How Teaching Mindfulness and Meditation Can Complement Healthcare
How Teaching Mindfulness and Meditation Can Complement Healthcare
What would it look like to parallel mindfulness and meditation with modern Western healthcare?
Yoga teachers are adept at noticing and guiding the human body and understand everyone is an individual. Humans are also unique in the imbalances that bodies carry from injury, stress, and disease. We do our best to support those bodies with healthy and appropriate asana guidance, sprinkling in various pranayama, meditation, and inspiration for the mind.
When there is an illness present, patients and their families rely on medical professionals for a diagnosis and treatment plan to bring the body back into balance. Their oath to provide care and compassion is unsurpassed, but managed care often has a singular focus on the body's illnesses, sometimes overlooking the emotional stress of illness or discussing prevention first.
Yoga teachers have the unique opportunity to support patients' mental health in conjunction with their physical healing. Mindfulness and meditation are the tools and coping strategies to create a holistic healing experience.
Mindfulness and meditation
Being mindful is simply about awareness. Being conscious of one's surroundings, emotions, reactions, and physical sensations is mindfulness. The present moment becomes the focus, not the never-ending stream of interruptions in the brain. Meditation is a training technique to find this peace and clarity, and can take many shapes. Moving meditations allow the mind to find a rhythm to match the body; seated meditations follow the rhythm of the breath.
Both mindfulness and meditation are evidence-based solutions to many health challenges. They work to overcome the stresses of pain, tests, waiting, possible treatments, and potentially bad news. The medical community calls mindfulness and meditation integrative and complementary practices, acknowledging their importance as part of a larger healthcare plan.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) outlines several appropriate circumstances in which mindfulness can work with several health challenges.(1) For example, cancer patients may use meditation to sleep better and experience less stress, menopausal women may use mindfulness to reduce their symptoms, and generalized anxiety/depression/pain may lessen with meditation practices.
Using spiritual support for the physical body to heal as a Yoga Teacher
Yoga teachers can use mindfulness exercises and techniques to support the mental health of students. Their bodies can then heal without the disruption of additional anxiety and uncertainty.
To compassionately teach meditation and mindfulness, consider additional course work to continue your yoga teacher education. Advanced yoga teacher trainings may include instruction and practice on pranayama, mental health, Yoga Nidra, Ayurveda, and more. You can teach yoga and work alongside Western medicine to serve your community.
If you’re curious to learn more, reach out to us at Prema Yoga Institute. In fact, we’d love to invite you to enroll in our online courses. Our Advanced YTT has healthcare in mind, for example, our Yoga in Healthcare includes meditation and mindfulness teaching skills, and will empower you to interface more effectively with doctors and health care professionals. Visit Prema Yoga Institute to learn more about our training, which is now available online with interactive trainings through 2022! Courses count as CE Credits with Yoga Alliance OR towards your RYT500 at Prema Yoga Institute.
PYI is an accredited program based in New York city, teaching students around the globe through online classes and trainings. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you advance your yoga practice and teaching!
Prema Yoga Institute is longer limited to New York City and is now available online with interactive trainings through 2022. PYI is an accredited program based in New York city, teaching students around the globe through online classes. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you advance your yoga practice and teaching!
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1 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). 8 things to know about meditation for health. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Retrieved September 10, 2021, from https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/tips/things-to-know-about-meditation-for-health.
