Uncategorized
https://blackgirlnerds.com/7-ways-yoga-can-improve-your-mental-health/
If you Google the term yoga, you’ll most likely see similar photos of fair-skinned and small-framed women in a fancy yoga pose. These pictures don’t show the diversity of yoga over the past 20+ years.
In 1975 an article in Ebony magazine featured some of the great leaders such as Angela Davis and Krishna Kaur. In their interviews, they spoke about the positive effects that practicing yoga had on Black women. In addition, Pam Grier and Rosa Parks were yoga practitioners as well. These women practiced yoga not only for the positive results yoga has on the body but for the effect yoga has on the mind.
Grier said ” I started to practice yoga to quiet my mind and learn to be still.” She studied natural healing methods and committed to a daily practice, even on movie sets. “The point was to be able to sense—in other words, to feel and hear—any medical issues in the body and mind.”
Even Eartha Kitt, who never exclusively called her physical practice yoga, spoke of the mind-body benefits. ” When the [brain and body] are functioning well in concert, there is nothing in the world more exciting,” she said. “So I strive to make the body love the mind, and the mind loves the body, keeping the spirit vigorous as a consequence.”
Their messages remind us of the importance of practicing yoga. Here are 7 ways practicing yoga can improve your mental health.
Stronger Mind
Yoga is an exercise for not only your body but your mind as well. Muscle builders show off the thickness of their biceps. But, yogis can flaunt the thickness of their cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. These areas in your brain are responsible for information processing, memory, and learning. Studies have shown that those who practice yoga have increased brain functions such as memory, attention, and language. Yoga can even lessen how much your brain shrinks as you get older. Yes, your brain shrinks with age.
Natural Mood Booster
It’s well known that exercise releases endorphins, a hormone that helps put you in a happy mood. However, yoga helps release another amazing chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). This happy chemical has been known to decrease anxiety. When paired with other treatments such as talk therapy, yoga can help reduce depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Reduces Anger
Anger can sometimes feel like an automatic response to some of the injustices in the world. Yet when unchecked, anger can be detrimental to your health. It can cause high blood pressure, headaches, skin disorders, and heart problems. To avoid these health issues and reduce the negative effects of anger, yoga is a great tool. It’s also been shown to reduce verbal aggression in adults.
Improves Sleep
Throughout the many yoga practices, a common thread is the use of slow and controlled breathing. Through the activation of your breath, it can trigger the vagus nerve. This nerve is connected to your parasympathetic nervous system, which handles putting your body into a relaxed state. Breathing in yoga is like a deaccelerate button for your body. So when you’re feeling restless before bed, with a few deep yoga breaths, you can calm your body down and prepare it for a restful night.
Reduces Anxiety
In addition to the breathwork that improves a better night’s rest, the deep breathing in yoga can ease anxiety. The meditative part of yoga has been known to reduce the worry and fear that often contributes to high levels of anxiety. Yoga introduces gaining awareness of the body to gain awareness of the mind. With greater awareness of your thoughts and emotions, you can better regulate your response to stress. Thus helping to reduce your anxiety.
Improves Body Image
One body-image survey showed that 62% of women feel negative about their body image. Yoga combats this by introducing a sense of gratitude for your body. It helps you attribute to a sense of accomplishment when you advance to different yoga postures. Along with helping to improve self-confidence. With more diverse bodies entering the yoga scene, such as Jessamyn Stanley, more women feel more confident in their skin.
Encourages a Sense of Community
The yoga scene has expanded to a more open and colorful than ever before. Amongst traditional yoga, such as Hatha and kundalini, communities have begun to create more unique types of yoga. This includes one’s representative of the culture, such as Trap Yoga and Hip Hop yoga. With these spaces, people can connect with people who share their interests in yoga. They also allow sharing commonalities in background, race, and culture. Allowing you to make connections with new people and feel supported and safe within a community.
Among all these benefits, practicing yoga offers a safe space for women to heal. A majority of yoga facilities offer a non-judgmental space for women to take time to focus on themselves.
If you Google the term yoga, you’ll most likely see similar photos of fair-skinned and small-framed women in a fancy yoga pose. These pictures don’t show the diversity of yoga over the past 20+ years.
