5 Tips to Beat Insomnia

We all know how ragged we feel after a night of tossing and turning. Here are some ideas to help you get a good night’s sleep.  Deep sleep is essential for the body to carry out its daily maintenance routine; repairing and healing injuries and removing old and damaged cells. Insomnia raises cortisol levels (the stress hormone) and keeps them elevated. 

Cortisol is essential as part of the body’s response to stress, but prolonged stress with sustained cortisol production is very damaging. High cortisol levels weaken the immune system, and this is associated with serious illness, such as heart attacks, stroke, fatigue, weight gain, lack of concentration leading to accidents, the premature death of cells and early ageing.  

1            Do a lazy stretchy Sun Salute or a similar whole body stretch. The emphasis here is on SLOW and EASY movements. You are not raising energy but releasing wound up energy and tension and removing stagnant energy so the body and mind can fully relax & do its maintenance work as you sleep.

2            Have a bath rather than a shower.  Physically, it is more relaxing to lie horizontal the body in a warm water rather than standing in a shower. But this is not the only reason for baths being better at bedtime. The running water of the shower flows negative ions over your body, invigorating you, which is why showers wake you up (and are great in the morning). Whereas, when you lie in the bath, positive ions flow around your body and promote a feeling of calm and relaxation. As you lie submerged in warm water it is also possible that there is a latent psychological memory of being bathed in the warm fluid of the womb. 

3            Have a warm milky drink before going to bed. Yes, it does contain calories, but it might come down to a trade off between a good night’s sleep and breaking a pattern, before sleepless nights become the norm and lead to chronic stress and more serious health issues. If you are lactose intolerant you can substitute almond or soy or rice milk. If you want to lessen the calories, add warm water.

There is debate about the positive effects of warm milk, but like much that is medical, it often leaves out important aspects. Milk contains the amino acid, tryptophan, which helps in the production of the sleep inducing brain chemicals, serotonin and melatonin. Some research has posited that a glass of milk does not contain enough of the chemical to induce drowsiness. 

However, the fact remains that it does work for many of us, and other theories suggest that there maybe psychological and physiological factors  at work here, on more than one level. 


Consider that a glass of warm milk warms the body and when the body temperature is raised, body also responses slow. People sleep better when they are warm because the muscles relax more, and warm milk coats and soothes the stomach creating a sense of wellbeing, that is readily apparent when babies fall asleep after nursing.  

Milk is associated with mothers and a mother's love and care. Comforting feelings and remembrances can produce chemicals in the brain that actually form a sensation of well-being and relaxation. This brain chemical, serotonin, is associated with sleep. This feeling of well-being and relaxation may cause the sleepiness.

If you are milk allergic, consider almond milk, soy milk or rice milk.



4            200 steps after eating. Many wakeful nights are the result of indigestion. That feeling of bloating, wind and discomfort often caused by a combination of too much food and alcohol, eating too late and food that is richer than our normal fare. Lying in bed slows the metabolism, at the very time when we need it to work well to digest all that food. 

Swami Satyananda recommended that we go for a walk after eating, or if that option isn’t available, do at least 200 steps. Try jogging on the spot, especially with big arm movements before retiring to bed. This is a great way to shake down that food and allow the body space to do what it needs to do.



5            Play a Yoga Nidra track to help you sleep. Yoga Nidra is different from ordinary relaxations. It is a scientific yogic technique which relaxes on several different levels.  It is preferable to stay awake in Yoga Nidra to get the full benefits, but if you do go to sleep it confers a much deeper and more relaxed sleep. This makes it ideal to play at bedtime, or if you are lying awake tossing with frustration.   

Put on your earphones so you don’t disturb your partner and it doesn’t matter if you let it play more than once, before you wake up and turn it off, and roll over and go back to sleep.   
The more you use Yoga Nidra, the more effective it becomes. (Make sure you have an authentic Yoga Nidra as there are many claims to this technique. Satyananda yoga is an authentic source and produces a large number of these CDs.)




It is really important to get a good night’s sleep. Don’t let the odd wakeful night become a habit. Act quickly to change the pattern.

NZ Film Festival: Alive Inside……Inspirational movie. If you see this simple idea, YOU CAN CHANGE SOMEONE’S LIFE

If you see this simple idea in action, you can maybe transform the final years of someone you love - and it is so simple.....

