Healthy Living Club

On the back of a whale in the middle of an impossibly blue ocean, I was riding high, slapping high fives with the fins of great white sharks and taunting a giant squid. It was an amazing dream.Yet moments before, I’d been locked in a recurring childhood nightmare, the one in which I tumbled into the jaws of the sharks. This time everything was different: Still asleep, I realized I was dreaming and turned the scary dream into something beautiful. I awoke exuberantnd the nightmare never came back.

That was the first time I experienced a lucid dream: a dream in which the dreamer is aware of being asleep and can control the script. Lucid dreaming, also known as dream yoga, is gaining attention in the West. But the practice has been refined over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists and Taoists, who use it as a tool for reaching enlightenment. Yogis, believing that the “dream body” is better able to feel subtle channels and chakra, have also used lucid dreaming to perform physical yoga and meditation, and to communicate with spiritual teachers. But the main point is to help you see that “reality” is like a dreamonstructed in the mind. If you can see through the illusion of your dreams, you can more easily see through the illusion of reality, too.

Now that scientists in the West have begun to study dream yoga, they’re discovering it has many practical applications. Research and testimony from practitioners suggest that lucid dreaming can help people boost creativity, shed addictions, transcend phobias, and improve performance in sports and at work. Sleep researchers say the method probably works something like creative visualization doesnly more powerfully, because dreams feel more real and thus have a more profound effect on the body and mind.

Lucid dreaming can be particularly useful for breaking through negative emotions. For example, if you interpret a nightmare about a monster to be, say, fear about a relationship, making that mental association can be therapeutic. But in a lucid dream, you can confront or change the monster itself.

“When you escape from a nightmare by waking up, you haven’t dealt with the problem,” says Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist who directs the Internet-based Lucidity Institute. “But staying with the nightmare and accepting its challenge, as lucidity makes possible, allows you to resolve the dream problem in a way that leaves you healthier than before.”

LaBerge can take credit for many discoveries about lucid dreaming. In the late 1970s, it was his research at Stanford University that showed lucid dreaming to be both a common phenomenon and a teachable skill. “Yogis never needed any knowledge about neurology to do this,” he says. “But it’s important that we do the scientific research so we can talk to Westerners about it in their own language.”

LaBerge has found that parts of the brain used in waking life can also be stimulated by dreams. For example, one of his studies at Stanford showed that subjects who had an orgasm in a dream had physiological reactions similar to those of a waking orgasm. It’s that basic principle, says LaBerge, that makes dreams feel so real and makes lucid dreaming such an effective tool for creative visualization.

If you suffer from acute anxiety, try a gentle restorative class with plenty of focus on breathing, suggests San Francisco Bay Area yoga teacher and physician Baxter Bell. Viniyoga, in which poses are synchronized with the breath, is a good option; even better would be to find a teacher who stresses pranayama, the science of yogic breathing. One breath pattern Bell recommends calls for adding one second to each exhalation, so your exhalations grow increasingly longer than your inhalations. “This is a quieting, calming breath pattern that combats stress,” Bell says.

Open Up

My favorite poses are backbends and chest openers such as Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose), Matsyasana (Fish Pose), and Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose), simply because they make me feel free and open. And these are among the poses yoga teachers most often recommend.

Go Upside Down

Other favorites are supported inversions because they give you the relaxation benefits of going upside down without the hard worknd stressf a challenging pose such as Handstand. “When the blood rushes to your head, your body interprets it as a rise in blood pressure and reacts to calm you down,” Bell says. Your heart rate and breathing slow and your blood vessels dilate. However, if inversions scare you, they may trigger the fight-or-flight response, which in turn boosts anxiety. If that’s the case, you should practice Salamba Sarvangasana (Supported Shoulderstand) or Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose) as the perfect compromise. Lastly, Bell recommends sitting and standing twists to release emotional tension.

The attack started, as they almost always do, late at night. While my two daughters slept, I paced the darkened kitchen, mentally ticking off an unending list of things that felt like they needed to be done right that minute. My breathing was rapid, my nerves jittery, my stomach queasy. Then I tried the trick a therapist taught me long ago and carefully jotted down my “worry list.”