In 1975 an article in Ebony magazine featured some of the great leaders such as Angela Davis and Krishna Kaur. In their interviews, they spoke about the positive effects that practicing yoga had on Black women. In addition, Pam Grier and Rosa Parks were yoga practitioners as well. These women practiced yoga not only for the positive results yoga has on the body but for the effect yoga has on the mind.
Grier said ” I started to practice yoga to quiet my mind and learn to be still.” She studied natural healing methods and committed to a daily practice, even on movie sets. “The point was to be able to sense—in other words, to feel and hear—any medical issues in the body and mind.”
Even Eartha Kitt, who never exclusively called her physical practice yoga, spoke of the mind-body benefits. ” When the [brain and body] are functioning well in concert, there is nothing in the world more exciting,” she said. “So I strive to make the body love the mind, and the mind loves the body, keeping the spirit vigorous as a consequence.”
Their messages remind us of the importance of practicing yoga. Here are 7 ways practicing yoga can improve your mental health.
Stronger Mind
Yoga is an exercise for not only your body but your mind as well. Muscle builders show off the thickness of their biceps. But, yogis can flaunt the thickness of their cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. These areas in your brain are responsible for information processing, memory, and learning. Studies have shown that those who practice yoga have increased brain functions such as memory, attention, and language. Yoga can even lessen how much your brain shrinks as you get older. Yes, your brain shrinks with age.
Natural Mood Booster
It’s well known that exercise releases endorphins, a hormone that helps put you in a happy mood. However, yoga helps release another amazing chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). This happy chemical has been known to decrease anxiety. When paired with other treatments such as talk therapy, yoga can help reduce depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Reduces Anger
Anger can sometimes feel like an automatic response to some of the injustices in the world. Yet when unchecked, anger can be detrimental to your health. It can cause high blood pressure, headaches, skin disorders, and heart problems. To avoid these health issues and reduce the negative effects of anger, yoga is a great tool. It’s also been shown to reduce verbal aggression in adults.
Improves Sleep
Throughout the many yoga practices, a common thread is the use of slow and controlled breathing. Through the activation of your breath, it can trigger the vagus nerve. This nerve is connected to your parasympathetic nervous system, which handles putting your body into a relaxed state. Breathing in yoga is like a deaccelerate button for your body. So when you’re feeling restless before bed, with a few deep yoga breaths, you can calm your body down and prepare it for a restful night.
Reduces Anxiety
In addition to the breathwork that improves a better night’s rest, the deep breathing in yoga can ease anxiety. The meditative part of yoga has been known to reduce the worry and fear that often contributes to high levels of anxiety. Yoga introduces gaining awareness of the body to gain awareness of the mind. With greater awareness of your thoughts and emotions, you can better regulate your response to stress. Thus helping to reduce your anxiety.
Improves Body Image
One body-image survey showed that 62% of women feel negative about their body image. Yoga combats this by introducing a sense of gratitude for your body. It helps you attribute to a sense of accomplishment when you advance to different yoga postures. Along with helping to improve self-confidence. With more diverse bodies entering the yoga scene, such as Jessamyn Stanley, more women feel more confident in their skin.
Encourages a Sense of Community
The yoga scene has expanded to a more open and colorful than ever before. Amongst traditional yoga, such as Hatha and kundalini, communities have begun to create more unique types of yoga. This includes one’s representative of the culture, such as Trap Yoga and Hip Hop yoga. With these spaces, people can connect with people who share their interests in yoga. They also allow sharing commonalities in background, race, and culture. Allowing you to make connections with new people and feel supported and safe within a community.
Among all these benefits, practicing yoga offers a safe space for women to heal. A majority of yoga facilities offer a non-judgmental space for women to take time to focus on themselves.
The Porter transports you back in time to a period in Canadian and American history when serving passengers on the train was a way for Black men to earn wages — despite unfair and racially-biased poor treatment. Mouna Traoré, who we’ve seen in The Umbrella Academy and Self Made, plays Marlene Massey, a nurse concerned with offering better healthcare to help her people.
She embodies the challenges of a working woman who’s married to a disenfranchised porter. She’s fighting to find the balance between support for her husband, bettering her community, and rising up against inequality.
