Yoga & Meditation to Supercharge Your Health

14 Jan Yoga & Meditation to Supercharge Your Health

I admit my bias. It’s no big secret that I teach yoga. I also study the art & science daily to better share its luminous benefits – physical, physiological and psychological – with my students and friends. In the roll up to the Telluride Yoga Festival, July 10 – July 13, 2014, I am always on the lookout for fuel to support the fire – and the event, now under new management (Albert Roer and Erika Henschel). I found this great article in HuffPost Lifestyle the other day.

With the benefits of holistic health and mindfulness practices finally starting to be recognized by mainstream medical institutions across the country, it’s only fitting that the first major symposium on yoga and medicine is taking place this weekend in the nation’s capital.

In conjunction with the Smithsonian’s Yoga: The Art Of Transformation exhibition, the museum is hosting a Medical Yoga Symposium on Saturday, inviting experts in the fields of health and medicine, mindfulness and yoga therapy to discuss the transformational potential of yoga and integrative medicine.

At the Symposium, keynote speaker and HuffPost Medical Editor Dr. Dean Ornish, author, president and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and creator of the Ornish Diet, will be presenting an overview of 36 years’ worth of research on the extraordinary health benefits of yoga and other types of holistic healing.

“We tend to think of advances in medicine as something very new and high-tech and expensive, but what we’ve been able to show with over three decades of research is that … lifestyle changes, which is including yoga and meditation, can not only prevent but reverse chronic diseases,” Ornish tells The Huffington Post.

Yoga’s many possible health benefits — from improved cognitive function to a lower risk of diabetes — are well-documented.