A Yogi's Perspective: COVID-19

The United States diagnosed its first COVID-19 victim in early January 2020. My concern and curiosity for this person still exist today.

The CDC confirmed the United States has the most massive death toll in the world. More than 45,000 have died in the U.S. due to the spread of COVID19, and growing (at the time of publication). The once, mysterious pneumonia that sickened dozens in Wuhan China is a pandemic and has literally taken our breaths away. 

Behind every documented number, there is a name, a person, a death. Health-care workers, teachers, our precious elders in nursing homes, athletes, politicians, police officers, grocery store clerks, transit workers, parents, and their children, our grief has had no boundaries. We are living in unprecedented trauma.

As yogis, we know our yamas (social restraints) and niyamas (self-discipline). In the Yoga Sutras, our definitive collection of 196 Sanskrit texts, written between the second century BCE and the fifth century C.E., outline the eight limb paths of the purification of mind and body for yogis.

The Eight Limbs, including the yamas and niyamas, are asanas (postures), pranayama (breathe work), pratyahara (sense withdrawal and non-attachment), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (the realization of the true self).

These fundamental philosophies are our guides to relate and make our way through the world. They are a yogi’s path to cultivating a steady mind and calming bliss. We share these spiritual, areligious philosophies with our students through lessons of mindful meditation, the physical practice of our asanas, and the instruction of conscious breathing.

Yet never in our lifetime have our challenges been so grave. Here, we know pratyahara, the conscious withdrawal of the senses — has profound meaning beyond its simplistic translation of detachment from life. As this pandemic unfolded here at home, we've responded, not with rigidity of emotion. On the contrary: We pushed aside our fears of closed studios, loss of sole proprietor incomes, canceled events, and most significant the fear of COVID-19.

We've rallied. As we found solace in our teachings, the practice of pratyahara enabled us to make space between the world around us and our responses to it. It didn't mean running away, because we don't get to exist in this world without the pain and discomfort that comes with it, but we do get to choose how we react to it. 

Like nature, we have found a way – through our cell phones, Facebook, Instagram, Zoom, on our balconies, we found a way -- and we made yoga available to everyone! Black, brown, white, low-income, and affluent communities, we choose how to respond.

The images. We all have them. They play over and over again in my head. Sometimes closing my eyes just for a few seconds breaks my heart. A bus driver, an average guy, responsible father, dedicated employee, merely doing his job, dead, COVID-19. One man, times 41,000+, and counting. Debating how and why we got here doesn't respond to the crucial need for yoga practitioners at hand. 

Our yoga challenge is embracing our intentions while learning to be uncomfortable with our fears, offering calm when we all need it most. Let's continue this conversation. How are you sharing your light?

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Renee Harriston is Yoga Therapist Candidate at Prema Yoga Institute. She teaches Therapeutic Yoga at Kula For Karma, a stress management program to those recovering from mental health, trauma, and addiction challenges. Renee is a Graphic Artist and former Journalist for CBS and NBC News.

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Yoga in Quarantine: Tips for Cultivating a Home Practice

“Yogas chitta vritti nirodah,” the second of Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras, is likely the verse most recognizable to yogis of any level of experience.  A seminal tenet of yoga philosophy, it literally translates to “Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.” A more modern, colloquial interpretation might be, “Yoga quiets the mind chatter,” and I bet I speak for all of us when I say that at this moment, I really need to spend some time each day quieting the chatter in my mind.  We are living in a historical moment unprecedented in our lifetimes, and it is all too easy, shut up in our homes and consuming the news, to allow atmospheric anxiety and personal worry to escalate into the full abandon of panic.  Over the past week, in my non-yoga life as a university instructor, I probably wrote the phrase “Don’t freak out” over and over again in upwards of sixty emails.  And yet, last night when a server crashed, I freaked out, my students totally freaked out, and my husband, at loose ends with his workplace closed, stayed up all night fretting and then drank a beer at 1:00 pm today and lay down for what he referred to as a “stress nap.” Right now, just when we all need yoga in our lives more than ever, our studios are closed and the governor is telling us to stay in our homes. 

The governor is right: we do need to practice radical social distancing as much as we possibly can in order to gain control of this crisis.  But we don’t have to give up our yoga practices just because we’re holed up at home.  With that in mind, here are five tips for creating and maintaining a home practice. 

