All things Yoga with Vicky

By: Vicky Richings
  • Summary

  • Chatting about all things Yoga. Whether you are a student starting out on your yoga journey, an experienced teacher or just have a passing interest, you may find something here for you.

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Episodes
  • Demystifying Sound Baths - reasons to bathe in sound
    Mar 17 2024
    Here I take dismantle the mystery of Sound Bathing and explore the reasons why you may want to give it a go! Find me at https://www.eqyoga.co.uk/TranscriptVicky (00:00:10) Hi. Welcome to all Things Yoga with Vicky. A podcast about all things yoga. Hello.We're going to do some demystifying the 'woo-woo' sounding world of sound baths. If you've never been to one, they aren't quite as strange as they may seem!During a sound bath session. There are different instruments like singing bowls, gongs and chimes, perhaps even drums, and they're played in a way that creates soothing sounds and vibrations that generally wash over you, helping you to relax your body and also your mind. Now, because they're played gently, the sound waves resonate through the room and sometimes into your body - we'll talk about that in a moment - and it creates a very peaceful and meditative atmosphere, even for those people who aren't used to meditation in the traditional sense. So what can you expect when you attend a sound bath? Well, you're going to immerse yourself in a sensory experience. You'll usually be laying down for the session, but if that isn't accessible, you can always sit on a chair.Vicky (00:01:12) But however you are, it's important to feel comfortable and warm. So generally people will have bolsters or pillows underneath their knees in their heads, a blanket over the top of you so that you just stay nice and comfortable. Now, the sound bath may take you on a journey of sound from singing bowls which can be placed on the body so you feel the vibrations into the whole of your being to things like cactus rain sticks and seed shakers to recreate sounds from nature. The instruments may be moved around your body or moved around the room to create different parts of that journey. You'll also expect the twinkle of chimes and the warm, soft sounds of the Sansula, a little finger piano, and perhaps even some sung mantras, what happens is you just allow yourself to be bathed in these auditory delights. Now, whilst sound baths are suitable for almost everybody, regardless of age or fitness level, there are a few conditions that if you have, you may want to skip the sound baths. Things like epilepsy, heart conditions or anything related to, finding sounds stressful or overstimulating, tinnitus, migraines triggered by noise, anything like that.Vicky (00:02:23) Also, if you have metal plates in your body or hearing aids that might make sound uncomfortable, it's best to skip out. And additionally, if you are pregnant and in the first or third trimester, it's best to wait until after for your sound baths. Now, it's worth also noting that some people with mental health issues might found sound baths lead to a release of emotions. There's no reason not to have a sound bath, but just be aware of that so that you know what to expect. Now, if you do attend a sound bath, the benefits you might feel can be amazing. You may feel a deep sense of relaxation during and after the session. People often find that sound bathing leads to a reduced sense of stress and lowering of anxiety, and it may help to improve focus and even encourage a sense of balance and harmony within yourself as a whole. Now, while most of the benefits are generally anecdotal, there has been some research into the effects of sound breathing. In 2016, a study by Goldsby concluded that sound bath type meditation may be especially useful in decreasing tension in individuals.Vicky (00:03:36) Additionally, Cotoia in 2018, said it was found that playing patients who were about to have an operation relaxing singing bowl music might be a useful strategy to manage pre-operative anxiety. Much more research is needed in this relatively new area, though. However, an interesting article in 2019 by neuroscientist and biophysicist William Softky, gives a new and interesting take on why sound baths are so popular. He sees the electronic noise pollution, and also the artificial sounds that devices that we use in modern life give out as an assault on our vibration sensitive nervous system, which becomes recalibrated. He said the solution to mental misery created by a de-calibrating sonic environment is to return to a calibrating one, such as a sound bath. Sound baths are a fantastic way to unwind, de-stress and rejuvenate your body and mind and also apparently recalibrate. So next time you need a little self-care, why not give a sound bath a try?Remember to hit subscribe and if you'd like to contact me, you can through my website eqyoga.co.ukThank you so much for listening.ReferencesGoldsby, T.L., Goldsby, M.E., McWalters, M. and Mills, P.J. (2016). Effects of Singing Bowl Sound Meditation on Mood, Tension, and Well-being: An Observational Study. Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine, [online] 22(3), pp.401–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2156587216668109.Cotoia, A., Dibello, F., Moscatelli, F., Sciusco, A., Polito, P., Modolo, A., Gallo, C., Cibelli, G. and ...
