Читать книгу Yoga Therapy as a Whole-Person Approach to Health онлайн

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In the third section of the book, the authors provide a small-group residential retreat format that addresses each level of embodiment in the yoga system, which has never separated mind and body as medical systems have done in Western allopathic medicine. The three weeks of these retreats are packed with practices that refocus peoples’ awareness of their mind-body and bring the whole person back together, as it were. Then there is a regular follow-up to help people to maintain the changes they have made. The measurement of these follow-up sessions to date validates the long-term effectiveness of the retreats.

The retreat format includes detailed descriptions of the practices used, so that the design is reproducible. These are taken from versions of hatha yoga and pranayama practice which come largely from the teaching of Kaivalyadhāma, one of the oldest modern yoga institutions in India and the first to conduct scientific research starting in the 1920s, from Richard Miller’s version of practices for yoga nidrā (iRest) and from the Sikh tradition of Kundalini yoga. This creates an invitation to test these practices both in scientific experimentation and in personal experience, which is always the true test of any yogic practice. It also provides the opportunity to test practices from other traditions in which a given yoga therapist may be trained. My own guru, Swāmī Rāma, always encouraged us to test everything he gave us. “Don’t just believe what I say—be a scientist!,” he would say.