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Art Exhibit: Hope in the Shadows(event)(1 day)
ZY Qigong Class for Energy Healers & TCM Practitioners(event)(2 days)
Enhancing your Fat Burning Potential(event)(2 days)
OPEN HOUSE at Access Natural Healing (event)(3 days)
CONSCIOUS VIBRATIONAL ALIGNMENT WORKSHOP(event)(4 days)
SHAMANIC DRUMMING & DREAMING CIRCLE:(event)(4 days)

Grin and Bear It? Forget It

Learning to let go with restorative yoga

by PAMELA POST

Recently, I felt in need of an instant mood lift. I was staring down the barrel of too many deadlines, running on empty.

Desperate for a little lightening up, I turned to the fail-safe laughter tonic of my childhood: I Love Lucy. Something light and hilarious from a simpler time would be just the thing to lift my enervated ennui.

Score! I found the classic candy factory episode on YouTube, and readied myself for some much-anticipated mood-boosting endorphins.

But—WAAAAAHHHH!—I was shocked to dis-

cover my reaction to the scene fell as flat as Lucy’s attempts at four-part harmony with Ricky and the Mertzes.

The retro vignette that had me in stitches when I was eight revealed itself as a grim, tragicomic tale of modern malaise: an army-sergeant-type factory matron threatens newly hired candy-wrappers Lucy and Ethel with the sack if they allow a single chocolate to pass them on the conveyor belt unwrapped. Lucy and Ethel are unable to keep up. They stuff chocolates into their mouths, hats, apron pockets—anything to hide the evidence and keep up the inhuman pace. The scene is replete with adrenalin, stress, and impending employment doom.

This isn’t comedy. It’s frickin’ Kafka!

OK, maybe it’s just me. With a premonition that Lucy and Ethel have come back from the ’50s to give me a message, I find myself visiting Evelyn Neaman, one of Vancouver’s leading stress busters.

Neaman is an expert in restorative yoga, a form of hatha that gently supports the body into inversions and poses through the aid of bolsters and pillows, and facilitates deep states of relaxation and meditation.

“Restorative yoga is all about going inside and refilling our empty wells, so that you don’t need drugs and Holt Renfrew and all those things we use to fill ourselves back up,” says the vivacious and health-radiating Neaman as we share ironic laughs about the craziness of life over a cup of green tea in her Dunbar home.

Neaman discovered restorative yoga 12 years ago when she was a busy professional working in the law courts education system. Judges and court workers have since become devotees of her lunchtime classes. Legions of stressed-out new moms and people recovering from chronic and acute illness flock to her home studio for the healing benefits of a practice she calls an “elixir.”

“There are very few opportunities to find stillness in your life unless you are a meditator. It’s hard to meditate, and so really, this sort of yoga helps people to meditate in a comfortable way.”

An emblematic pose of restorative yoga is the “legs up the wall” posture, where you lie on your back with your back gently supported by a blanket or bolster, legs stretched comfortably—you guessed it—up the wall.

“They say that as you grow old, you [can] get younger by reversing the flow of gravity in your body,” Neaman says. “Most people think they have to do more to get more, but you actually do less to get more in restorative yoga.”

Enough talk. Evelyn takes me down into her luxurious basement home studio that she calls her “yoga cave” for a 90-minute session of restorative yoga. To the sounds of music, the playing of crystal bowls and chanting, she covers me in blankets, tucking me in like a loving mother. She puts me in gentle poses, bolsters supporting me. Sandbags are placed along my lower back. She nests my aching neck into the soft support of a folded blanket. A lavender-scented eye pillow closes out the stimuli of the world. Crystal stones are dotted along the chakra points of my body.

“Crystals have been still for millennia,” she whispers. “They help facilitate our stillness.” As she guides my body into deeper and deeper states of comfort, she continually asks, “Are you comfortable? A hundred per cent?” She knows we have a tendency to hold discomfort, grin and bear it. That’s not allowed in restorative yoga. This is about letting go.

The session ends with listening to a yoga nidra guided imagery tape that promotes body awareness and stillness. It’s the ultimate yin experience of receiving, in stark contrast to the relentless yang of our “doing” culture.

As if reaching the merciful end of a Desi Arnaz song, the Babalú beat of incessant stressful thoughts has stopped beating in my head, and I’m ready to laugh again. I’ve been fed an elixir indeed—even better than one of Lucy’s cure-all vitamin-meat-vegetable-and-mineral pills in “Vitameatavegamin”!

Now that’s a funny episode.
Pamela Post is a CBC News reporter who is planning to spend more time with her legs up the wall and less time worrying about deadlines.

Please email comments to letters@shared-vision.com

March Body Talk

by ELIZABETH BARKER

Your Brain on Sugar

Not just a hazard to your teeth and waistline, slurping up too many sugary beverages may increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. To test the effects of sugar overload on the progression of Alzheimer’s (a condition linked to both obesity and diabetes), researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham fed a group of mice a diet that was 10 per cent composed of sugar water. After 25 weeks, the sugar-fed mice had gained about 17 per cent more weight than mice that followed a regular balanced diet. They also displayed poorer learning abilities and memory retention, and their brains contained more than twice as many amyloid plaque deposits (a hallmark of Alzheimer’s).

The human equivalent of the study’s mouse diet would be about five cans of soda per day, the study’s authors note. But since mice have a higher metabolism, they add, less sugar intake could have a similar impact on humans.

New Red-Meat Risk

One more reason to cut back on bacon burgers: new findings from the U.S. National Cancer Institute indicate that loading up on red meat and processed meat could raise your risk for several kinds of cancer. The study’s authors even suggest that one in 10 colorectal (colon or rectal cancer) and one in 10 lung cancers could be avoided if people lowered their red- and processed-meat intake.

The study began in 1995, when researchers surveyed about 500,000 cancer-free adults (ages 50 to 71) about their eating habits over the previous year. At a follow-up session some eight years later, 53,396 incidences of cancer were identified. Those who had the highest red-meat intake showed a 20 to 60 per cent increased risk of colorectal, liver, lung, and esophageal cancer when compared to those who ate the least red meat. A high intake of processed meat was also linked to elevated risk for colorectal and lung cancer.

Since the study’s definitions of red meat and processed meat overlapped (with bacon and ham included in both categories, for instance), the researchers weren’t able to determine which kind of meat may cause which form of cancer.

Fresher Breath, Naturally

A herb-infused mint could knock out odour-causing germs faster than your average breath freshener, according to a new study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Mints made with extract of magnolia bark—a herb used in traditional Chinese medicine—were found to kill 61 per cent of oral bacteria that trigger tooth decay and bad breath, within 30 minutes. Researchers tested the extract’s effects on saliva samples taken from nine volunteers, discovering that extract-free mints destroyed only 3.6 per cent of germs.

Not yet available in breath-freshening products, digestion-aiding magnolia bark is most commonly found in stomach-soothing herbal formulas. If developed, magnolia-containing mints could serve as an alternative to existing antibacterial products, some of which may lead to tooth staining and other side effects.

Please email comments to letters@shared-vision.com