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Hello. My name is Scott Anderson, Director of Alignment Yoga, and welcome to our home
base - the Blue Mounds Dharma Center in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin.
Today I'd like to talk about headstand. In many traditions of yoga, headstand is considered
one of the fundamental, one of the most important yoga poses.
But so often people are a little bit nervous about trying headstand,
maybe afraid they'll fall down out of headstand.
What I'd like to talk about today is that headstand is available for anybody.
You can get the benefits of a headstand without even going up in a headstand.
And the benefits of headstand far outweigh just the benefits for the circulatory system
for helping to restore the flow of blood in the body.
When we talk about headstand, our focus is generally on the circulatory system.
That is a powerful benefit of headstand.
But perhaps the biggest benefits of headstand are going to be in the nervous system.
One of the benefits of headstand that's not very often talked about
is its potential to reset the vestibular sense.
The vestibular sense is our inner ear, and it's considered the foundation of our perception
- how we interact, how we relate to the world around us.
When our vestibular sense is disregulated, as it's often called,
we're more likely to see the world as full of threats,
rather than seeing the world as full of opportunity.
It's often said that when people are born Cesarian section, they don't have the opportunity
for their head to squeezed through the birth canal.
There are some occupational therapists and practitioners of sensory integration that
say
there is a bigger incidence of struggle later in life
for people that have been born Cesarian section.
Potentially one of the benefits of headstand is to help reset the nervous system,
whether you've been born Cesarian section or born otherwise.
By putting the top of the head on the floor, that's part of the power of the headstand,
is to help reset how we see the world as processed by our sensory system.
Another potential benefit of headstand is to reset the breathing.
As we've talked about in previous blog postings and in previous videos,
our nervous system is largely driven by our breathing.
If we're breathing with a full, complete exhale,
we're more likely to see the world calmly, objectively.
If our exhale is cut short, we're more likely to be reactive
to the world that's going on around us.
The benefit of headstand is we take all these abdominal organs -
they weigh about 30, 40, if not more pounds than that -
ordinarily these organs are largely resting on the pelvic floor.
When we do an inverted pose, we take the weight of all those organs,
and now they're resting on the diaphragm.
So you don't have to talk about technique of breathing,
diaphragmatic breathing, or any of the details.
Simply get the body upside down, and the breathing resets.
So when we start to talk about benefits of headstand,
certainly benefits for circulatory system, certainly benefits for muscles, bones, skeleton.
But perhaps even more important, benefits in nervous system.
To help re-equilibrate autonomous nervous system
by resetting the sensory system and by resetting the breathing.
In the next video, we'll show how anybody can get the benefits of headstand,
from beginner all the way to experienced practitioner.
We can all derive the benefits
of headstand.