5 Yoga Poses to Boost Your OM-munity
Have you ever noticed that a day after you start your vacation you get sick? Or perhaps a sniffle or cough comes on right before your important work presentation? Or maybe you get taken out by a sore throat or ear ache when you have the most on your plate?
Sadly, bacteria and viruses don’t work around our schedule and can take up residence in your body whether you invite them in or not. The immune system has important job to do each and every day, and if we are sleep deprived, eating on the run, overwhelmed and stressed out, and not taking good care of our body, mind, and emotions, it has a profound effect on its ability to ward off dis-ease.
The health of a women’s immune system depends on the health of all our systems. For almost every health condition a woman faces, we can often trace it back to hormonal imbalances. Colds and flu included, since one of our many systems responsible for a strong immune system is the endocrine system, which includes your ovaries, pituitary, adrenals, thyroid, and hypothalamus. All these organs/ glands are also directly responsible for your monthly menstrual (moon) cycle and regulating hormones.
The nervous, digestive, and circulatory systems also work along with your endocrine system to boost your immune system’s response to invaders. However, if we are experiencing stress and overwhelm, for example, these system functions are jeopardized. This in turn influences your hormones causing you to become susceptible to sickness.
In addition, your emotional state affects your physical health so if you are feeling healthy and vibrant, mostly likely your immune system does too and the team of trillions on white blood cells will attack unwelcome invaders with no fear. Except that throughout a woman’s monthly cycle our emotions can be a roller coaster ride ultimately impacting our ability to stay healthy and virus free.
Our yoga asana practice is a refuge where we can go and take time to nourish and replenish all our systems so that they can function optimally. Yoga asana can help improve our circulation, support our central nervous system, clear the mind, balance emotions, and uplift the spirit. Each of these individual benefits will, collectively, assist in harmonizing the endocrine system and stabilize hormones.
In addition, we want to be sure that we get adequate sleep, 8-9 hours a night, eat foods high in vitamin C and A which stimulate our immunity, and surround ourselves with joy and laughter. Laughter also helps fuel and boost immunity and encourages a positive outlook which helps too!
1. Downward Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana)
Helps to increase upper body circulation, bring fresh blood to the brain, energizes the legs, and is soothing and calming for intense emotions especially when done with a block or bolster under the head. Calm and rejuvenate!
2. Bow Pose (Dhanurasana)
Puts pressure on the belly which increase blood flow to the abdominal organs which is full of the white blood cells that help us fight invaders. Bow also activates the thymus in the chest that is the primary immune system organ. Invigorate and enliven!
3. Child’s pose (Balasana)
Is calming for the central nervous system and allows the adrenals to relax by receiving the ‘sign’ that there is no distress from your long, deep breaths. Then the immune and digestive systems can return to a balanced state and circulate freely to look for those pesky ‘invaders’. This pose can also be great right before bed to assist in a better nights sleep. Restore and relax!
4. Simple Seated Twist (Bharadvajasana)
Stimulates the spleen, kidneys, liver, and circulation to the belly and reproductive organs which produce immune cells. It also stimulates the flow of lymph fluid through the nodes in groin and the armpits. Replenish and renew!
5. Shoulderstand (Sarvangasana)
Helps bring oxygenated blood to your thyroid and parathyroid glands, supports the lymphatic system in passive circulation, calms the mind and emotions, and soothes nerves if you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Moving in to Plow pose will also help to balance your entire endocrine system which in turn will balance your hormones and emotions.
I also suggest practicing according to your monthly cycle and changing what you practice when in accordance to where you are in your personal cycle. This will make these asanas even more potent and powerful keeping you healthy and balanced all year long. Read my article, Manage Your Mood: Balance Your Cycle With Your Practice to learn how to practice according to your monthly cycle.
About the Author
When Things Get Turned Upside Down: Yoga Inversions
You’re never more alive than when things get turned upside down.
::Malcolm Gladwell
Whether misjudging a headstand and crashing to the floor, fired from our job just when we thought we were up for a promotion or dumped after posting “in a relationship” on our social media status for all to see, nothing gets our attention like being confronted by the unexpected. Suddenly, we find ourselves in a surprising new landscape for which we weren’t prepared. We’re staring down change and wrestling with the fear that we might fall again.
The truth is we’re guaranteed to fall again…and again. Like crashing waves, challenges will crest and crumble whether we’re talking about our headstands or our lives. Personally I’ve fallen many times, certainly out of my headstand, but ultimately into a new headspace.
Inversions in Yoga
To me, inversions are a fantastic living laboratory where we can embrace and move beyond things like fear, expectation, and impatience. All at once upside down needs to become right side up, and we have to surrender our tight grip on what we think we can control. We feel tangible postural balance merge with something deeper.
Inversions are an amazing reminder that how we do one thing is how we do everything. They reveal to us that often things are not going to go as we’d planned, but they just might turn out even better that way.
Making the Leap
Starting a new job or relationship is like the leap of faith it takes to turn upside down in a handstand. Though initially our jump may resemble a first handstand in an unfortunate bra, revealing things we had not hoped for…we learn as we go. Frankly, sometimes the catalysts for our evolution are pretty tits-out, upside down. But, if we move through our raw initiation and prove to ourselves a little at a time that we can do it, before you know it, whatever we were attempting becomes an important part of our personal fabric.
When we try too desperately to control the things we can’t, we become tightly wound in lopsided ways that stunt our growth and leave us miserable.
If we litter our inversions or our lives with expectation, we pin ourselves underneath frustration and impatience, which, in turn, erode the courage and humility it takes to try again.
Outcomes Are Not Guaranteed
The bottom line is we can’t control a guaranteed outcome. Even Kino MacGregor and Doug Swenson have days when they can’t balance in their handstand (albeit annoyingly infrequently). And for all of us, life can feel out of control and out of balance sometimes when it comes to work, deadlines, responsibilities, Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Covered Almonds, time wasted down the rabbit hole of Facebook…you name it.
The Yoga Sutras
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, abhyasa (perseverant practice) and vairagya (surrendering without expectation of a particular outcome) demand that we resist the trappings of instant gratification our modern society seems to promote. And Pattabhi Jois, the father of Ashtanga yoga, stated,
Do your practice and all is coming.
He didn’t say, “Do your practice and kurmasana (flipping your feet behind your head) is coming instantly.” Nor did he promise results like millions of dollars and six-pack abs. We have to allow incremental progress to eclipse our need to accomplish the finished product. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so famously put it,
Life is a journey not a destination.
What We Can Control
There is one thing we can control, however, and that’s the accountability and integrity with which we show up — on our mat, at our job, for ourselves and for one another. Abhyasa and vairagya ask us to see balance and progress not as a single handstand, but as a part of a larger personal pilgrimage (sadhana). When we look at things through a wider lens, we can see every wobble, challenge and fall as an opportunity to learn and grow. Each time we glean a little bit more wisdom to bring to our next inversion or adventure. And as we do, we start to see that we’re never more alive than when things get turned upside down.