If you have a family member or a friend with dementia this documentary is a MUST SEE. The film shows that the power of music, via an Ipod, can truly raise the comatose “from the dead”. 

When you watch the filmmaker turn on a patient’s favourite music, there is an instant transformation. Watching the faces of the elderly who are otherwise helpless and lifeless, suddenly become animated and tell us the name of their favourite song – and sing along with all the words, brought tears to my eyes (and I noticed the bloke next to me had something itchy on his cheek too). One woman patient pushed away her walker and began to dance to a Latin American jazz tune (in time to the beat, she grasped the filmmaker as her partner, and turned him around in time to the music. It was truly breathtaking.

Hearing is the first sense we acquire in the womb and the last to go at death. While scientists do not really understand how the brain processes all this information, what is certain is that once you can find out what music loved ones listened to and loved when younger, replaying it again as memory fades, allows patients to return to a former period in life when they felt safe and loved, rather than the scary unknowable world they currently inhabit as memory deserts them. 

If you missed the film at the festival – there is a lot of info out there on the internet and YouTube talking about the movie and the research behind it. With this information you can truly transform someone’s life and old age. Thousands of people have already done so for their loved ones.

An inspiring read: Yoga helped her find peace in a hostile environment

REVIEW:

Zen Under Fire: A New Zealand Woman's Story of Love & War in Afghanistan by Marianne Elliott.

A profoundly moving account of her experiences as a human rights lawyer for the UN in Afghanistan. Marianne writes fluently, and shares her insights into the intensely complex political situation in easy to absorb chunks.   A month after arriving at her new job, and still feeling a bit underprepared, her senior colleagues go on a much earned holiday, leaving her as the Officer in Charge of a United Nations war zone, waving away her concerns with the reassurance that as long as no one kills Amanullah Khan, the powerful leader of one of the local tribes, all will be fine. But by lunchtime he is dead, killed in retaliation for the death of a rival leader the week before.

Marianne describes both her everyday working life, constant meetings and writing reports of the local conflicts, the violence against women and children, the struggle to grow food in the backlash of intertribal conflict and famine, and her personal struggles to cope with the endless stream of harrowing, negative information flowing in, and the heavy toll, this randomness of life and death around her, takes on her personal relationships. “I feel as though I am sleepwalking through my own life between guilt and sadness.” Feelings that are intensified by the tight security limitations imposed on her movements, both as a foreigner and a woman.

Eventually she turns to her fledgling yoga practice to rescue her from total descent into a cycle of fatigue, insomnia, PTSD, depression and addictive medication.  At first, her practice is almost mechanical. Unnerved by a phone call or a meeting, she would do some simple breathing exercises and a few sun salutes. Over time she becomes aware, that while the stressful situation remains the same, her attitude to the continual crises around her has changed. "Yoga is helping me little by little to trust my breath and my body, and to loosen my tight grip on control. I am starting to get glimpses of what yoga might be able to teach me ..."  Less control, more softness and acceptance. 

As she furthers her yoga journey through meditation retreats in various recuperation spots around the globe, she realises her compulsion to save the world has been fuelled by her own private fears and insecurities as much as her compassion and commitment to justice.

She takes comfort from the words of Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron who says that the purpose of meditation is not to make us feel better. “If we expect that, we will end up feeling we are doing it wrong most of the time.  Well, yes, exactly.  But to accept ourselves as we are.” It is ok to sit with sadness, doubt, anger and fear. “We can’t be of true service to others unless we are prepared to face our own shadows”.

For months she is angry at others for their cruelty and at herself for being so powerless in the face of the enormous suffering she encounters daily. She feels inadequate and berates herself for not being able to better the lives of those suffering around her, but eventually realises that one of her greatest gifts to the people of Afghanistan is simply to take time to really listen to their stories and record them in her reports. It is in giving up the need to feel in control, that she releases her ability to be herself and fully present in the moment. Not perfect in every situation, but present. 

With this new awareness, she finds more inventive approaches to getting things done. Where at first she was frustrated by intractability of UN security rules, she now finds ways to work within them and around them to achieve her goals. When there is no money for a project, she gathers resources and assistance from many disparate groups to make things happen anyway. 

