About how Your Health, Wellbeing and Life are Supported by Yoga and Lifestyle Medicine
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Lifestyle medicine is an interdisciplinary approach to alleviating and preventing complex, chronic and lifestyle-related health concerns.
It is primarily concerned with the root causes of ill-health and how the activities we do (or don’t do) in our daily lives impact our health and wellbeing. And it focuses on assisting people to engage in activities that support their health and wellbeing long-term.
Lifestyle medicine is practiced by health practitioners in clinical and community settings and by people through self-care and health-promoting activities. It includes public health and advocacy because larger societal systems and decisions impact people’s health and wellbeing choices and habits.
There are many disciplines that practice lifestyle medicine, including yoga, counselling, psychology, psychotherapy, general medical practice, nutrition, exercise physiology, naturopathy, cardiology. In fact, most health disciplines are relevant to lifestyle medicine.
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Women’s midlife, menopause, elderhood and healthy ageing jounrey is a long-term experience. It is characterised by change and unique to each woman.
Simple health solutions are inadequate for the complexity of this journey.
Yoga and lifestyle medicine focus on the whole person and long-term wellbeing maintenance. They are concerned with root causes and life-habits. This makes them particularly suited to women’s midlife, menopause, elderhood and healthy ageing journey.
Yoga and lifestyle medicine support women to navigate the profound changes and transitions with greater ease, empowerment and grace.
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Counselling, psychotherapy and psychology are recognised lifestyle medicine approaches. Mental health is complex, lifestyle-related and can be an ongoing concern for many people.
Many theories of wellbeing, human development and mental disorders incorporate a range of factors, including cognitive, emotional, social, physiological, environmental and societal contributors. This highlights how lifestyle is a substantial part of mental health, its maintenance and treatment.
What we do in our daily lives, our habits and the contexts in which we live impact our entire health and wellbeing experience.
Decades of research shows that counselling and psychotherapy provides evidence-based treatment for stress, anxiety, depression, loss and grief, trauma, pain management, relationship issues, body image, eating issues, times of transition, decision-making, career decisions, parenting, thriving in life ... and just about all other aspects of being human.
Counselling and psychotherapy offer many ways people can address challenges in life, including women’s midlife, menopause, elderhood and healthy ageing.
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Our integrative approach blends various recognised lifestyle medicine modalities: yoga, yoga therapy, meditation, counselling, psychotherapy and psychology. This provides our clients with a comprehensive approach to managing and maintaining health and wellbeing.
Core to our approach is the Common Factors perspective.
Western research shows that all therapies in psychology, counselling and psychotherapy share a foundation of common factors, such as empathy, non-judgment and respect.
At the heart of this approach is a strong, supportive and collaborative therapeutic relationship, shared client-therapist goals and a belief that positive change is possible. These are key, extensively researched reasons for Western therapies effectively benefiting people’s mental health and wellbeing. Yoga therapy shares a similar view of how therapy is conducted, especially regarding the importance of the therapeutic relationship.
Yoga therapy asserts that the client can maintain their wellbeing by following prescribed practices that balance their bodily energies. Similarly, Western biopsychosocial approaches recognise that our bodies aim to achieve homeostasis and ill-health often arises from a physiological imbalance. Many Western therapies, such as psychology, counselling, psychotherapy, physical therapy and physiotherapy, give activities and exercises for clients to practise at home to assist recovery, prevent relapse and maintain positive general health and wellbeing.
Yoga and yoga therapy are inherently preventative. They aim to provide practices not only for times of ill-health, injury or challenge, but also for times when you are flourishing so that you can continue to enjoy good health and wellbeing as you move through life. They share this perspective with lifestyle medicine.
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Yoga is a whole-person approach to health and wellbeing, with a strong preventative focus.
Yoga therapy’s goal is to live a long and well life, so it focuses on treating the root cause of health concerns and maintaining positive health and wellbeing. Yoga therapy is one way of practicing lifestyle medicine.
Yoga is increasingly recognised and used clinically and therapeutically in Australia and other Western countries to treat and manage a range of physical and mental health and wellbeing experiences. Research on the effectiveness of yoga as a therapy has been conducted for a broad range of illnesses and conditions that can be chronic, complex and lifestyle-related.
Yoga assists people to deal with and prevent many health and wellbeing concerns. Some challenges yoga helps with are stress, The Menopause, fatigue and exhaustion, sleep issues, musculoskeletal issues, pain management, anxiety, depression, loss and grief, trauma, autoimmune issues, injury or illness recovery.
Yoga compliments and can be incorporated in Western mainstream biomedical, psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge, practices and therapies.
