At Enheal we offer yoga to empower you through tailored instructions for self-treatment techniques for your specific needs.
If you are seeking naturopathic treatment for asthma for instance there are suitable yoga breathing exercises that can clear your bronchial tubes and expand lung capacity.
Similarly, if you are being treated for diabetes or digestion problems you may be given some relevant yoga techniques so you can improve functioning of your digestive organs.
Another example is if you are wanting to subdue anxiety and perhaps trying to avoid reliance on medications learning progressive yoga relaxation can calm and control your nerves.
Enheal also provides guided group yoga sessions and facilitates insightful yoga, physiology and well-being workshops.
Tuesday Evenings from 7pm,
Loch Village, Victoria, Australia
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Enheal Yoga
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Yoga is essentially a process of bringing together, control of the physical body, with clear thinking of the mind and inner focus of the spirit to create a joyful experience of being.
Tracing more than 3,000 years of history back through ancient Vedic India to Egypt, Yoga has been associated with various religions. Yoga however is not a belief system but rather more a collection of practical methods taken up by the wise to improve their physical health, increase awareness, find purpose and engender self-respect.
Classic yoga practices include;
Yoga today is mostly recognised as the traditional physical movements of Hatha Yoga, promulgated out of India by the likes of Shri Yogendra and Indra Devi, which have now diverged into a multitude of branded yoga exercise styles. The most prominent include:
A hatha yoga class will differ in accordance to the style followed by the teacher or school. As a general format however, in a typical class one may expect:
Pranayama, the calm control of breathing is fundamental to yoga. It involves various techniques to guide the breath for physical, mental, and spiritual benefits.
Essential to the practice is diaphragmatic breathing, which involves breathing deeply into the abdomen by engaging the diaphragm. This promotes relaxation, reduces stress, and increases oxygen intake.
Full Yoga Breathing is an extension of abdominal breathing into a longer wave rhythm that may be used in conjunction with yoga postures to guide energy and release muscles reflexes.
Nadi Shodhana (Alternate Nostril Breathing) is another common pranayama technique that involves breathing through one nostril at a time, alternating between the left and right. It balances the flow of energy in the body, calms the mind, and enhances concentration. It is particularly useful leading into meditation.
Everybody would do well to learn and apply the principles of yoga relaxation.
Yoga relaxation is the purposeful withdrawing of attention away from physical concerns back into ourselves to allow the body to enter a refreshing sleep-like state but with the mind awake and observant. It is a very powerful practice for releasing deeply held patterns of tension and can help one enjoy a whole new healthy way of life.
People typically take up yoga for the proven health benefits of stretching routines that increase flexibility, exercises that improve breathing and techniques that control stress.
After only a little effort coordinating body, breath and mind in the gentle postural moves of hatha yoga, participants consistently discover they are more supple, have better agility, feel more carefree and more alive.
With further practice most people find their original reason for doing yoga changes. Their self-awareness and self-respect grow and they become inspired to do yoga for the greater sense of connected wholeness it brings - calmness, inner strength and mental clarity of purpose.
Gita Yoga is the mode of yoga practised and promoted at Enheal.
In the contemporary sense of yoga as exercise, Gita Yoga is not really a brand style and although it came from India it's origins really reach back millennia. Gita is rather a distillation of classic practices that were imparted to the West in the 1950s by M. Segesman, in the form of a sophisticated program of gentle physical exercises, energising breathing and transformative relaxation techniques that are characterised by scientific rationale and a practical methodology suited to our modern minds and busy lifestyles.
The Gita program is based on ten physical postures that are practised in careful succession. As the ten postures are gently worked through, either in the classic poses or variations, mental attention is focused and movement with breathing is coordinated. During the process the body is stretched and strengthened. And importantly as one focuses on the body through the postures we imbue attitudes such as self-respect, self-care and self-determination.
A distinguishing aspect of the Gita sequence is the physiological tonic benefits of that come through the pressure-release at certain neuroglandular areas of the body;
First three postures focus on fast-acting neural control systems.
Final seven concentrate on slow-acting change command signals from hormones of the endocrine system.
A highly recommended book of practical guidance to the Gita program
by Lucille Wood & Di Lucas
A short meditation, usually done after the physical exercises, may also be part of a general yoga class. For longer sessions many yoga schools and teachers hold designated meditation classes.
There is a diverse range of meditation practices associated with yoga, which historically are linked to the contemplative practices of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity and Sufism.
For millennia however, the adept training of mental attention and awareness through yoga meditation, was mostly instructed verbally by adroit eastern gurus in one-to-one teaching of disciples.
Coming out of this spiritual tradition, notable exponents who disseminated yoga mediation to the wider western world were:
In modern times yoga meditation has been secularised with practices that focus on mental control techniques for stress reduction, relaxation and self-improvement. Mindfulness, the holding of attention in the present, as used by psychologists to treat anxiety and depression, is also derived from the disciplines of yoga meditation by way of Buddhist practices like Zen and Vipassanā.
For a typical group meditation session participants sit comfortably on floor cushions and are guided with eyes closed to still the mind and calmly concentrate. Mental focus may be directed to breathing sequences, images, words, sounds or to abide in silent watching of thoughts and sensations passing by.
Avid yoga practitioners will regularly make some form of individual yoga meditation a part of their daily morning or evening routines.