The next day, hoping to assuage my anxiety with action, I raced around trying to take care of everything on the list. But my thoughts swarmed in a vibrating hum and I couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to be effective. I returned an important call, and then couldn’t remember what I’d meant to talk to the caller about. I went grocery shopping, but left a bag of groceries in the cart. The absurdity of the situation hit me when my 12-year-old daughter picked up the list and read it out loud: “Pay overdue mortgage,” certainly a legitimate concern, was followed by “change lightbulb in closet”—surely not worth losing sleep over.

Although I’ve sought countless therapeutic remedies for my anxiety, the eventual breakthrough I experienced didn’t happen on a therapist’s couch. It occurred in a single moment in a yoga class, when I finally managed to get into Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose)—and stay in it for a full five minutes. Something happened: My back arched, my chest expanded, I breathed more deeply than I would have thought possible. And my mind cleared. All that constant, overwhelming clatter was just gone, blessedly gone.

As I discovered later, my yoga breakthrough wasn’t unique. More and more anxiety experts are recommending yoga—along with meditation and other mindfulness techniques—as part of an effective strategy for bringing a worried mind under control.

“In the past few years, yoga has gained widespread acceptance among those working with anxiety disorders,” says psychologist Christian Komor, an expert in obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD), who directs the OCD Recovery Centers of America, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “There’s a real buzz about it-people are taking it seriously as we see research that validates its benefits.”

This is good news, considering that anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States. According to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, more than 13 percent of the adult population is affected. And that’s counting only those with a diagnosed anxiety disorder; there are many more people, like me, who struggle with a chronic tendency to worry over anything and everything.

Why Yoga Works

“When you practice yoga, you’re able to be more aware of thoughts as they come and go. You can see them in your mind but not chase them,” says Lizabeth Roemer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Roemer is at the forefront of what she calls a “pretty substantial movement” to harness the power of mindfulness strategies such as yoga and meditation to supplement traditional anxiety therapy. With collaborator Susan Orsillo, Roemer has spent the past four years developing a treatment protocol for anxiety that blends traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy with the mindfulness program of yoga, meditation, and breathing techniques developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, wraps up this year, and Roemer says preliminary results are more than encouraging.

One spring morning, Janet White (not her real name) was having lunch on the San Francisco waterfront with her husband and her daughter Kate, when her daughter burst into tears, sobbing that she feared her recent engagement was a huge mistake. White, a 58-year-old graphic artist and the mother of six, had never seen Kate so distraught. Thinking it would help, she left with Kate to walk through the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral, atop nearby Nob Hill. But halfway up the hill, White became so dizzy and weak herself that she had to lie down in a park.Her daughter’s emotional crisis came at a time when White, who lives in Lafayette, California, was feeling dangerously depleted. Her husband, a lawyer, was bringing his stressful workload home, and another daughter, a teenager, was cutting classes.

White tried to take care of herself by doing yoga or Pilates every morning, but she was plagued by stress-related health problems?igh blood pressure and painful recurring outbreaks of cracking and bleeding on her hands.

White, it seems, was suffering from an excess of empathy, a quality that recent research suggests is hard-wired into our brains and bodies. When we empathize with the physical or emotional pain of others, specialized brain cells called mirror neurons start firing much the same way they would if we were experiencing the pain directly. Researchers suspect that people who are highly empathic, like White, have higher-than average numbers of mirror neurons in their brains, and that those neurons are especially active. What’s long been suspected in the mental health field?nd what the physical sciences are just starting to understand?s that being overly empathic can be bad for your health.

“Feeling too much of others’ pain can lead to chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia,” says Judith Orloff, M.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Positive Energy. Overly empathic people, she says, too often walk around feeling anxious, depressed, frightened, or as White did, just plain exhausted.

No one is suggesting that you try to rid yourself of empathy, just that you learn to use it appropriately. “Empathy is necessary for compassion,” says Nischala Joy Devi, an internationally known yoga teacher in Fairfax, California, and the author of The Healing Path of Yoga. “But if you lose yourself in others’ suffering, you can no longer be compassionate.” Fortunately, there are several ways you can remain sensitive to the pain of others without overwhelming yourself, draining your energy?r even becoming ill.

