Creative Anxiety: STRETCH. BEND. Controlled Breathing: How Yoga Changed my Life

Friday, October 19, 2012

STRETCH. BEND. Controlled Breathing: How Yoga Changed my Life

SO…if you haven’t tried yoga, if you think you aren’t “flexible” or if you think it’s not for you…YOU HAVE GOT TO TRY IT!

Put your ego aside for a second and step into a studio or get a DVD and try it at home! Yoga has been the best thing I have found to help with my anxiety and I will forever be a yogi. It isn’t about how GOOD you can bend, whether or not you can touch your toes or who is looking at you! It is holding a difficult pose and then coming out of it and thinking, “wow, I did it”. Yoga is trying a pose even if you don’t think you can maneuver your body in such a way, it is controlling your breath and accomplishing a state of total CALM (if you fall, you fall…just get back up). Yoga is lying down at the end of class and saying “holy shit I made it!”. After a while these positive outcomes and thoughts follow you into your normal daily life.

With anxiety your brain talks TOO MUCH! It tells you what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do, how awful you will feel or how you will fail at something new. Yoga goes against all of those silly little thoughts that flutter your head all day. Yoga is about the NOW and how you feel as you flow from pose to pose. Your anxiety lives in the past and in the future, what kind of life is that? I walk into my yoga studio and leave my brain outside the door and focus on ME. And, yes, my brain does sneak in and tell me how awful I am doing once or twice during a yoga class, but I reverse each thought and find something positive that I have improved on in my practice (YOU ALWAYS IMPROVE ON SOMETHING)! I’ve continued to practice yoga; positive affirmations and breath training have followed me into my everyday life helping me manage my anxiety.

I encourage any anxiety sufferer, WHOLE HEAREDLY, to at least try yoga and see how you feel afterwards. I promise you will feel the benefits.

Yoga has changed my life and helped my anxiety so tremendously that I decided to learn as much as I can about it and sign up to become a certified yoga instructor. CRAZY right? At first I signed up thinking I would learn SO much that my anxiety would somehow disappear and I would gain a new talent. It ended up being so much more than that.

I believe that yoga teacher training ignited this want and need inside of me to help others find their way to CALM. And this is a great start! I am so very thankful to myself, for signing up, but also incredibly thankful to my instructor, Adrienne Hengels! She taught me how to not use my anxiety as a crutch, but as a bounding point. And here I am now and will be doing LOTS more in the future.

Yoga is aligning the mind, the body and the spirit. In balancing your entire self your anxiety has not a lot of room to rattle around and cause you to feel uneasy. Sounds wonderful really! So why not do that for yourself?

I am currently doing the research into the poses that benefit anxiety directly, can calm you in a time of distress and can be a sort of balancer for when you might feel a little out of whack. I will eventually be posting some poses that you all can try. And when they start helping you, pass it on and help someone else! “Spread the love”!

So I sincerely encourage anyone and everyone, especially anxiety sufferers, to try a little yoga. If you are in the Midwest area come out and check out Power of your Om studio (www.powerofyourom.com). Stop in and take a class and let me know how you feel afterwards. Comment and let us know or send us a private email. If you need a little motivation, email me and I will help you or recommend a DVD you can try at home. I am here to help you experience something new that COULD help! That’s it. Simple.

Check it out. Let us know what you think. Don’t forget to smile through it.

Peace. Love. Sincerity.

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The girls who started it all...and their stories.

Well hello there! My name is Megan and here’s my little tale:

It’s safe to say that the person I am today is a far different one than I was many years ago. As many of you know, dealing with anxiety seems like an uphill battle some days, and I’ve felt like for most of my life I have been struggling to get to the top of that hill to safety. My anxiety started very young and mainly revolved around the constant fear of something medical going wrong with me. I was definitely a hypochondriac, and gave myself unnecessary amounts of anxiety over little to nothing at times. After passing out a few times due to seeing my own blood, both fainting and blood became huge triggers for me. This led me to avoid many situations, namely doctors’ offices, etc. My anxious symptoms were like that of fainting or having a heart attack and at any given time, I felt like my world was crashing and I was about to die.

…which brings me to my next chapter with the “beast”. By the way, I call anxiety the “beast” because it truly takes on its own entity at times. Anyhow, my next chapter is one of quite the lengthy time frame. It was all exacerbated when one day a tragedy hit close to home. My dad had got into a motorcycle accident and died instantly. This, as for anyone, sent my world spinning at the speed of light. It was then that my fear of death and dying amplified. I was constantly feeling sick, or like an 80 pound elephant was sitting on my chest. I didn’t know what I was feeling, nor did I really talk to anybody about it, which made it worse. Junior high, high school, and even my first few years at the junior college were plagued by constant worry; self esteem issues, horrible panic attacks, and so on. I somehow managed to make it through as normal as possible but I was hurting on the inside and most definitely not living a full life.

Once I went away to college my anxiety had stabilized. It was by no means gone, but for some reason it had subsided to a point of decent comfort. Those few years were as relaxed as they could be, and life seemed to be pretty good. It wasn’t until about a year ago that the “beast” began to really rear its ugly head again. This time it was back tenfold, however, and I was determined to find a happy place…one of comfort and happiness. And that my friends is where I’m at today, trying to find a true life of bliss. This last year has been a hard one, but through a lot of self discovery and branching out into new avenues, I am slowly piecing together what works best for me. So far I have found inner strength through trying new things such as yoga, supplements, and creative outlets such as photography, dance, and art. My hopes in build a community through Creative Anxiety is that I can reach out to others who strive to better themselves and others who deal with this unfortunate beast.

Hi there, I’m Chrissy!

My journey with anxiety has been a long one (or so it feels), dating back to when I was in high school. I had been struggling for a while in social settings and changes, but had chopped it up to being an average teenager. It was my first anxiety attack that painted a clearer picture as to what I had been dealing with. And so began the journey…

My first attack was something I will never forget and has created a foundation for where I stand today. My first attack also explains a lot of my history and was a breakthrough for me in getting the necessary help I needed at the time. It was triggered by a past traumatic experience. When I was fourteen I had been raped. The setting in which it took place was visually recreated which induced my first and most horrific panic/anxiety attack. This was a breakthrough in a lot of ways for me. I had not told anyone, spoken about it or personally revisited the memory for four years until that day. When my family was informed I gained the support I needed to start my battle against ANXIETY!

After learning what anxiety was, how it works and being fed drug after drug by doctor after doctor I was really getting nowhere. I was feeling zombie-esque on the medicine, having bad withdrawals and feeling sedated for the majority of the time. This is when I decided to take a different path.

See…my brain automatically links my anxiety now to being raped and the feelings that were felt in that situation. It is such a feeling of disgust and helplessness that motivate me to free myself. I have problems in social situations and trusting others with anything and everything. I have a fear of being attacked, which feeds my anxiety daily in everyday situations and the constant negative self-talk is something I have to keep battling.

I have really two choices (the way I see it)…I can either lay down and feel sorry for what was and what now is or I can fight like hell to live the BEST life I can possibly live. I’ve chosen to fight! I believe there is a fix for this thing we all call ANXIETY and I am determined to find it. Through trial and error, trial and success and a lot of support I believe it is something that is attainable. Holistic, drug free, all natural healthy ways to heal is what I’m all about. So let this new journey begin in sharing what I’ve learned with other who might have walked in my shoes or who choose to walk right alongside me. Let’s fight on!