Yogic Techniques for Managing Anxiety: Resting in Stillness

By Virginia Iversen

The practice of Yoga offers us many tools to help manage our internal and physical states of being. One of the most challenging and sometimes debilitating internal states is that of unremitting anxiety. Anxiety can be defined as the fear of being hurt in the future, in one form or another. This internal alarm system can save our lives. For example, if you are alone in a train station late at night, and you begin to experience tendrils of anxiety because you feel like you are being watched, this heightened state of alertness may enable you to save your own life. However, if you are constantly feeling anxious at one level or another, your mental and physical health may be compromised. Anxious thoughts and feelings release adrenalin and cortisol to help you navigate out of a dangerous situation. If these hormonal levels are too high for an extended period of time, the functioning of your immune system will be lowered, your cardiac health may suffer and your serotonin level may decrease, leading to depression and even more anxiety.

One of the primary tools of Yoga to manage anxiety is to rest in stillness through meditation. Although meditation may seem elusive and complicated, it is actually very simple. According to Pantanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras, meditation is simply the cessation of the vrittis or thought waves of the mind. For some of us, this is far easier said than done! You may sit down to meditate for a specific period of time and find that your mind flits from one thought to the next. You may even discover that you are mentally writing out your grocery list or planning your next activity. Meditation is a particularly Ying practice. In the paradigm of the Ying/Yang dichotomy, Yang is very outwardly focused on “constructive” activities, and Ying practices are more introspective, dreamlike and symbolically-oriented. To be more enlightened about Yogic Techniques for Managing Anxiety: Resting in Stillness visit www.yoga-teacher-training.org.