Even as a long-term yoga practitioner and teacher, and as someone who has directly experienced the power of a personal yoga practice to help me face stressful situations from being a carer to financial and work pressures, I hesitate to write about ‘yoga for stress’. Such a huge topic!
Yoga ‘for’ stress implies a quick answer, a prescription sequence to ‘fix’ the perceived problem.
Yoga is yoga, it isn’t ‘for’ anything.
Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind: yogaḥ cittavṛtti nirodhaḥ (according to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali).
In relation to stress then, you could say it is a state of non-stress. Stress, whether physical tension or emotional pain, activates plenty of ripples in the mind. Aversion to the sensations of stress, desire to be free of them.
At the same time, a friend said to me: “Isn’t all yoga for stress?”
There are many paths of yoga, just