A vast amount of Western research has been inspired by contemplative disciplines such as yoga and Buddhist meditation. This research shows that mindfulness, meditation and breathing practices are helpful for a range of health issues, including The Menopause, stress management, anxiety, pain management, depression, sleep issues, trauma, digestive issues, dealing with loss and grief, dementia and cardio-vascular conditions.
Asana practice has been shown to be beneficial for mobility, balance, flexibility, strength and mental health. Research consistently shows that engaging in exercise is one of the most protective factors for good health - it supports healthy ageing and reduces the risk of neuro-degenerative disease.
Yoga assists people to maintain vitality and wellbeing throughout life. Yoga meets you where you are at in your life and health journey. Its diversity and flexibility underlies its ability to adapt to your changing needs, enabling you to maintain ongoing positive health and wellbeing. Thus, yoga is ideal to support women in midlife, menopause, elderhood and healthy ageing to navigate their long-term health and wellbeing journeys.
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Yoga is an ancient and comprehensive system of wellbeing originating in the region we now call India. Yoga’s key goal is to still the mind and enable the practitioner to experience enlightment.
Yoga is a vast discipline that has evolved over thousands of years - the earliest written texts were created about 5000 years ago. So there are many ways of practising yoga.
The main form of yoga brought to and taught in Australia and other Western countries is Hatha Yoga , a form of Raja Yoga. The Yogis who shared their practices with Westerners in the first half of the 20th century and helped to originally popularise yoga in the West practised Hatha Yoga and modified it for Western audiences. At this time Western society best understood yoga as exercise to support physical health. Hence, there has been an emphasis on movement and exercise in Western interpretations of yoga.
The key text that guides most yoga practitioners in Australia and Western countries is the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali, which codified yoga about 2000 years ago.
The Yoga Sutras outline 8 limbs of yoga to achieve the goal of stilling the mind to attain enlightenment. These limbs comprehensively include ethical principles, such as Ahimsa (do no harm), Satya (truth, integrity, authenticity) and Tapas (dedication to practice, purpose), called the Yamas and Niyamas.
Asana are the movements and postures popularly associated with yoga in the West, and were designed to prepare the practitioner for meditation. Working with the breath, Pranayama, is a core part of yoga practice that research now confirms has wide-ranging health benefits. Pratyahara involves drawing the senses internally from the external world and Dharana exercises concentration, which assist settling the mind before engaging in meditation or Dhyana.
Meditation is undertaken to enable the practitioner to enter Samadhi, enlightenment. The process of yoga (moving towards enlightenment) can involve experiencing different states of consciousness, with enlightenment being a state of deep relaxation with high levels of alertness (observed in research as theta and gamma brainwave activity).
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Yoga shares the same broad goal as Western psychology, counselling and psychotherapy - alleviation of mental distress.
Yoga is concerned with stilling the fluctuations of the mind, and counselling, psychotherapy and psychology are concerned with alleviating mental and emotional disruption and discomfort. Together these disciplines compliment one another and provide a holistic, lifestyle-focused view of health and wellbeing with an emphasis on prevention.
Since the 1960s Western health sciences have researched and been inspired by Eastern wellbeing practices, such as yoga and meditation. Mindfulness is now a highly researched phenomena and is incorporated in contemporary mainstream therapies in psychology, counselling and psychotherapy. There is a vast amount of research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness techniques for mental health concerns, such as stress, anxiety, depression and trauma. Research is also supports the utility of somatic (body-based) practices for mental health concerns, particularly for stress and trauma.
In this way, yoga techniques (mindfulness, somatics and breathing) have already been included in evidence-based therapies and yoga continues to influence mainstream health services in Australia and other Western countries.
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Today, about three-quarters of yoga practitioners in Western countries are women and yoga is evolving to meet practitioners’ needs.
Yoga has always evolved over time and in response to historical and cultural contexts. It is far more diverse than Hatha Yoga and the Yoga Sutras, which were historically developed for monastic men.
Yoga today is grounded in traditional yoga philosophy, theory and practice whilst understanding and applying research on the practices and mechanisms used in yoga. This blending of Eastern and Western science, philosophy and therapeutic practices provides a comprehensive and culturally relevant wellbeing experience for contemporary Australian women.
Women are influencing yoga in Australia and Western countries. During the last couple of decades experienced female senior yoga teachers have published systems of yoga specifically designed by women and for women that they have been teaching for years. These teachings and systems form the foundation of our offerings. We draw from the work of Judith Hansen Lasater’s Restorative Yoga, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s scholarship on women’s role in the history and practice of yoga, Petra Coveny’s Menopause Yoga and Ana Davis’ Feminine Yoga.
We embrace an evolutionary perspective on yoga, which acknowledges the origins and traditional approaches to yoga whilst ensuring our practice is appropriate for our clients and context - Australian women.