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    5 mins
  • Busting myths about yoga teachers
    Mar 9 2024
    What are yoga teachers really like? Do they never eat chocolate or swear? Find me at https://www.eqyoga.co.uk/E2S2 Transcript**Vicky** (00:00:10) - Hi. Welcome to all Things Yoga with Vicky. A podcast about all things yoga. Hello and welcome. So we're going to have a little think about busting myths about yoga teachers. The yoga teachers. They are a strange breed in their lycra. Bend in this way and that. But. Not all yoga teachers are your stereotypical Western yoga teacher, and there are a lot of myths about yoga teachers, such as they all wear Lycra. I certainly don't. But we are going to think about just a few of these things that actually could be quite,, shall we say, detrimental to people attending yoga classes. So the first thing I'm going to say is all yoga teachers are not really skinny and really fit. You do not have to be really skinny and really fit to teach yoga. That's not saying some aren't, because yes, quite a few are, but there are a lot that aren't. Yoga isn't necessarily for people who have a level of fitness, a level of flexibility, a certain body shape.**Vicky** (00:01:21) - Yoga is for everybody, and this is something which is really key. When we look on Instagram and other social media, there is a large contingent of things that represent yoga that aren't actually representing yoga. They are representing an interpretation of yoga, doing a headstand in your shorts and bikini and so on. Now this is really key as it puts people off coming to classes. It makes people think that yoga is exclusively for a certain type of person, a certain body shape, a certain skill or flexibility level or fitness level. That is not the case. So number one myth busted. Not all yoga teachers are super fit, super bendy and super slim. Okay, so let's move on to myth number two. Myth number two is that yoga teachers are all vegan. Now, interestingly, some yoga teachers are vegan and there are certain yogic principles to live by. One of these is ahimsa, which is non harm. Now ahimsa can extend to not eating animal products or using animal products, if that is your interpretation of it.**Vicky** (00:02:39) - But a lot of yoga teachers do not follow any specific diet. There is nothing to say that yoga teachers have to be vegan or vegetarian. Personally, I'm pescatarian and I have been for many years, but that was way before I was a yoga teacher, so perhaps we can stop thinking about our yoga teachers being these super healthy beings because quite frankly, I love ice cream. I have a pizza on Fridays. You know, there's nothing wrong with this. This is a human thing to do. Yoga teachers are human. Now, the next myth we're going to bust is the fact that yoga teachers never, ever get injuries. Now, this is quite an interesting one. I quite often go to the same shop, and the people in there who work in there kind of know me because I'm in my yoga gear. They know I'm a yoga teacher. And the other week one of the guys who works in there said, oh I have a really bad back are there any yoga stretches I can do for it now? I don't ever recommend things like that, but I recommended him to a book that he might want to look at because I don't prescribe.**Vicky** (00:03:53) - I'm not medically qualified, but it's a book that I used when I had a herniated disc. And I said, look, from my personal experience, this book could be really useful. You might want to look at this. And he said, but you're a yoga teacher. How could you have had a bad back? Now, this fascinated me., yoga teachers are not superhuman. We get injuries, my wrists hurt. Sometimes if I kneel on my knees for too long, they hurt. We have the same issues as everybody else, as a yoga teacher. And in fact, sometimes too much of certain things in yoga can actually cause injuries, which is why we need to be quite careful. But it's that idea of yoga teachers being completely and utterly superhuman. We are not Terminators. As yoga teachers, we get injuries, trust me. Now, the last thing I'm going to talk about as a yoga teacher, and this is the one that I absolutely love. My mum says this to me sometimes.**Vicky** (00:04:54) - Like, how come you're not calm and collected all the time? Now it makes me chuckle. The idea that yoga teachers, all yoga teachers, just walk around in this super Zen like state unaffected by traffic jams or, you know, something annoys them. Trust me, yoga teachers do get annoyed. Yoga teachers get sweary and angry sometimes. Not necessarily in yoga classes. But like I say, yoga teachers are human, so we don't all walk around in a Zen like state. I mean, okay, sometimes we do some yoga teachers may do. If those yoga teachers out there,, walk around in the Zen like state all the time. It must be very nice. But from my personal point of view, the yoga teachers I know and also myself, we are not. Zen like beans 100% of the time. So I hope this has given you an insight into the world of the truth of yoga teachers busting those myths., if there's...
