Yoga with Naomi: Healing hearts

Science and medicine have proven that yoga can help with all sorts of physical conditions, from heart disease to high blood pressure or back pain. But it also helps with injuries that affect our emotional hearts. What I tell my students is that through yoga, we connect to our breath. And through connection to the breath, we access relaxation. And when we access relaxation, we can access our ability to heal, both our physical and our emotional bodies.

One of my students is a shining example of this. Her mother passed away two years ago, and the loss was a huge struggle for her. She suffered from insomnia and anxiety, for starters. She tried therapy, prescriptions, but nothing worked...until she came to yoga. Almost immediately, she began to feel better.

She has been a dedicated student, coming at least once a week for several months. She told me today that she recently overheard her husband telling someone that she was a different person because of yoga. She said yoga helps her to focus, calm down and lose so much of her anxiety, which for the last two years had been, as she says, out of control.

"Yoga has brought so much balance to my life," she told me, and we laugh about this (warmly, gently together) because a structural issue with her foot makes literal physical balancing in yoga nearly impossible for her.

I share her story with you with her permission in the hope that if you are out there and wondering how to feel better--how to sleep better, how to be less anxious, how to feel more balanced and okay--you might be inspired to come and step onto a mat with us. I can't promise you will feel better, but I promise the possibility is there, and for me, each day, that is enough.