1.     Create a dedicated container for your practice.  It’s wonderful to be able to have a designated space—even a room!—for your home asana practice, but most New Yorkers don’t have that luxury.  However, anywhere you have space to roll out your mat can be a sacred space if you make it so.  Create a bit of ritual around your practice: light a candle, compose a dedicated playlist on Spotify, do something to establish an intentional boundary around your physical practice, even if you’re in the living room one day and the bedroom the next.  Devoting a time of day to your practice can also be a way of creating sacred space. 

2.     Take it easy. If you are used to practicing in class with a teacher observing, be especially careful when working at home.  Don’t cut corners: take care to warm up fully, and make sure the room is at the temperature you’re accustomed to when practicing.  If you can’t get your apartment as warm as the studio, add layers, especially around your joints.

Don’t test your limits—there’s no teacher to stop you from hyper-extending or “hanging out” in your joints.  So be mindful of your hips, knees, spine (particularly your neck) and shoulders. If you’re used to being cued in and out of poses, transition slowly and mindfully, and be especially mindful of alignment.  If you feel any pain or discomfort, stop. A home practice during an epidemic is neither the time nor the place to push boundaries in your asana practice.

3.     Try practicing online.  If you’re missing class and instruction, there are plenty of options for you to practice at home with others, both in real time and asynchronously.  Prema Yoga Institute is offering live classes every day via Facebook, on a donation basis.  In addition, online yoga platforms offer a tremendous variety of options for a home practice.  PYI’s own Dana Slamp teaches via Yoga Anytime, and there’s a fifteen day free trial for their subscription service.

4.     Remember that yoga is more than asana. Just as important as maintaining a physical practice is keeping yoga alive in your mind and heart.  If you don’t have an altar in your house, now is a good time to set one up. An altar doesn’t need to be religious—it can simply be a space dedicated to cultivating mindfulness. Mine sits on top of a tiny cabinet in the corner of my bedroom and holds a salt lamp, a candle, a box with my mala, a few precious stones, and copies of The Pocket Pema Chodron and Tosha Silver’s Change Me Prayers. I sit in sukhasana every night before bed to read, breathe, and chant.

5.     Just practice.  As my teacher says, the best yoga practice is the one you do. If you’re homeschooling the kids, working online all day, taking care of loved ones, or just generally climbing the walls and can only devote ten minutes a day to your practice, then practice for ten minutes. But fire up that tapas and commit to an ongoing practice.  As the extremely prolific novelist Anthony Trollope once said, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

During this period of intense mental stress and danger to our physical health, a steady at-home yoga practice is not only possible, it may well be a major component in keeping us mentally and physically well.  Yogic practices are proven to down-regulate the nervous system and boost immunity, and yoga in general keeps us in touch with our bodies, our breathing (!) and our bodhichitta (soft-heartedness).  A home yoga practice not only helps  us to keep functioning, it helps us to marshal our resources to support others.  So here’s a new mantra to carry into the coming weeks: keep inside, keep well, and keep practicing.

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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.

Precautions for Yoga Professionals in the Flu and Viral Season

The physical practice of yoga tends to attract people seeking who are actively seeking to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Unfortunately, like any place where human beings gather, a studio can easily become a breeding ground for pathogens.  The added considerations of heat, perspiration, on-site locker rooms, and shared resources such as mats, blocks, and blankets, further contribute to the challenge of maintaining hygiene while practicing yoga in a public space. 

While most studios are fastidious about cleanliness, there are additional personal precautions yoga teachers and students can take to reduce the risk of infection or transmission.  Below are five tips for protecting yourself and your students in cold season, flu season, or during a state of heightened alarm concerning public health.

1) Wash Your Hands Properly and Often

According to the Centers for Disease Control, hand washing is one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of germs, provided it is done properly.  Just as important is when you wash your hands.  The yoga student and the instructor should always wash hands before and after a class, as well as before and after handling any kind of food or drink, or using the lavatory.

Are you washing your hands correctly?  Most of us don’t realize that effective hand-washing requires a full 20-30 seconds of your time.  To truly minimize the transmission of infection, follow these steps from the CDC:

1. Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.

2. Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.

3. Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds.  (Tip: hum “Happy Birthday” two times, all the way through.)

4. Rinse your hands well under running water.

5. Dry your hands using a clean towel, or air-dry them.  It’s extremely important to dry your hands completely, as bacteria colonize more readily on moist surfaces.

6. Use a Paper Towel to turn off the sink, as well as to open the door of a lavatory in a public space, then immediately dispose of it in a waste bin.

