Yoga Therapy for the Mind with Arun Deva

FREE Friday night hours: 6-8pm
Saturday and Sunday 9am-5pm with lunch breaks
This 3-day workshop will take you on an experiential tour of how yoga therapy can be applied to healing the mind. The link between the mind and the different organs/systems of the body is well researched and documented in Āyurveda. Now the progressive field of psychotherapy has related our instincts to our reptilian stem, our emotional to the limbic, and the rational to our neo-cortex. In Āyurveda, however, the mind is not restricted to this structure, instead it begins in the heart, reaches downwards into the gut and upwards into the brain. The connections are easy to see as seats of instincts, feelings and sensation/thought. Therefore, all our instincts and our rational thinking revolve around the mediating emotional state. When our emotional state is one of creativity, innocence and joy, we see beauty, feel compassion and instinctually open to universal waves of loving. However, when our emotions are dominated by fear, anger and grief, we become susceptible to the 6 enemies of the mind: lust, rage, greed, jealousy, envy and delusion. And our thinking and functionality begins to operate from these states. In Ayurveda, it is also said that if you wish to conquer these six enemies, there is no better pathway than that of yoga (sattvavajaya cikitsa).
Lectures
The workshop will include 3 lectures. Topics to be covered are:
• Yogic Psychology of the Mind – Sāmkhya, the underlying psychology of yoga and āyurveda, divides the mind into 4 parts: storehouse, intellect, sensorial and ego. Each will play a part in our health.
• 3 Mind Centers – Gut + Heart + Brain. The gut is the seat of digestion, the heart of love and the brain of reason. When they work in harmony, we have health.
• Merging Ayurveda & Yoga in Therapy – Āyurveda gives us daily routines, dietary guidelines and other powerful tools within which the practices of yoga are essential.
Practices
The workshop will include many practices, so please dress appropriately and bring your mat if you have one!
Practice topics will include:
• Breathe!
• Chanting & Mudra
• Yoga Therapy for Gut (instinct)
• Yoga Therapy for Heart (emotions)
• Yoga Therapy for Brain (reasoning)
• Vishesha: āyurveda practices: shiromarma and padābhyanga (shiromarma is a head marma massage and padābhyanga is a foot oil massage)
Arun Deva is a member of of numerous Āyurvedic Associations: NAMA & CAAM since 2004. Currently he chairs NAMA’s Committee for Āyurvedic Yoga Therapy and is a NAMA Board Member. Arun teaches internationally, lectures at Conferences, writes articles for different publications; including peer reviewed Āyurveda Journals, and has been featured on both radio and television. He is director of āyurveda for yoga studies at Loyola Marymount University. Born and raised in India where he began his yogic studies, Arun has made his home in Los Angeles since 1977. www. yogarasayana.com