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    7 mins
  • The One Constant is Change
    Feb 6 2024
    Here we examine how humans like to have predicitability and suggest how we can help deal with the inevitable changes in our lives. Find me at https://www.eqyoga.co.uk/TranscriptVicky (00:00:03) - Hi, welcome to All Things Yoga with Vicky, a podcast about all things yoga. Hello. So today we're going to talk about change, the ever constant change. Now there's a saying that says one thing is certain in life and that is that things are going to change. And this is very true. So even when we feel that we're on an even keel, everything's swimming along nicely, then everything can take a nosedive or vice versa. So what we need to think about really, is the fact that we need to really not expect things to remain constant. The sense of constant change can be quite uncomfortable, and this is something that humans don't tend to sit well with, or it doesn't sit well with us humans. We like to have predictability. We like routine. We like to know what is happening, when it's happening, how it's going to happen. It's that same thing as kids coming home from school and saying, oh, what's for dinner? They want to know when's dinner? What is dinner? And it's that sense of being able to have predictability.Vicky (00:01:25) - When we stop having that sense of predictability in our lives, what happens is our brains start to want to cling on to things that are predictable, the things that can actually remain a constant. Now. It's really interesting because I think during Covid there was a lot of uncertainty. We didn't know when we will be able to leave our houses, all of those different things. And that uncertainty really didn't sit well with a lot of people. However, on the flip side, the certainty of knowing that you were going to be in your house and what your routine was going to be, and maybe when your food was going to be delivered if you didn't venture out to the shops. That was actually something that some people did get on board with. So the sense of being able to predict our lives and predict what is going to happen really does make us mostly comfortable. However, if we stay in that same place, if we stay in the place where we know exactly what is going to happen, we will stay in that place and we will never try anything different.Vicky (00:02:37) - We will never change things up in some sense, is we may never, as some people refer to it, grow. Um, the growth zone. Now, when I was a psychology teacher, we looked at quite a lot of learning theories, and a lot of the learning theories say more or less, you have to take yourself outside your comfort zone to learn new things, to learn skills, to advance. Now, okay, I take it that, um, not everyone wants to advance and learn new skills, and that is absolutely fine. Some people are quite happy where they are and there is nothing wrong with that at all. However, what I'm going to say is we need to start to be able to get comfortable with change. Change is a constant in our lives, and one of the things that we can maybe use to help us deal with change different situations, things not remain in the same is to maybe have something else that is a constant. Now, one of the constants in life you can have is something like meditation.Vicky (00:03:45) - You can have a five minute meditation practice, maybe at the beginning of the day, the end of the day, maybe in lunch time. That doesn't matter when. But if we have that one thing that is constant, it allows us to possibly cope better with the other things that are constantly changing. Now, quite often I speak about meditation, and my preferred meditation is a breath guided meditation. Just watching the inhales and the exhales. Just simply observe in the breath and the thing that attracts me really about this, apart from the fact that it was the first kind of meditation I learned at the Buddhist Centre, was the fact that we always have our breath with us. We don't need anything in particular. We don't need any sounds. We don't need a cushion. We don't need anything special. Our constant is our breath. And if we want to, we can allow ourselves to just take a few breaths, observe in those breaths in a meditation to allow us to deal with that sense of everything changing.Vicky (00:04:58) - Now. Some changes in life are bigger than others sometimes. Changes happen when we least expect it. But if we have a regular meditation practice, this is something that can allow us to deal better with that change. Also, the other thing is to expect change and sometimes changes for the better, not for the worse. So this is something we need to bear in mind. Let's not dread things shifting. Sometimes the sand dunes shift on the beach to make an even more beautiful pattern. So this is something that we can bear in mind when something happens. Maybe we can say, okay, there's this. Not all negative. I guess it depends on what it is, but that sense of being able to actually perhaps make room for growth, make room for different activities, make room ...
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    7 mins

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