Updated March 18, 2022.
The average yoga class at a fitness center can bring quite many benefits. Even a one-hour intervention can help you develop flexibility, build strength, feel more relaxed, and even sleep better. However, many people who enjoy and benefit from a standard Asana-based yoga class may want to deepen their understanding, digging into the philosophies and body understandings that underpin the movements and guidance provided in a yoga class.
At Portland Community College, you can pursue a health program in Ayurvedic Yoga, which marries the ancient science of health and healing with the peace of mind and wellness that yoga can bring. If you want to learn how yoga and Ayurveda work together, this course might be right for you.
What is Ayurvedic Yoga?
Yoga and Ayurveda work to balance the mind, body, and spirit. They are holistic health systems, which help you make both movement choices and mental focus choices, as well as choices about how you feed yourself, cleanse yourself, and analyze your experiences of illness and injury.
Ayurveda involves an ancient understanding of what keeps the body in balance and causes it to fall out of balance. Understanding this philosophy can help you incorporate different foods, movements, and other healthy choices into your life. While some similar roots inform yoga and Ayurveda, there are a variety of distinct suggestions and perspectives in each system of thought. Taking a program that focuses on both can help you understand when an intervention from one or both of these systems of thought could benefit you, a customer, or a patient.
Rooted in Wellness
Rather than focusing on seeing an illness and giving a particular high-power medicine, Ayurveda's reliance on herbs and foods attempts to create a diet that promotes overall wellness, with slight adjustments made for changes in one's health state. Other interventions, like nasal cleansing with a Neti pot, aromatherapy, and intentional breathing practice, also focus on one's overall health and wellness through a very different lens than the typical Western-medicine approach.
Practitioners find that adjusting their daily practices to bring more ease, bodily wellness, and health can be beneficial in the wake of a significant medical intervention or when facing an upsetting diagnosis. You don't have to choose Ayurvedic approaches exclusively but find an additional store of wisdom when learning how this ancient science promotes wellness.
Improving Body Functioning
Many people turn to Ayurvedic cooking and herbs in the same way that yoga's movements have gained appeal. Gentle interventions like adding new kinds of foods and new trends come with far fewer side effects than some medicines prescribed in Western medicine. You may see significant impacts through minor adjustments of one's life, from improved digestion to better mood.
Learning about ayurvedic yoga in this thorough, multi-term program helps you responsibly use the interventions and methods of Ayurveda and Yoga in ways that help you or your clients to feel better and have demonstrably better functioning in their bodies.
Relaxation and Stress Reduction
Another primary benefit is how yoga and Ayurveda promote quality of life, not just bodily benefits. Its holistic nature means that 'being healthier' may involve a gentle restorative yoga practice rather than a hard-hitting, painful workout. Rather than restricting one's diet, you get to cook flavorful, comforting foods that taste great while making you feel more relaxed and comfortable. The goal is to improve one's health in a way that does not focus on intense, instant results, a point that becomes clear when you dig into the understanding of the bio-energies, anatomy, body tissues, and universal qualities.
Learn Ayurvedic Yoga in Context Through Portland Community College
Ayurveda and yoga aren't a replacement for all kinds of healthcare interventions - most practitioners use them in tandem with many other scientifically backed ways of approaching health and healing illness and injury. Taking a substantial program, like the one offered at Portland Community College, helps you integrate the elements of Ayurveda and Yoga into your life while understanding that the process of learning ayurvedic yoga aligns with the system of science and wisdom that developed these approaches in the first place.
Homeopathic healers and practitioners may find that adding this knowledge to their background can help them give more complete options to their clients seeking natural and gentle ways to boost their health or manage symptoms of illness or injury. Fitness professionals can use these strategies and the philosophy behind them to help athletes work out, eat, and generally live so that they avoid injury and boost their well-being while pursuing peak performance.
Get to know PCC's Ayurvedic Yoga program today - you'll be glad you did.
