8th Street Studio - Blog

The Yoga Center represents at Maitri

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:56:13 -0500

Essential Soap is now part of the Charlotte Art Collective

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:17:06 -0500

Essential Soap (handmade soap and lotions made by Phyllis Rollins and friends) will participate in the May 12 Charlotte Art Collective. This spring show will be held from 10am-4pm at 2821 Park Road. Other show participat the show include pottery, sculpture, jewelry, photography, wood, handmade books, paintings, prints, glass, fiber art and garden art.

Rope Wall Workshop March 2012

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:20:43 -0500

Here's the kind of fun YOU could be having if you attend one of our monthly Rope Wall Workshops... (click here to register)

See video from our most recent Yoga and sound workshop

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:18:29 -0500

If you've never experienced one of our Yoga and Sound workshops, you're in for a treat. The next workshop is Sat 3/17, 2-4. Go to the Workshops & Events page now to sign up. Space is limited so be sure to sign up early.

Downward-Facing Docs: Med Students Study Yoga To Help Patients, Selves

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:16:34 -0500

February 10, 2012 | 10:36 AM
By Rachel Zimmerman
wbur.org | Common Health

Ben Tannenbaum, a wiry first-year medical student, is under pressure.

His typical day involves about five hours of lectures and test prep — physiology, genetics and histology on a recent weekday; a mad dash off to a clinic to practice as a doctor learning physical exams and basic medical history-taking; and then, after getting home around 8:30 pm, a few more hours of work reviewing the day’s material before it all starts again the next morning.

“And that isn’t including elective courses, student organizations, research, volunteer work, or extracurricular activities that almost everyone is trying to find time for as well,” says Tannenbaum, a-24-year-old student at Boston University School of Medicine.

But on Tuesday night, the perpetual motion of Tannenbaum’s life stopped. He entered a packed classroom, rolled out his blue yoga mat and plopped down on the floor. Alongside 25 other barefoot medical students, Tannenbaum listened to a half-hour talk on “the relaxation response” and how the technique — a simple type of meditation that reduces the activity of the autonomic nervous system — can alleviate stress-related maladies, from migraines to depression. Then everyone took a deep breath and stretched into downward-facing dog. The yoga part of the medical school’s weekly yoga course had begun.

As everyone knows, medical students are a singularly stressed-out lot. “More than 20 percent end up with depression, more than half suffer from burnout, and in any given year, as many as 11 percent contemplate suicide,” Dr. Pauline Chen writes in a New York Times report on the “toxic” nature of the medical education process. So it makes sense to offer these overwhelmed kids de-stressors like yoga and meditation. But here, at the BU medical school’s first-ever yoga elective the aim is even broader: The faculty and instructors who launched the class hope these future doctors will be able to exploit their knowledge of yoga and its research-based benefits to someday help patients and to feel as comfortable prescribing yoga as they do Prozac.

“I’m leaning toward primary care,” said Tannenbaum, the med student, speaking after class. “And it’s so important to acknowledge that there are many paths to health and wellness. It’s one thing to sort of know about yoga and other alternatives to pills and medications, but with the lecture component here, to really understand how it works and be able to talk about it with patients, I think that will be be very helpful.”

So in these weekly, hour-and-forty-five minute classes, lead instructor Heather Mason — who designed the course — and members of the BU faculty introduce students to the research behind various elements of yoga. The focus is mainly neuroscience, but there’s also psychology, mind-body medicine, anatomy, and beyond. The class syllabus includes clinical studies on how the nervous system benefits through an elongated exhale, the mechanics of neuroplasticity, increasing heart-rate variability and alleviating lower back pain through postures.

“The unique thing about this class is that the students are getting this extra neuroscience component, so it’s more than just experiential,” says Dr. Rob Saper, the Director of Integrative Medicine at BU School of Medicine, who envisioned the course with Mason after the two met at a yoga research conference in India last year. Saper adds: “In 1988 At Harvard Medical School [where he was a student] a yoga class that included lectures on neuroscience would have been untenable, a total nonstarter.”

In fact, Saper, as a burnt-out medical student, took a year off to study at Kripalu, the yoga retreat in western, Mass. which, he says, inspired him to “try to change medical education and medical care in a way that’s more wholistic” and to make self-care a priority. “To the degree a medical student or health care professional can promote their own wellness — whether it’s yoga, running, whatever — that person will be better able to provide outstanding health care and avoid burnout, which has been shown to negatively impact medical care.”

It’s worth noting that under the fluorescent lights here at the BU yoga class there are no fashionable Lululemon outfits nor orders to “push to your edge” with complex, increasingly controversial, poses.

Indeed, in Tuesday’s class Mason, complained that she had no blocks to use for props; when there was a shortage of mats, some students were clearly unsettled by the prospect of practicing on the maroon-colored carpet badly in need of a shampoo. “Who is familiar with the relaxation response?” asked Mason, who is also finishing up a master’s degree in neuroscience, at the start of her lecture. One young woman raises her hand. The others shook their heads. “Well, if you want to use this in your clinical practice, you can teach someone in an hour and it can have a huge impact,” Mason said.

Student wellness and self-care programs aren’t new. Increasingly, they’re sprouting up at medical schools across the country, says Dr. Benjamin Kligler, Vice Chair and Research Director of Beth Israel Medical Center’s Department of Integrative Medicine in New York. But the shift has truly started to take hold in recent years: Kligler cites the rapid growth of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine (he chairs the group) which started with eight medical school in the late 1990s and now has over 50.

