For Amy Weintraub, living with depression felt like living under a battered old pot. She wasn't going to crawl out from under
it, either. Her psychiatrist had told her so: She was always going to be one of those people with perpetually empty pockets, always dissatisfied with her life, always yearning for something she couldn't have.
So Weintraub took anti-depressants and dutifully went
to therapy. She functioned, but she didn't feel.
Then she found herself - on a yoga mat.
That was in 1989. A year later, Weintraub threw away her anti-depressants, and she hasn't taken one since.
Through a daily yoga practice, she realized that her "empty pockets" weren't a curse; they were a blessing.
"I had more room for the divine inside me," Weintraub writes in her new book, Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through
Yoga. "This new insight didn't blow the fog of depression from my mind. It simply opened a window through which I saw the possibility of feeling better, the possibility of extending through the rest of my day the good feelings I had in the moments after yoga class."
There are sound physiological reasons for those good feelings. Studies show that yogic breathing and asanas, or poses, raise levels of happy-making hormones oxytocin and prolactin and increase oxygen levels in the brain.
A study of 50 severely depressed university students, half of whom received 30 yoga sessions, concluded that yoga was effective in alleviating depression and that the effect increased over time.
"No matter what
form of yoga you're practicing, all you're doing is clearing the space within, removing the obstruction, letting the energy flow through," says Weintraub, who lives and teaches in Tucson. "Depression is stuck grief, stuck emotion."
Those emotions can well
up unexpectedly on the mat. Michael Lee created Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy 17 years ago after helping a fellow student who had cried at every yoga session for a decade. The therapy now has more than 1,000 trained practitioners worldwide, including at least 11 in Colorado.
Clinical psychologist Melaney Sreenan of Ouray offers both Phoenix Rising and traditional therapy in her practice; they complement each other perfectly, she believes.
"Psychologists might be angry at me for
saying this, but I believe people really have all the answers they need inside themselves," she says. "Yoga therapy often puts people right into the core of who they are.
"Traditional therapy is very beneficial, but it takes folks a lot longer to get
where they can get if they're willing to go to the deep places that yoga therapy gets them to go."
Phoenix Rising combines one-on- one supported yoga poses with gentle questioning that keeps the focus on breathing and feeling. It integrates the whole
person, Sreenan says.
"Every second in yoga therapy, you're going inside and are being invited by your therapist to stay inside," Sreenan says. "The only question being asked is, 'What's happening now?' "
What happens for some is a peeling away, a look inside and a new openness. It's a surrender, Sreenan says, to the postures, the touch and the safety.
"As the person unravels from stress of day, noise and traffic, what
they're really unraveling is what's going on physically and emotionally, creating spiritual energy within themselves," she says. "You provide the soul with a safe, protective space to do its work, and it will."
Donna Raskin found that principles she
learned in yoga helped her carve out a quiet place amid the negative noise of her serious depression.
"Yoga teaches you to calm down and find a place inside yourself that's always calm and serene," says Raskin, who wrote a book about her experiences,
Yoga Beats the Blues. "Instead of focusing on the sadness and anxiety inside me, I concentrated on that place that was calm."
Eventually, Raskin's depression dissipated as her serenity grew. For her, a physically challenging style of yoga worked best,
and her success with that is reflected in her book, which features faster-moving Vinyasa poses.
"When you're depressed, one of the problems is you can't get out of the cycle your brain and thoughts are going through. You want to get off that verbal
treadmill in your head," Raskin says.
You can help yourself by finding a teacher who instills trust and generates good feelings, both Raskin and Weintraub say.
"If you go to a yoga class and feel
ashamed of your body or feel like you didn't get it right, find another yoga class," Weintraub says. "It's not about creating the perfect posture - it's about creating a container of self-acceptance, a non-judgmental awareness.
"It becomes an experience of self
with a capital S."
Ryckmanl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2736
