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Yoga is Healing

Flopped on my belly, swishing my legs back and forth in the air as I prop my chin up on my palms, I flash back: I'm 6 years old, stationed six inches from the TV, humming along with The Banana Splits. This would make tonight's yoga instructor, Eric Evers, 34, proud. He is a Kripalu-certified instructor at the YMCA in Knoxville and at Paragon Health Club in Oak Ridge by night, and Web programmer with a masters in computer science by day. In teaching, he is like nothing so much as a big, overgrown kid himself—leading his class around the room walking backward, flopping his head from side to side, joking and laughing and generally having fun.

But from Evers' point of view, this sort of fun serves an important purpose. "Adults have forgotten how to breathe, they've forgotten how to communicate with their bodies," he says. "And one of the major purposes of yoga is to reunite that which has been separated by stress. When you join back together that which has been separated by stress, then stress levels naturally come back down."

A major component in this sort of stress reduction is breath. "When you breathe properly, when you allow the belly to come out and the lungs to fill with air, then the internal organs and glands are purified," he explains. "Glands are incredibly important in yoga. Not only are we stretching muscles, but we're massaging internal organs and glands, and helping them to secrete in proper balance. We're helping change our moods by changing our body chemistry."

But as powerful a healing tool as yoga can be, it's even better preventive medicine, he says. "Yoga, by connecting the body with the mind, increases body awareness so that when warning signs of injury or fatigue arise, you're simply more aware of them. It keeps you out of trouble in the first place."