Available on Video: Yoga for Healthy Digestion Practices!

by Baxter

Since I last wrote on subject of yoga and your digestive system (see Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Yoga), I completed two live one-hour lectures on the topic for YogaU Online, which are now archived and available on their website if you had hoped to join me live but could not. See yogauonline.com to access these lecture.

And, in addition to the information-packed talks, I completed a one-hour video practice on Yoga for Healthy Digestion in August! It is part of the package you get if you purchase the sessions from YogaU, and it is the first significant video practice I’ve produced in a long time, so I am pretty pleased to have it to share with you! To give you a sense of how I came up with the practices on the video, I wanted to share a bit about how yoga is applied to imbalances in the digestive system.

As I discuss in my talks on yoga and the digestive system, when you have an imbalance in your digestive system, it can often be classified in one of two ways: either a condition of excess digestive energy, such as with heartburn or reflux disease or a condition of deficient digestive energy, such as with chronic constipation. This way of looking at digestive imbalances comes from the work of TKV Desikachar, which I was exposed to back in 2005 when I studied at his center in India. Addressing these imbalances can then be done by applying a particular yogic quality to the practice you design to bring the situation in to better balance, towards homeostasis. 

If a condition is one of excess energy, you’d address it with a calming, cooling, restorative approach. The word we use in the world of yoga therapeutics to describe this is Langhana. On the other hand, if the condition is one of deficiency, you’d address it with a more stimulating, active or heating practice, known as a Brahmana practice. There is a slight paradox here however, for if your deficient condition is really causing you to be depleted, you can always start with a more Langhana style approach, and as your energetic reserves improve, switch to a more Brahmana style practice.  So, you can never go wrong going with the quieter, calming, gently grounding yoga practices, which include gentle asana, restoratives, pranayama (such as a 1:2 ratio inhale:exhale breathing), and guided meditations, to name a few of the Langhana tools.

In the video, you will get a 30-minute practice that exemplifies Langhana practice for conditions of excess and another 30-minute practice that exemplifies a Brahmana practice or conditions of deficiency. I hope you find both the talks and the video helpful as you attempt to get your digestion into optimum balance! You can find them both at yogauonline.com.