READY FOR VIEWING: Effective yogic strategies for energy management

When you wake up every morning, you get a clear sense of your body’s starting “budgetary state” – whether your internal body budget is balanced or depleted. Then, everything you do or experience during your day serves either as a deposit toward the body budget or as a withdrawal.

Every routine thing you do in your life subtly affects your arousal level and valence, meaning that it is either stimulating or sedating and more or less pleasant. But you might also have some chronic budget-draining things going on, like financial insecurity, loneliness, being a primary caregiver for a child or an aging parent, chronic pain, and so on. If that’s the case, are those factors being balanced by other, nourishing experiences in your life?

Your body is very sensitive about the budget going both too low and too high, while negative balances and surpluses usually lead to disease. Here is a quick summary of how a chronically unbalanced body budget affects your life on a daily basis:

1. It puts stress on your physiological systems and makes you more vulnerable to disease.

2. Your body’s internal state, as perceived by your brain, directly affects how you feel day to day. You know how you get antsy and stressed if the balance on your bank account goes too low? Or how you feel secure and relaxed when it’s consistent and sufficient? It works similarly with your body budget. If your body budget is unbalanced, you will feel unpleasant and/or agitated; if your body budget is balanced, you will feel pleasant and/or calm.

3. Your entire perception of the external world (in yoga we sometimes call it “coloring” of the world) entirely depends on the state of your inner physiological balance. When your body budget is balanced, the world seems sunnier, food tastes better, people are friendlier, body aches are not bothersome, and things are generally looking up. When your body budget is out of balance, the world seems to conspire against you, nothing goes smoothly, the body is a wreck, people are mean, and it feels as if nobody cares about you. In short, your body balance directly affects how you function, feel, and think.

Our moment-to-moment physiological state literally impacts every aspect of our existence. The two obvious strategies for managing a body budget include:

1. Getting enough sleep,

2. Having strategies in place that help you manage stress.

Your yoga practice can also become an effective strategy for managing your body budget. It can help you move toward a more pleasant state and closer to balance between the hyper-aroused and hypo-aroused states. Clearly, you will need different types of practices for stimulating your energy and unwinding. Luckily, the yoga tradition has developed comprehensive strategies for managing your body budget and facilitating both deposits and withdrawals from the system (as necessary).

In this online course, Olga Kabel will introduce you to the yogic model you can use to manage your body budget. She will show you why breath is the most effective tool to regulate your inner budget and teach you simple practices and breathing techniques that you can use to stimulate your system or purge excess jittery energy. She will demonstrate how simple and subtle changes you implement for your yoga classes and private sessions can shift the energetic tone of your yoga practice.