Addicted to Yoga

Are you a yoga addict? Do you line up with your mat and rush the doors of your yoga center? Do you find yourself dreaming about asanas and arranging travel plans so you can take a workshop with your favorite teacher or take a yoga class in a new town?

Are you hooked on yoga? Of course you are, if you have read this far.

Yet just like there is such a thing as positive stress, there is also positive habituation. When yoga truly becomes your habit, when you notice your withdrawal symptoms (low tolerance for heavy traffic, bossy bosses, and stupid human tricks), then it is safe to say you have gone from a casual user to committed yoga junkie.

The interesting thing, however, is that yoga is the habit to end all habits: the addiction that frees you from all other addictions.

In our yoga teacher training classes, I often ask the students what they have noticed about themselves since their immersion into yoga and training. Some change their diets, some even change their friends, but many of them drop habits and addictive behavior.

In yoga psychology, addictive behavior has its roots in the absence or derangement of "prana," the vital life force of the body. When we become prana depleted, we reach outside of ourselves for stimulation, such as substance abuse, computer games, an expresso grande - even a shopping spree. We look for a hit that stimulates us into feeling "alive" because we are not living on our own prana.

Yoga is the master science to increase, cultivate, and store prana. The breathing techniques, the asanas, even the meditations and relaxation, all increase our pranic storehouse.

As a result, we have fewer tendencies to engage in destructive addictive behaviors.

One of the most successful drug treatment programs in the United States, SuperHealth, placed recovering addicts into a residential program that emphasized fresh foods high in prana as well as several hours of yoga a day. The recidivism rate was one of the best of all treatment programs.

This month we are bringing to Yoga Yoga one of the primary individuals who designed the SuperHealth program for an amazing workshop on using yogic techniques and diet to overcome substance addiction, as well as all the other habits we have that do not serve us.

Warning: This workshop may increase your yoga addiction. My name is Mehtab and I am a yoga addict.