wasn't designed for that.  Yoga was originally developed to be an exercise in awareness. It was a preparation for meditation.  Just doing the the asanas themselves is meditative.

For some, yoga has become a competitive
sport, where "contestants" are rated by
judges, and "winners" receive trophies
and prizes.  There is talk of it becoming an
Olympic competition eventually.  While
this is great for promoting an awareness 
that yoga exists, to me, it sends the wrong 
message about the purpose of yoga.
 

        Kate Holcombe, the soft-spoken instructor in the video above, founded the Healing Yoga Foundation located in San Francisco, California.  Yoga teachers are trained there to use yoga therapeutically to assist people suffering from a variety of ailments such as insomnia, hypertension, depression/anxiety, as well as more serious ailments such as cancer.  This is more in line with a useful application of yoga.

        In fact, traditionally, yoga has always been used therapeutically.  It's not uncommon to hear someone who was raised in an Indian family tell a story about being told by a grandma to stand on her head whenever she had a headache.  Since the Western remedy for everything is to pop a pill, this might sound counter-intuitive to us.  But with a common headache the pain often comes from the brain's blood vessels being constricted for whatever reason, so standing on one's head actually makes one feel better because it gets blood flowing back toward the brain.

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