New Release: Yoga Therapy
Categories: Fitness & Sports Health & Healing New Release
About the Book
From the best-selling author of Teaching Yoga, Yoga Sequencing, and Yoga Adjustments comes this essential resource for learning how to adapt yoga practices to best accommodate and heal a wide array of common injuries and ailments. Surveying historical writings on yoga, ayurveda, and scientific medical approaches to health and healing, Mark Stephens distills this received wisdom of ancient and modern practices for more insightful and practical application in today’s world. He applies these insights to healing musculoskeletal injuries; promoting a healthy reproductive system; and addressing mental, emotional, and behavioral difficulties. With each health condition, Stephens applies yoga to the most recent evidence-based practices for healing, offering an integral place for yoga in integrative health practices.
Yoga Therapy is a practical manual with a systematic approach of considering the nature of each health condition and the specific asanas, pranayamas, and meditations most helpful in healing it. Rather than adopting a narrow medical model of healing as the reduction or elimination of symptoms, Stephens invites yoga therapists, teachers, and students to relate to health as a continuous, dynamic process of self-care in which the qualities of personal experience and social connectivity matter. He illustrates that how we live our lives—including our emotional states, nutrition, sleep, relationships, and sense of purpose—is reflected in our sense of balance (or imbalance) and well-being (or disease). Comprehensive, accessible, and informed by Mark Stephens’ decades of deep study, practice, and teaching, this will become an indispensable reference.
About the Author
Mark Stephens is a dedicated yoga student whose personal experience of yoga’s promise to make life better inspires him to share the practice through teaching and scholarly writing.
Described by Yoga Journal as “the teacher’s teacher,” Stephens, a certified yoga therapist and member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, is the author of the international best-sellers Teaching Yoga, Yoga Sequencing, and Yoga Adjustments, which have been published in nine languages.
From deep study of yoga history and philosophy, human anatomy and physiology, social and interpersonal dynamics, and Eastern and Western theories of being and consciousness, Stephens brings a nondogmatic, accessible, and integrated perspective to yoga therapy that makes yoga a more refined resource for healthy living.
Practicing yoga daily for more than twenty-five years and teaching for more than twenty years, Stephens draws from his prior years in academia, as an education consultant, and as a progressive social change activist to create practical resources for yoga teachers and therapists. In 1997 he founded Yoga Inside Foundation—establishing therapeutic yoga programs in more than 300 schools, treatment centers, and prisons across North America—for which he received Yoga Journal’s first annual Karma Yoga Award.
Stephens lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches globally.
Exercise
Healing with Asana Practices
The primary focus of asana is on stretching and strengthening the calves (gastrocnemius and soleus muscles) and their tendon (the Achilles), along with small lower leg muscles whose actions or attachments affect the plantar aponeurosis. In the asanas suggested here, progress sequentially in the order in which they are presented.
Dandasana (Staff Pose) Resisted Ankle Mobilizations
In setting up for the basic form of Dandasana, place a folded blanket, block, or other rm bolster under the sitting bones if unable to comfortably and stably sit fully upright with pelvis neutrality, fully extended legs, and the spine in its natural form. Explore alternately moving from plantar exion to dorsi exion (pointing and exing the feet), backing away from even the slightest sharp pain in the bottom of the heel of the affected foot when creating the dorsi exion movement. Do three sets of fteen repetitions three to ve times per day, gradually increasing range of motion, sets, and repetitions only to the extent that there is no increase in in ammation or pain within two hours of each stretching practice.
Eka Pada Utthita Bidalasana (One-Legged Extended Cat Pose)
Begin on all fours in Bidalasana (Cat Pose). Fully extend the leg of the affected foot, curl the toes under, and alternately press and release pressure back through the heel.
Do three sets of fteen repetitions three to ve times per day, gradually increasing pressure, sets, and repetitions only to the extent that there is no increase in in ammation or pain within two hours of each stretching practice.
Tags: Mark Stephens Yoga
About the Author
North Atlantic Books
North Atlantic Books (NAB) is an independent nonprofit publisher committed to a bold exploration of the relationships between mind, body, spirit, culture, and nature. Founded in Vermont in 1974 and operating in Berkeley since 1977, NAB has been at the forefront of publishing a diverse range of original books in bodywork and somatics, ecology and sustainability, health and healing, Indigenous cultures and anthropology, psychology and personal growth, social justice and engaged activism, and spirituality and liminality. NAB’s Blue Snake Books imprint is one of the largest sources of internal and historical martial-arts books in the world.
