Quote Originally Posted by Crankin View Post
To answer your question, Indy, there are a couple of reasons I recommend yoga to treat both anxiety and depression. The first reason is that yoga works on calming the physical manifestations of anxiety by decreasing neurotransmitters that raise your anxiety. Recent research done here at BU shows that yoga actually can do the same thing as some of the medications that are prescribed. The other reason is that yoga is actually a system of psychology in the Eastern tradition. Here, we see it more as exercise; we hold feelings and memories in the physical body and yoga can release these feelings. This is why you might cry in a yoga session or why you feel better. It's also why there is a lot of work being done with vets to treat trauma, using yoga. One of my goals is to become a certified yoga therapist.
Thank you for that explanation; it certainly mirrors what I've experienced in yoga, especially during the first year or so of my practice.

When I first started my practice in 2006, I was going through a difficult relationship/breakup and I admittedly cried during a lot of my classes because many of my emotions were pretty close to the surface. At the time, I had a teacher who offered a reading at the end of class. It might be a passage from Rumi, for instance; I wasn't always sure of the source material. A lot of what she shared had to do with self acceptance and self love. The passages often resonated in a way that prompted tears on my end. There was also a lot of things we did during class that offered a very tangible sense of release and that, too, often prompted an emotional reaction in me.

With or without tears, I often left class feeling less burdened and more joyful. I also started to feel a growing sense of gratitude for the various experiences--both in the present and in the past--that I'd had in my life and a growing trust that I could cope with whatever came my way. Yoga helped me tie together a lot of the things that I'd been working on in CBT for a long time.I've never spent much time trying to understand why it did what it did. I just know that I loved it and still do. On it's more superficial level, it offers a weekly dose of stress relief, but I truly believe there wa more to it than that.