Set Boundaries

“If you’re overly empathic, you struggle when you see someone else in pain; you want to make it go away,” says Bo Forbes, a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and yoga therapist in Boston. But if your empathy extends to taking on someone else’s karma by trying to take away pain, you’re invading that person’s boundaries. The same is true if you allow others to invade your psychic space. It may sound callous, but sometimes letting others struggle to find their own way can be the greater gift.

Long before Starbucks sprang up on every corner, traditional Chinese medicine used acupressure and acupuncture to recharge mental batteries. Now University of Michigan researchers have affirmed the practice, in the first study ever to find that acupressure can boost alertness.

The study enlisted people in a potentially snooze-inducing three-day lecture series. At each lunch break, the volunteers gave themselves one of two acupressure treatments: one thought to invigorate, the other designed to relax. At the end of each day, the people doing the stimulation treatment had more energy than those who did the relaxing one. The alertness treatment involves stimulating five points for three minutes each: the top of the head; the V where the thumb and forefinger connect; the spot below the center of the kneecap; the point beneath the ball of the foot; and the back of the neck at the base of the skull.

If 15 minutes of this might bother your boss, don’t fret. “If you’re only going to use one point, tapping your head is best,” says study author Richard Harris. “Or squeeze the point between your thumb and forefinger.”

For eight years, Karl LaRowe worked in the emergency room at an inner-city hospital in Portland, Oregon. As a crisis intervention counselor, he helped hundreds of people each month cope with everything from domestic violence and depression to psychosis and suicide attempts. Eventually, the constant adrenaline rushes and biweekly 48-hour shifts took their toll. “I wasn’t sleeping well,” says LaRowe, who’s now 50. “Thoughts about the patients would come crashing into my mind, and I became acutely aware of noises.” He began to drink heavily and to use drugs, and spiraled into a deep depression. When antidepressants and talk therapy didn’t help, LaRowe felt he had no choice but to quit his job. After drifting for a while, he remarried and moved to Singapore, where he met a master of qi gong, a Chinese system of exercise and breathing performed in a meditative state. It was this ancient technique, which he now practices for 15 to 20 minutes every day, that LaRowe says gave him back his life. “I got lots of ideas in therapy,” he says. “But nothing was happening. Qi gong was my first experience of really feeling the frozen energy in my body release.” Eventually, LaRowe returned to the health field; he now works two to four days a week assessing mental health clients in the court system. “Though my schedule is very busy, the difference is that today when my day is done, it’s done,” he says. “I no longer take my patients home with me.” He also leads regular workshops on body awareness, breathing, and compassion fatigue—things he wishes he’d learned about years earlier—for social workers, psychologists, and other professional caregivers.As LaRowe learned, making your work less stressful doesn’t have to mean leaving it behind for good. (And how many of us can hope to do that, anyway?) Instead, the key is to transform your relationship to the stress so that it no longer overwhelms you. More and more people are discovering that mind-body practices like yoga, qi gong, and meditation can be hugely helpful in shifting the way they react to stress.

The need for anti-stress practices has become increasingly urgent. Americans now work nine full weeks more per year than our peers in Western Europe. And even if we get time off, we don’t always use it: At least 30 percent of employed adults don’t take all their vacation days, according to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll. Each year, Americans hand back 421 million days to their employers. Constant emails and ever-increasing workloads have too many of us working through lunch and staying late, yet still feeling as though we can never catch up. The upshot, say experts, is that we’re overscheduled, overworked, and just plain overwhelmed.

“Burnout is the biggest occupational hazard of the 21st century,” says Christina Maslach, Ph.D., coauthor of Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for Improving Your Relationship with Work (Jossey-Bass, 2005). “Today’s work environment has lost its human dimension. Global economic pressures, along with technological advances such as pagers and email, have altered the landscape irrevocably. Given these new challenges, it’s no wonder that our relationship with our work is under constant strain.”