One of her initiatives is workshops for police and prosecutors on women’s rights in domestic violence cases. In dusty corners of the country there are honourable men who want to find ways to make the law equal for all, especially women, yet they are hindered by a lack of training and the scarcity of actual copies of Afghan law to study. They ask Marianne to procure copies of the law and to provide training workshops. These workshops are led by her friend, Kate, a smart, articulate Canadian lawyer, who has developed a specialised curriculum for prosecutors on women and criminal justice. Kate effortlessly recites whole clauses of Afghan law, is also an expert in Sharia law, speaks fluent Dari, the local language, and quickly wins the respect of the male police and prosecutors in the room.

 

This is a remarkable read. By the end of the book you will have a much wider appreciation of the conflict in Afghanistan; the violence, the politics, corruption of warlords and those vying for power and also the remarkable courage and dignity of the Afghan people who try to live their lives and bring up their children in tenuous circumstances. 

It is also a story of the people who risk their lives to try to make a difference, in a country where human rights count for little, and the toll this takes on the human spirit. What is really inspiring, is that it is precisely in this ravaged country, with all its turmoil, that Marianne finds a sense of Self.  Through yoga and meditation, she is learns to “slow down” in Afghanistan, taking time to honour her feelings.  “It is transforming my ability to be in the presence of profound suffering without closing my heart or leaping too quickly into action. As I learn to sit with other people’s pain, I also learn to sit with my own.”

Since returning to New Zealand, Marianne continues to inspire others to overcome their fears. It is our fears that hold us back. “As I learned, our own fears, even our best intentions can get in the way of our ability to serve others. Yoga, writing and walking continue to be my tools to process fears that get triggered by the suffering I encounter”. 

Body Whispers: Listening to the Body shows us why Less is really More

Using the Wisdom of the Body.

Moving within our Optimal Range of Movement (OROM) can help us get past feeling “stuck” and reduce pain

My students know that I am a research junkie. I see life as a journey and I am always looking at new ideas, the latest yoga research, information on how the brain works; anything that seems relevant to how we think, our health and what makes us tick.

Every week brings new discoveries of some exciting new development. What I really LOVE is that these modern “scientific” discoveries are always a reflection of what the ancient yogis and munis have seen in deep meditation thousands of years ago, and handed down in many ancient texts such as the Upanidshads or the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.  

Well, this term I found a great online yoga functional anatomy course which has redefined the way I am teaching yoga. (www.functionalsynergy.com) Students are loving exploring these concepts for themselves and the results have been truly amazing.  Everyone is noticing the difference.

Optimal Range of Movement (OROM) 

All this is possible because the latest developments in 3D imaging capture the body in movement and show how the myofascia holds the body and muscles together and impacts on healthy – and “unhealthy” movement patterns. Even with basic actions like standing and sitting we are often not moving within our optimal range of movement (OROM) and this has negative consequences on the rest of the body.

There are two parts to this. The first is that we often have ongoing niggly pains or even worse, chronic pain. The second is that we are often unwittingly placing layers of compensatory muscle actions on top of one another.

Small “cultural” compensations, like standing and walking with toes turned out, can also make a BIG difference. Movement in this non-functional way impacts on the function of the hip socket, which over time causes larger issues like hip problems, and results in hip instability which can then move down to the knees or up into the shoulders.  Lack of balanced muscle activity in the shoulder girdle can cause a number of problems affecting wrists, neck and head. 

Old injuries and scar tissue can also be part of the problem. When pain redirects our muscle activity, we naturally use compensatory muscles to perform everyday activities. Over time this can become the default pattern and almost inevitably this affects the pelvis and hips. The pelvis is both our anchor and our pivot point and if our hips lack mobility or stability, we will compensate somewhere else, whether in the back, sacro iliac joints, knees, feet, shoulder girdle or neck. 

The site of the pain is often not the cause of the pain. Eg: carpal tunnel in the wrist is likely to be the result of imbalance in the function of shoulder muscles. Unhappy shoulder muscles move pain down the arm – and of course this shoulder imbalance also relates to what is going on in the hips. 

And hip problems are related to the way we stand on our feet – who would have thought that standing with our feet parallel could make such a difference? We are, after all “A System” as we say in yoga. Everything affects everything else!

Hip and pelvis stability is our core strength – yet a lot of us don’t actually have it – including yoga teachers, as I discovered from the online comments as we progressed through the course. We all come to yoga believing that the goal is to “stretch” but in reality, as Susi Hately at Functional Synergy notes: “ A stretch is merely a sensation, it is not a sign that you are doing the pose correctly.” 

