Free Download! Enhancing Emotional Balance: Yoga for Anxiety and Depression

Are women more prone to suffer from mood swings, and anxiety and depression? If so, what lies at the root of these imbalances and how might yoga help restore our balance and sense of equanimity?

In this free download, yoga teacher Linda Sparrowe, co-author with Patricia Walden of The Woman's Book of Yoga and Health: A Lifelong Guide to Wellness talks about these questions and shares her insights into how yoga can help restore balance.

Linda discusses some of the the hormonal components involved in anxiety and depression, and reveals why these two disorders may not be as different from each other as we have historically thought.

The Western and Eastern paradigms and approaches to mood swings are very different, Linda notes. In the West, we tend to think of mood issues as the result of chemical imbalance. In the yogic framework, however, mood issues and even anxiety and depressions are often viewed in terms of blockages to life force, or Prana.

There are numerous yoga tools for removing blockages to the flow of Prana and in this context, yoga can often help offer relief for mood swings, anxiety and depression, Linda notes.

Linda offers tools from her own process of “resetting” mood, and speaks about the importance of learning to pay attention to your body’s own unique signals.  She also highlights the results of a recent study at Boston University School of Medicine on yoga’s effect for those who on medication for depression.

Linda explains that using yoga as a tool to find balance and joy in life doesn’t need to mean going to long yoga classes three times a week. “Yoga also gives us five-second practices,” she explains, describing how we can apply such five-second tools in moments of difficulty.

You might also be interested in Linda's YogaUOnline course:

Yoga for Balancing Moods- A Woman's Guide to Emotional Well-being