The always-on approach brings with it enormous moment-by-moment mental and physical costs. Unyielding stress floods your body with a cascade of hormones: Adrenaline pumps up blood pressure and makes your heart beat faster; cortisol raises your blood sugar level, and, if it remains chronically elevated, can erode your immune system. Not only does such chronic stress make you more susceptible to ailments such as migraine headaches and irritable bowel syndrome, but research increasingly shows it can raise your risk for more serious conditions, including heart disease, osteoporosis, and depression.

Recently, a team of researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) found that stress may even accelerate aging at the cellular level. The study found that the blood cells of women who had spent many years caring for a child with a health condition appeared to be, genetically, about 10 years older than the cells of women whose caretaking responsibilities were less prolonged.

Although the study focused on caregivers, the findings apply to overworked employees, too. “People with other sources of life stress showed similar relationships between their levels of stress and cell aging,” says Elissa Epel, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at UCSF and the study’s lead author.

Stress itself, Epel emphasizes, is neither inherently good nor bad. Instead, how you perceive and react to it determines how it will affect your health. “In the study,” she explains, “the perception of stress was more important than whether one was under the strain of caregiving or not.”

The Merits of Mindfulness

So how do you shift your perceptions so you no longer feel like one big rubber band about to snap? That’s where yoga and other mind-body approaches come in.You’re likely to feel many of yoga’s benefits the first time you step onto the mat, says Timothy McCall, M.D., an internist and Yoga Journal’s medical editor. “When you’re doing Downward-Facing Dog, your mind is saying, ‘I want to come down now; my arms are tired,’ but if your teacher tells you to hold the asana a little longer, you find the strength to do it,” he says. “At that point, you realize that you don’t have to respond to every urge you feel. At other times, when your body says it needs to come down, it really needs to. Yoga teaches you to tune in to what your body is telling you and to act accordingly.”

With practice, this awareness will spread into other areas of your life, including your work. “As you learn to separate the urge to act from the reaction, you begin to find that something like a canceled meeting or having a last-minute project handed to you may not rattle you as much as it once did,” says McCall. “You can detect stressors—what Buddhists call the spark before the flame—earlier, then pause long enough to think, ‘Well, maybe I don’t need to respond.’”

That’s what happened for David Freda, a 41-year-old software engineer in Pasadena, California. He had practiced yoga sporadically to help him deal with job-related anxiety in the past, but after he took a new position at an investment company in 1999, he decided to get serious. “I have very high standards as an engineer. As a result, I have a pattern of getting fed up with co-workers and bolting from my jobs,” he says. “When I took this job, I decided to stick it out to see what I could change in myself. I had a strong sense that yoga could help me do that.”

Flush with a holiday bonus check, Freda signed up for a full-year, unlimited-use membership at a yoga studio near his office. He started practicing regularly—sometimes at home, sometimes at the studio—between 60 and 90 minutes each day. Six years later, Freda is still at his job, and still on the mat.

“When I’m doing a challenging posture such as Revolved Triangle [Parivrtta Trikonasana], I can stay in the posture, focus on my breathing, and perhaps not push quite so hard,” he says. “That approach helps me in my job. When I’m confronting someone who is making a bad technical decision, I consider what I could say that would facilitate what I want to achieve. In the past, my emotions would have gotten the best of me, but now people are more inclined to listen and to engage. Even my boss has commented on the changes.”

Of course, there’s more to yoga than just the asanas, or postures. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the eightfold path is called ashtanga, or eight limbs (”ashta” = eight, “anga” = limb). These eight branches act as guidelines for living a meaningful and purposeful life. The principles can collectively go a long way toward helping you stay centered in the face of cranky bosses, impossible deadlines, and unending piles of paper.

Rumpled covers. Scrunched-up, itchy pillow. Brain buzzing a million miles a second. There’s nothing fun about insomnia. While it’s tempting to pop a sleeping pill, recent studies suggest that it’s better to try yoga next time Mr. Sandman doesn’t come through.

Prescription sleeping pills can be addictive, and over-the-counter pills can leave you drowsy the next day. They also don’t address the underlying problem. “Yoga addresses the root of insomnia, which is usually linked to higher stress-hormone levels,” says Sat Bir Khalsa, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School.