How does this relate to reducing pain?

 “No pain, no gain” we hear, but this is not necessarily helpful or true. Understanding and utilising healthy OROM can help us to lessen existing niggly pain or even become pain free. 

LESS IS MORE - try it and see: 

 The principle of using OROM is that less is more. It seems counter intuitive but we have all tried it and it works. Often we unthinkingly use our arms to leverage ourselves into a position, whether it is trikonasana (triangle pose) or reaching up to a tall shelf. 

When we use force, we create resistance and tension in the body. This is simple physics. Newton’s law of motion states that: “every force (action) is accompanied by an equal force (reaction) of equal magnitude in the opposing direction.” 

In yoga, without realising it, we often “push’ into a posture to get into the right look; the way the pose is “supposed” to look. We feel fine. We can do the pose. But in reality there is something missing. There may be strength and balance in this method of attaining a pose but it is not “asana” unless there is ease, softness and stillness in the pose, and this produces quite a different feeling altogether.

Retraining the Mind and the Muscles

In yoga, when we do asana more slowly, there is time to increase our awareness of what is actually happening, which muscles are moving and if there is pure movement or a sensation of strain or even a niggle of pain as we move in or out of the pose. When we perform these poses more quickly, we lose this awareness and it is easy to overlook inappropriate muscle gripping or stacking in order to get into the pose. One of the more common issues for students is tension in the lumbar spine when doing backbends like the cobra. Yet this is easily remedied once the principles of OROM are fully understood.

Many people have aches and pains, and this includes yoga teachers who have been practicing yoga for years. By tweaking knees to get into the lotus pose when the muscles are not ready to do this, we can do permanent damage. Yet much of this could have been avoided, and can still be eliminated by coming back to simple movements, with awareness and working from there.

And this starts from the feet up. If you stand and walk with feet straight and parallel, then the femur moves with pure movement in the hip socket and increases pelvis stability.

By doing these actions with Pure Movement, and retraining the muscles, strength and flexibility can quickly be regained and more complex asana built on top of a stable base. In a few short weeks we are all noticing the difference and an improvement in everyday function.

 Subtle changes make an enormous difference. And this translates into everyday life.

The men in my classes are all commenting how they notice improvements in hip function, having changed their walking pattern. Men habitually walk with toes at 10 and 2 o’clock but this is a cultural phenomenon, not biological and I am truly amazed at how quickly they have managed to change this pattern.

Lower back pain or a pinch in the lumbar spine is very common especially when doing backbends like cobra. Learning to use appropriate muscles has enabled students to overcome this discomfort both on the mat and in everyday activities.

Applying synergistic movement to everyday function is important. A student reports that applying this understanding to her horse riding, has transformed her dressage and hunting. 

Others who have been troubled with hip pain, have noted that all of this has gone and they can sleep at night without pain in the hips causing endless tossing and turning.

An older student said she had woken up so sore from gardening that she nearly didn’t come to yoga class, but had decided to come, knowing it would help. At the end of the class she announced that all the aches and pains were all gone and she felt really good.

Is it my Mind (Ego) or my Body doing this asana?

When you next do a yoga pose, ask yourself: “Is it my mind (ego) doing this posture or my body? If you find there is “propping” of muscles to get you into the posture, or your jaw feels tight and breathing stops, then it is the mind and your ego setting the goal and the wrong muscles are turning on to support a weakness.

On the other hand if you are happy to only go as far as your OROM, you will feel the mind at peace, the body gently flowing and elongating in a totally organic way, bringing a sense of peace and stillness, and  then you know it is the body doing what it does best. 

The irony is, that often when you do the latter and go with the flow, the body often elongates further, because it is relaxed and not having to “prop” to keep the body secure. The first is “exercise” and the latter is “yoga”. Remember yoga means “union” at all levels.

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding.

But water will wear away rock,

which is rigid and cannot yield.

As a rule, whatever is fluid,

soft and yielding will overcome

whatever is rigid and hard.

This is another paradox:

What is soft is strong.

--- Lao-tse

To find out more, come and explore the concepts of Body Wisdom and functional synergy at the BODY WISDOM WORKSHOP on 24 August. (see: www.yogaforlife What’s Happening)

Namaste

Dharmavati