“Many of these schools incorporate into their curriculum an experiential approach, in which students actually participate in some type of “alternative” therapy — yoga, meditation, acupuncture for example — and then also learn about the evidence for and against effectiveness for these therapies as well as the clinical situations in which they tend to be used,” Kligler says. But naysayers remain. “There are still conservative pockets out there,” Kligler says. “People who feel there isn’t enough evidence yet for us to incorporate some of these alternative practices into the medical school curriculum. But one counter argument is, if patients are doing it, it’s something doctors should know about.” Indeed, with an estimated 20 million Americans doing yoga, it makes sense for doctors to at least have some understanding of what all the buzz is about.

Dr. Chris Streeter, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at BU School of Medicine practices yoga and conducts research on its effects. She recently gave a Power Point presentation to the BU yoga students on how yoga impacts levels of Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA), a key neurotransmitter in the brain.

Streeter’s latest research, published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2010, and done in collaboration with doctors at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. compared two groups of exercisers: people doing yoga and people walking. The bottom line findings: After 12-weeks, the folks in the yoga group showed greater improvements in their mood and anxiety levels compared to the walkers, and there was a positive correlation between increased GABA levels, measured through brain imaging, and improved mood.

At the end of Tuesday’s class — a series of sun salutations, warriors and pigeons — Mason turned out all the lights and led students through a short meditation. She had them relax various body parts and then repeat a simple, calming word with each inhale and exhale for about 10 minutes.

As Carolyn Smith-Lin, another first year medical student, packed up to leave, she explained the main reason she started attending the class: “It’s good for my own mental health.” But now, she says: “I can see how it could be part of an evidence-based practice.” She’s even started prescribing it, albeit informally: “I’m encouraging my mother to do yoga or tai chi,” she says, “for the health benefits.”

The Science of Yoga

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:27:03 -0500

Click here to read the Terry Gross interview with William Board, author of The Science of Yoga. Or click below to download the Mp3 file. Air date Feb 7, 2012.

Fresh Air interview.mp3
File Size:	18092 kb
File Type:	mp3

Download File

Thanks for celebrating our 10th year at 8th Street Studio

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:24:56 -0500

Thank you all for coming to the birthday party and participating in the free classes. Thirty five people participated in the free yoga classes and cupcakes. It was a lot of fun all day long. We look forward to our next party which will be the 20th anniversary of Charlotte's first Yoga Center in 2013!

An IYNAUS Response

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:37:06 -0500

Jan 11 2012 “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” in the Jan. 8 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine contained errors and a negative slant. In consultation with Senior teachers, IYNAUS sent this letter to the Times; we hope it will be published to correct some of the errors. IYNAUS takes seriously its mission of disseminating the teaching of Sri B. K. S. Iyengar and of promoting Iyengar Yoga teachers in the U.S. and around the world.

Let us know what you think. Post your comments below and write your own letter to letters@nytimes.com

8 January 2012

To the New York Times Editor: If yoga hurts, it is not yoga. A student’s overreaching ego, a teacher’s ignorance –many causes may lead to injury while doing yoga, but yoga itself cannot be blamed. Nor can B. K. S. Iyengar, who more than any figure in modern yoga has made yoga safe, accessible and transformative for all.

Many teachers and students of Iyengar Yoga were disturbed by the negative tone and outright errors in “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by William J. Broad. Just one example: Broad calls Roger Cole a “reformer” who advocates reducing neck bending in Shoulder Stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of blankets. But this teaching was devised by Mr. Iyengar – Cole is simply one of many of Mr. Iyengar’s teachers who work this way. Similarly Broad writes that Mr. Iyengar does not address yoga injuries in his seminal book Light on Yoga; any reading will reveal countless instructions on how to perform poses correctly, without harm.

We urge readers to try an Iyengar Yoga class themselves. Iyengar Yoga teachers are held to the most rigorous standards. Only after years of practice and study, and close examination by senior teachers, are they certified. A Certified Iyengar Yoga teacher is a student’s guarantee of a yoga experience which is safe, progressive and personalized to their condition.

During his more than 70 years of practice and teaching, B. K. S. Iyengar has pioneered modern yoga and modern yoga therapeutics. One of his guiding principles – that yoga is for everyone – led him to develop modifications for the yoga asanas (postures) using props which allow them to be performed by practitioners of every age, fitness and skill level.

Iyengar teachers are trained to work even with students with serious limitations and injuries, to recognize when students are ready for certain asanas, and not to ask them to go beyond their readiness. Going to one’s maximum also means not going beyond one’s limits; teachers must help students understand this.

Before undertaking the practice of asana, those who pursue the eight-limbed path of yoga must first practice the guidelines of yama and niyama; first among these is ahimsa – non-violence. For a teacher, this means “do no harm.”

Sincerely,

Christopher Beach, President
The Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States (IYNAUS)

21 Harvey Ct., Irvine CA 92617
949-379-4969
Beach59@hotmail.com

Our Trip to Satchidananda's Yogaville

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:24:41 -0500

We had a great time in Yogaville. We plan to go again in early summer 2012. Stay tuned for updates so you can attend!

Medical Yoga class

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:38:13 -0500

This is a wonderful video about the medical classes in Pune.