It’s also important to use hand sanitizer, especially in a yoga studio.  We’ll cover that below.  However, hand-washing hygiene raises and additional, often overlooked point:

2) Avoid Wearing Jewelry To The Yoga Studio, And Keep Fingernails Short

As PYI’s Pain Management and Clinical Yoga Therapy instructor Beret Kirkeby, C-IAYT LmT, points out it’s best to keep jewelry extremely minimal at a yoga class, and to keep nails trimmed short and clean. Jewelry that is not regularly cleaned can have bacteria levels up to ten times higher than those on the skin, even immediately after washing hands.  Jewelry that is not worn on the hands, such as necklaces and earrings, is sanitized even more rarely. Moreover, long nails, both natural and artificial, are breeding grounds for bacteria, and most people do not sufficiently clean their nails when washing their hands.  While they may look attractive, by wearing your nails long, you create more surface area on your hands where pathogens can lurk.

3) Use Hand Sanitizer In Addition to Proper Hand-Washing

While washing the hands with soap and water is always indicated at obvious times, such as before and after a class, handling food, or using the lavatory, proper use of hand sanitizer can also qualify as effective hand-washing (or a follow-up to hand-washing), provided that the hands are not visibly soiled, or that you haven’t come into contact with another person’s bodily fluids.

According to Ms. Kirkeby, an alcohol-based rub is the preferred method for hand sanitation.  To sanitize hands properly, ensure that you dispense the recommended amount of product (written on the container) into the palm of one hand.  Rub hands together, making sure to cover the surface area of both hands completely, including the undersides of the fingernails, until hands are dry.  Hand sanitizer can also be used a second step after washing with soap and water.

While some yogis may be resistant to hand-sanitizer because of beliefs that it is “not organic,” contributes to antibiotic resistance, or is ineffective, it is important to note the CDC’s guidelines during flu and virus season. While proper soap and water hand-washing is more effective than hand sanitizer on certain germs, such as norovirus and C. diff, alcohol-based hand sanitizers are the preferred method used by healthcare providers to prevent the spread of disease, provided they are at least 60% alcohol.

During a public health alarm such as an infectious disease outbreak or a flu epidemic, yoga professionals and their clients can wear disposable medical gloves when doing any work with students that requires physical touch, discard the gloves immediately upon completion of the session, then wash hands.  Hands-on adjustments should be avoided in classes of more than one student during periods of concern about contagion or in high-risk settings, as it’s not practical for the instructor to change gloves for every student. 

This excerpt from our Yoga Therapy Certificate course covers the standard precautions yoga professionals should take to print the spread of disease and infection. Yoga Therapists working in clinical conditions may have additional precautions to take to keep clients, coworkers and themselves safe and healthy. Thanks to Beret Kirkeby, C-IAYT, LmT for her content and narration.

4) Consider not Teaching or Attending Class When You Are Sick

Even a minor illness, such as head cold, is a legitimate reason to cancel a class during a period of heightened risk of contagion.  We’re not always aware of the immune health of those around us, and even seemingly healthy people can unwittingly spread infection.  For someone who is immune-suppressed, a minor infection such as a cold can lower the body’s resistance to more serious disease.  It is far better to cancel a class or reschedule an appointment than to risk contracting or transmitting pathogens during a public health alarm.  If you do find yourself teaching or attending class when sick, make sure to follow the guidelines above, and if you need to cough, cough properly: use the vampire cough method, maintain a three-foot barrier between yourselves and others, and wash hands properly immediately after coughing.

5) Avoid Sharing

The yoga community is a generous one, and the average yogi is happy to share: a snack, some essential oil, even a sip from a water bottle!  But this laudable virtue should be curtailed during a public health alarm.  While sipping from the same water bottle is obviously unhygienic, sharing a bag of Pirate’s Booty or passing around a roller of essential oil might seem benign under normal circumstances.  But unless everyone present has undertaken proper hand-sanitizing methods immediately prior, several (or even two) people dipping their hands into a common bag and then touching their mouths is a superb way to spread germs.  Anything applied directly to the skin, such as an essential oil roller or a towel, should ideally not be shared, as many bacteria can live on the skin - including serious pathogens such as MRSA.  As a rule, for everyone’s health, if you love to share, keep individually wrapped candies or bars on hand.  But in general, if it touches your skin or your mouth, keep it to yourself.  This is doubly true in the locker room.

No one enjoys enduring the stress of cold or flu season, or the heightened anxiety of a public health alarm. But with proper preparation and rigorous adherence to some basic hygiene guidelines, we can make considerable strides in the effort to keep ourselves and our students and clients healthy.

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Molly Goforth is a yoga and meditation teacher and a student at Prema Yoga Institute. She specializes in accessibility and trauma-informed yoga teaching and practice.