A recent study conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital gives credence to the claim. In it, Khalsa had chronic insomniacs do a Kundalini Yoga bedtime meditation, shabad kriya, which includes conscious breathing and mantra recitation. About 75 percent of the chronic insomniacs who practiced it for eight weeks improved their “sleep efficiency,” the amount of time they slept divided by the time they spent in bed. In fact, any yoga technique that relaxes your mind will help you sleep better, says Roger Cole, Ph.D., a sleep researcher and yoga teacher in Del Mar, California. Cole recommends doing a few gentle asanas before bed and practicing breathing techniques that emphasize exhalation.

You know from your yoga practice that the mind often runs at a feverish pace, much like a monkey jumping from branch to branch of a tree. Multitasking, of course, doesn’t help: It keeps you from being calm, present, and truly awake to what you’re doing. But now there’s proof that one particular form of multitasking might actually make you stupid.

Scientists believe that incessantly checking email can lead to significant IQ loss, making workers less efficient. A recent study from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London suggests that your IQ falls 10 points when you’re fielding constant emails, text messages, and calls, the same loss you’d experience if you missed an entire night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point loss you’d have after smoking marijuana. On average, men fared worse than women because, researchers say, men have more difficulty multitasking.

Who knew that the ancient wisdom of yoga could make you more productive at the office?

Study your features in the mirrorll the lines and creases, your mouth and nose, your cheeks and eyes. Then close your eyes and “look” at the inner person who did the looking. “Growing toward maturity means deepening the sense of who you are,” says Linda Mainquist, director of Student Support Services at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. By doing this exercise you are creating a relationship not with what you look like but with who you are.

Become a Warrior

Stand in Warrior Pose I, II, or III, suggests yoga instructor Patricia Walden, “It’s hard to feel like a victim of age when you’re in these poses. They say, I am powerful. I have a wonderful future.’ Your mind is affected by the shape you put your body in.”

Release

You tend to hold in the fears you feel about aging, particularly in the chest and hips, says Julia Hough, 54, a therapeutic yoga instructor at Devotion Yoga in Hoboken, New Jersey. Doing a pose like a restorative Bound Angle can help release those fears physically, she says, which in turn can relieve emotional fears.

Relax

As you practice Savasana, or Corpse Pose, observe how you feel about aging and at the same time try to separate yourself from those feelings, counsels physical therapist Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D., the author of 30 Essential Yoga Poses: For Beginning Students and Their Teachers. You don’t have to confuse the feelings you have about growing older with your essential Self. During Corpse Pose, think, “I am not my thoughts any more than the clouds are the sky”.

For many beginners, balancing poses are extremely challenging. Sometimes it is hard enough to do an asana (posture) with two feet on the ground, let alone to avoid toppling over while standing on one foot. The key to successful balancing lies in cultivating awareness of the midline (or median line) of your body-the vertical axis that bisects the face and neck, running straight through the center of the torso and pelvis and down between the legs into the ground.To get a felt sense of your midline, stand in Tadasana (Mountain Pose) with your feet hip-distance apart and parallel, arms relaxing down by your sides, eyes closed. First bring your awareness to just the right half of your body: the right side of your face, the right arm, the right side of the torso, the right leg and foot. Be open to receiving whatever you may sense-feelings (strong or vulnerable, open or closed, focused or distracted) and also sensations, colors, textures, temperatures. Repeat this exercise on the other side.

Then take another breath and focus on your median line. What are you experiencing here? These sensations may be profoundly different, for your center can be a sacred place, untouched by the stories and variations of the left and right sides. My students have said that they feel equanimity, peacefulness, and truth when they focus on their midlines. Honor whatever you perceive. Vrksasana (Tree Pose) requires a sense of rootedness and centering down through your core. If you attempt to balance on your right leg with no sense of your midline, your weight will fall on the outer leg and outer foot, and the inner edge of your foot will lift. Before you know it, you will fall to the right like a felled tree.