BGN spoke with Traoré via video chat about her experience growing up in Canada, the importance of this story, and the dream of working with Alfre Woodard.
As a child of two immigrant parents, what was your experience growing up in Canada?
I had an interesting upbringing. Toronto is a super diverse city, and my family is very diverse. That really informed who I am today. My mom’s first husband was Jewish, so my older half-sister is Jewish. My stepmom is also Jewish, so it’s a double blended, multiracial family. I had a really beautiful childhood in Toronto.
I think it’s a great place to grow up. There’s so much food and things to do, especially within the arts, and I could access that. I went to acting classes from a young age, and then I went to performing arts camps. I pursued all kinds of artistic and creative interests. I went to a performing arts high school, and then I went to the University of Toronto to get my degree. While I was in university, I was also auditioning and acting.
What drew you to acting?
I just remember being a kid and seeing people on TV and feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. I love to perform and love attention. So I think that it was just something I was always drawn to.
When you see videos of me as a kid, as soon as the camera came on me, I was ready to perform. It came naturally. As I’ve grown into a sense of self, the things I want to do as an actor and what acting means to me have changed so much from when I was a kid.
What’s the first role that made you feel like acting is what you are meant to be doing?
I don’t know if I’ve had that yet. Everything always feels weird and shaky and scary, especially when it means a lot to you. Acting is such a big thing for me that it’s hard to distill my feelings about it because they’re always changing. I’ve had experiences that have made me feel like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Sometimes I’ve been in certain acting classes working on a monologue or a play or performing at a small theater.
Tell us about The Porter and the character you play in the series.
The Porter is a period drama that follows an incredible ensemble cast. It tells the story of these two gentlemen porters who work on the train for a railroad company going across Canada and into the United States for independence. They also creating a better life for themselves in the community but in very different ways. All of the other characters within the show follow the same trajectory of wanting to create a better life for themselves and their community.
For [Marlene], that looks like her work as a Black Cross Nurse, providing health care and education within her community and trying to create something that Black people can rely on that is outside white medical institutions.
Was there anything about this particular story that pulled you in or made you want to be a part of this show?
It was the opportunity to tell a story that reflected the Black Canadian experience in a way that I’ve never seen; for Black people by Black people. That was something that resonated with me. I’m half-Mali and half-Haitian. On both sides, my parents are new immigrants.
I don’t necessarily connect within my family to that history, but the impact that these men and women had on the Black community in Canada, how that has impacted the fact that my parents were able to come to Canada with immigration policy and the like, the quality of my life, and what I’m able to expect, that seemed important to represent and to honor and to give space for right now.
How has it been to work with Aml Ameen and Alfre Woodard?
Working with Alfre was such a dream because she’s in everything. I called her an icon the other night, and she’s like, “I’m not an icon.” I’m like, “To me you are.” I literally grew up watching her on-screen, and she is one of those people who see her gave me that bit of confidence to believe that I could do it.
Working with her was like a full-circle moment of working with someone who I didn’t even imagine I’d be able to work with and learn from and become friends with and grow with. That’s such a dream. I really enjoyed working with my co-stars. Ronnie Rowe and I were on a show called In Contempt together several years ago; we actually played lovers. It was nice to work with him again in a totally different period on a completely different show.
A lot of us grew in our friendships with each other. I never had any scenes with Loren [Lott]. The only scene I had with Loren was where I was leaving the Stardust in the first episode, and she was there. As we were filming, we were able to bond, and I would go to her dance rehearsals just to watch her dance because otherwise, I didn’t really get to see anything that she got to do. That was an incredible experience to build friendships and grow with my co-stars.
Are you excited about the US release of the show?
It’s exciting because it connects to so many people I’ve met over here who have family members who were porters, or who were somehow connected to a porter. For many of them, they haven’t seen the stories that their elders or their family members or relatives shared in such a way and I really am anxious to hear how they feel about it and how they connect to that.
What’s next for you?
I am developing my own projects, and I’m really working on developing my voice as a writer. That’s really important to me. The pandemic made it very clear how important it was to me. I really want to focus on comedy writing and speculative fiction writing.
The Porter, which originally aired on the CBC in Canada and premiered May 5, 2022, on BET+.