This is a book about yoga, a holistic system for creating and sustaining balance and harmony on all the levels of our being: body, mind, emotions and spirit. It's about yoga's boundless potential for healing, for bringing about beneficial change on all these levels.
I've called it The Healing Power of Yoga because throughout my life yoga has proved its transformative healing power, most profoundly in 1993, when I had breast cancer. That experience left me with a deeper trust in the power of yoga to help us to face our challenges, and to heal ourselves.
The book draws on my experience of yoga, and on my work with others who are dealing with life-changing illness, to explore how the yoga practices of body movement, breathing, relaxation and meditation contribute to healing. The simple yet powerful techniques I describe can be practiced by everyone, for inner strength and inner peace
JULIE FRIEDEBERGER has been practicing yoga since 1970, and teaching and training yoga teachers since 1987. Her teaching experience includes work with older people, people with mental health problems and people with cancer. She lives in London with her husband, the painter Klaus Friedeberger. She is the author of A Visible Wound: A Healing Journey through Cancer, and Office Yoga.
The present work by Julie Friedeberger is an attempt to dive in the vast ocean of the healing aspect of yoga written in a lucid language accessible to non-initiates. It will certainly help many thousands of readers to discover the richer dimension in life.
The time has come for us to abandon the attempts to learn the 'advanced' practices of yoga and rather replace the word advanced with 'subtler'.
Yoga does not heal from outside in but from inside out. Movement of the healing force is not from someone else's fingers or voice. It is from the mind and the prana to breath and body, although for a total beginner it could still appear to be the reverse. The practices of breathing, relaxation, movements, postures, etc. described herein, are what a beginner might be able to manage to find the entry into that core of being whence proceeds all healing force.
The field of yoga is vast. There are 96 basic varieties of alternate nostril breathing exercises. There are at least 31 different ways of breath awareness. There are 108 different mental exercises done in the corpse position.
There is a series of exercises without movement. The more advanced healing practices of yoga can only be done with mantras appropriate to different mental, pranic, respiratory and physiological conditions. For example one needs to be proficient in the system of nyasas (assimilating a mantric syllable into the different organs) leading of vyapaka where the mantra and prana-breath-stream are unified (a) to flow through all parts of the body, and (b) then again centered in specific organs. The present work will make a valuable contribution to pre-paring people to learn from the master who is initiated in the ancient traditions. I pray for the success of this volume and wish continued growth to the dedicated author who has obviously received much blessing from the sources of wisdom.
This his is a book about yoga, a holistic system for creating 1 and sustaining balance and harmony on all the levels of our being: body, mind, emotions and spirit. It's about yoga's boundless potential for healing, for bringing about beneficial change on all these levels. It's about how yoga can serve us as a source of inner strength in times of stress and difficulty, and in times of acute crisis, too: serious illness, bereavement, divorce, loss of job and income - the things we hope will never happen to us, but which do happen to most of us. For thousands of years, people who practise yoga have experienced the unfolding of awareness, self-discipline, stability, resilience and detachment-the inner resources that enable us to meet these challenges and to overcome the obstacles that life puts in our path.
I've called it The Healing Power of Yoga because in the 37 years since my first lesson, yoga has proved its transformative healing power over and over again. It has been an unfailing source of strength and spiritual nourishment, most profoundly when I had breast cancer in 1993. Then, it helped me through the anxious, stressful, painful period of diagnosis and mastectomy surgery, and through the subsequent process of coming to terms with cancer and all its implications. In the longer term it has played a continuing role, the key role, in my healing. I do not call myself a healer. But I have been teaching yoga for the past 20 years, and I've come to realize that yoga and healing are fundamentally the same. Since I had cancer, my focus has increasingly been on how yoga promotes healing.
When I was first diagnosed, and agonising over what I might have done to 'cause' my cancer, and what I could or should have done, but didn't do, to avoid it, my teacher, Swami Dharmananda Saraswati, whose counsel in all the years I've known her has been unfailingly accurate, turned the whole thing around for me. She told me that it didn't matter. 'All that matters now', she said, 'is what you do with this experience, how you use it'. This gave me hope that the experience of cancer could be transformed into something good and useful, and that I might be able to use whatever I learned from it in some way that might be helpful to others.
I had no idea at the time how this might happen, but it did happen. From the start I kept a journal, which became the basis for a book, A Visible Wound: A Healing Journey through Breast Cancer. It was published in 1996, and with its accompanying audio cassette, Breathe and Relax: A Way to Healing, it has inspired others to meet the challenge of cancer and to see it as an opportunity for transformation and healing. In 1998, I was asked to start a Yoga and Cancer programmed at the Yoga Therapy Centre in London. I have taught a weekly class there since then, and have contributed to the training of yoga therapists, some of whom have now started their own classes for people with cancer. At around the same time I became a trustee of New Approaches to Cancer, a charity which promotes the benefits of holistic healing for cancer patients, and furthers closer links between orthodox medicine and the complementary therapies. And I began to be asked to give talks and workshops for the British Wheel of Yoga and other yoga and cancer support organizations, and training days for teachers, on the theme that is at the heart of this book.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
Asana (102)
Bhakti Yoga (22)
Biography (50)
Hatha Yoga (95)
Kaivalyadhama (56)
Karma Yoga (33)
Kriya Yoga (84)
Kundalini Yoga (62)
Massage (2)
Meditation (351)
Patanjali (139)
Pranayama (69)
Women (30)
Yoga for Children (12)
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