Feet First
So let’s work from the ground up to establish your foundation in the pose, the roots for your tree. Start by opening the doors of perception in your feet by rolling a tennis ball underneath one foot and then the other. To stimulate the toes and encourage them to spread, sit cross-legged with the sole of one foot facing the ceiling and lace your fingers in between your toes; work the base of your fingers down to the roots of your toes and gently spread your fingers. You can also kneel, curl your toes under, and sit on your heels for a minute. After these exercises your feet should be alive and ready to support your torso and arms-your tree trunk and branches.To awaken your sense of the midline running down the inner legs, stand in Tadasana, feet parallel, and firmly squeeze a yoga block between your upper thighs. Firming the greater trochanters (the knobby bones protruding at the top of your outer thighs, about five inches below your frontal hipbones) toward the midline prevents your standing-leg hip from jutting out too far to the side and taking you off-center. As you gently squeeze inward, slowly lengthen down your inner legs into the inner feet. Then zip energy up the midline of your trunk and press the center of the crown of your head skyward. When you practice Vrksasana, your foot will take the place of this block, and you’ll want to recreate the same current down your inner leg.

Another important element to feeling centered is abdominal tone, which provides the core strength necessary for the pose. If the abdominals are weak, the section of the midline that runs through the belly area remains dull and provides no support for the low back in the posture. If you know any abdominal toning exercises or asanas, such as Navasana (Boat Pose) or Ardha Navasana (Half Boat Pose), do them before attempting Vrksasana. Otherwise, with your thighs pressing into the block in Tadasana, practice gently drawing your navel back toward the spine and up.

Now let’s try practicing Vrksasana at a wall. Begin in Mountain Pose with the left side about a foot away from the wall. Spread the right toes and emphasize the arches in both the inner and outer foot. Take hold of the left foot with your left hand and place the foot against the top of the right inner thigh. Situate yourself so your left knee firmly touches the wall and you feel held in place. Lengthen down your inner right leg and press the greater trochanters toward your midline. Then draw your navel gently in again and move the crown of your head up. Press your palms together in Anjali Mudra (Namaste) at the center of your sternum. Now you are ready to begin focusing on your midline, grounding through it and lifting out of it. Repeat the pose on the other side.

Off the Wall
Now you are ready to try Vrksasana in the middle of the room. Fan out the toes of your right foot and ground the ball of the big toe and little toe, as well as the front of the heel. Make sure the knee of the right leg is facing straight forward.Lift your left foot up to the top of the inner right thigh. The left toes should point down. If your foot keeps sliding, consider changing out of slippery tights if you are wearing them, putting on shorts instead and working on bare skin. If you’re still having trouble and wishing for Velcro on your foot, practice with a strap around the left ankle, holding it in place with your left hand. It’s also fine to practice with the left foot lower on the standing leg, at calf-height.

For those who have tight groins and inner thighs, lifting the bent knee too high may cause the spine to become swaybacked. If so, lower the foot against the standing leg and don’t force the bent knee any farther out to the side than you can while still maintaining the parallel alignment of frontal hipbones.

Accentuate the pressure of the outer left foot on the inner right thigh so that the left knee comes more into the same plane as the left hip. This alignment will improve as your hips and groins open. Bring your palms together in front of your heart and isometrically press them together. Mirror this action by pressing the thigh into the foot and the foot into the thigh. The inward movement of your greater trochanters will help you with this. Feel how the tone in your midsection supports your balance. Keep your throat and eyes soft.

If you wish to go further with the pose, raise your arms overhead, palms facing each other. Relax your shoulders and tailbone down as you lengthen your spine upward. Breathe smoothly. If you find that looking straight forward is too challenging, pick a spot in front of you on the floor (about one body-length away from you) to gaze at softly.

For a few breaths, try to feel your vertical center, that quiet place of balance amidst the shifting energy of the left and right sides. Remember, there is no front to a tree. Relax your face, and from your awareness of your center, allow your attention and energy to radiate 360 degrees. Hold for 10 to 20 seconds, about three to eight breaths. With practice, you might work up to a minute on each side. Vrksasana strengthens and tones the legs and feet, opens the hips, groins, and chest, and fortifies your Muladhara (first or “root”) Chakra. Through the practice of balance, you develop poise, concentration, and coordination-as well as steady and calm your mind. Practicing Tree Pose brings you back into your body, connects you to the earth, and helps you experience safety and stillness. Though praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow may “come and go like the wind,” as the Buddha said, happiness comes if you can “rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.”