How Stress Impacts Your Health

Reducing stress levels can not only help your immediate emotional state, it can also protect your long-term health. Stress can affect all aspects of life, including emotions, behaviors, thinking ability, and physical health. Unfortunately, while stress is known to be a contributing factor in a countless variety of ailments, its influence can be easily overlooked.

Ayurveda views stress in terms of balance; balance in our doshas (the three governing principles of the body: Vata, Pitta and Kapha), balance in how we live our lives, balance in what we eat, and balance in our emotions. Both the mind and body must be in balance to experience optimal health. Anything that upsets that balance contributes to a deterioration of our health and happiness.

The powerful rejuvenation and detoxification therapies at the heart of The Raj treatment programs help to restore balance throughout the physiology. The Raj offers additional tools of yoga, breathing exercises (pranayama), and meditation to help support and maintain balance on all levels of life.

Yoga and Pranayama

Ayurveda and Yoga are sister sciences that synergistically complement one another, increasing each other’s benefits. The Raj offers guests a daily Yoga class, with a simple set of postures that are appropriate for beginners as well as experienced practitioners. Regular practice of these postures can help eliminate stress, develop flexibility, improve sleep, balance digestion, and deepen the experience of silence and expansion of consciousness.

While Yoga has become household word, most people are unaware that Yoga is more than an ancient form of exercise that tones the body and promotes health and well-being. The Sanskrit word Yoga means “union” and refers to the union of the individual self with the higher Self. Yoga means the experience of pure consciousness, the unified field of intelligence deep within. The original role of the physical poses of Yoga was to prepare the body for meditation. The poses enliven the connection between mind and body, consciousness and physiology. Done correctly and without effort, Yoga poses help dissolve stress and enliven mind-body coordination in order to support the expansion of consciousness.

Modern medical research support the benefits of yoga and breathing exercises. These practices have been shown to increase serotonin and endorphins, neurotransmitters that are well known to improve mood. They are also found to increase circulation to the brain and to produce hormones that are beneficial to mental health.

Meditation

The Raj invites you to learn the Transcendental Meditation^® (TM^®) program at the Raj. TM is a simple mental technique that produces profound benefits indicative of both mental and physiological balance. This technique does not require any change in beliefs or lifestyle and can be learned by anyone regardless of age or level of education.

The Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique is practiced for 15-20 minutes in the morning and evening, while sitting comfortably with the eyes closed. During this time, the mind settles down and experiences a unique state of restful alertness, an experience referred to as Transcendental Consciousness.

Instruction in TM is not included in your package price but can easily be added to any in-resident treatment package.

Guests who already practice the TM technique can have their meditation checked and can opt to enjoy meditating with others in our specially designated meditation room.

The effectiveness of the Transcendental Meditation program has been validated by over 600 scientific studies conducted at more than 200 independent research institutions in 30 countries. These include 368 peer- reviewed studies that have been published in top scientific journals.

The research findings include:

• Increased happiness
• Reduced stress
• Increased intelligence
• Increased creativity
• Improved memory
• Improved health
• Reduced high blood pressure
• Improved relationships
• Increased energy
• Reduced insomnia
• Reversal of biological aging
• Reduced crime and improved quality of life in society

The research has been published in major scientific journals such as Science, The American Journal of Physiology, Scientific American, Lancet, The Journal of Counseling Psychology, The International Journal of Neuroscience, The Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, and The British Journal of Educational Psychology.

According to the American Heart Association (AHA), the TM technique is the only meditation technique proven by controlled research to effectively reduce high blood pressure. AHA research shows that this lowers the risk of heart disease (by up to 48%) and is associated with substantially reduced rates of death, heart attack and stroke.”

The National Institutes of Health has funded over $26 million in research on the Transcendental Meditation technique for prevention of heart disease. The TM technique has also been found to reduce the three major risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.

In addition ,TM practice has been shown to be an effective tool for reducing chronic anxiety and overall stress.