The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga: 8 Weeks to Strength, Awareness, and Flexibility

Description

THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL GUIDE TO YOGA is a comprehensive guide to understanding an integrated approach to yoga. While there are many yoga books available on the market, most are based on an individual yogis expertise. This book relies on modern medical science to illustrate the benefits of yoga;and offers a practical, easy-to-implement plan. Scientific research and clinical experience have shown that an integrated approach that includes multiple yoga limbs (including breath control, postures, guided meditation, and self-reflective writing exercises) does far more to improve physical and mental health than merely doing yoga exercises. This streamlined 8-week program features user-friendly, step-by-step sequences that are easy to learn and practice at home with minimal equipment. The book also offers poses and sequences targeted to improve arthritis, cardiovascular health, type 2 diabetes, weight loss, sleep issues, chronic pain, neurological disorders, as well as depression, anxiety, stress, and more.

Marilyn Wei (Author) Marlynn Wei, MD, JD, is a board-certified psychiatrist, certified yoga teacher, and writer. She began practicing yoga in 2008 during her residency training at Harvard Medical School and completed her 200-hour Yoga Alliance teacher certification. Dr. Wei integrates principles of yoga into her work with clients with anxiety and depression, using a holistic approach of psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, and mindfulness. James E. Groves (Author) James E. Groves, MD, is a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. A psychotherapist for more than four decades, he practices psychotherapy, supervises psychiatry and psychology trainees, and offers tutorials in literature and psychiatry.

The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga is a wonderful addition to the yoga library that helps bridge the gap between East and West. The yoga world has to clean up its act in order to find its deserved place in the world of medicine, and this manual is a necessary step. The practices and research are sound. --Rodney Yee, internationally renowned yoga instructor Every so often a manual emerges from the sea of 'how-to' yoga books and startles by virtue of its eminent accessibility, its breathtaking comprehensiveness, its scientific underpinnings, its remarkable clarity, and its immediate applicability. Dr. Marlynn Wei and Dr. James Groves's The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga is just such a manual. Inspired and inspirational, this book includes a treasure trove of easy-to-follow illustrations of numerous yoga poses; it will be an invaluable resource for all students of yoga interested not only in toning their body and reducing their stress but also, more generally, in evolving their health to ever-higher levels of mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. --Martha Stark, MD, author of Relentless Hope: Refusal to Grieve and six other award-winning integrative psychiatry books It is amazing to me that yoga has become popular enough that professors at Harvard Medical School would publish a book on the subject. Giving people more information and helping them find their way is what I see as being the great purpose of a book on the subject of yoga. Blessings to Marlynn Wei and James E. Groves for helping make this Divine Knowledge available to you, and may all achieve success in yoga. --Sri Dharma Mittra, creator of the Master Yoga Chart of 908 Postures Marlynn Wei and James Groves have done the public a great service. They are physicians who've learned by acquaintance how yoga can be a powerful aid to health. Consequently, they have produced a thorough and very accessible guide replete with tables and summaries and simple drawings, which leaves the reader with an excellent grasp of this particular pathway to wellness. --Gregory L. Fricchione, MD, director, Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Harvard Medical School Wei and Groves are reaching out to you, inspiring, coaxing, and above all informing about the path you can take for health and wellness of your inseparable body, mind, and soul. The lessons contained herein are encyclopedic in scope, but the message is of a journey that lies ahead for you, within you, accessible and transformative. Whether needed to enhance well-being and facilitate recovery for those who suffer or are ill or just make this one life at once more peaceful, reflective, calm and energetic, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga can be your itinerary. --Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, MD, chief of psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital; Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School