Harvard Guide to Yoga Review
- Rating: 5/5
- Authors: James E. Groves and Marlynn Wei
- Published: 2017
The Harvard Guide to Yoga is possible the best yoga guide you can pick up as a complete beginner or advanced student. Thoroughly researched and extremely personable and enjoyable, the HGY offers a great read and it’s authors have take great care!
The book provides a clear and thorough introduction to yoga that encompasses more than postures, asanas, breathing and meditation. It is a beautiful blend of scientific rigor and practical application, with just enough yoga mythology to feel authentic and sincere.
The Harvard Medical Schools Guide to Yoga is a comprehensive guide to understanding an integrated yoga approach. This guide to yoga practice includes asanas, breathing exercises and meditation and offers an 8-week course to promote yoga practice for serious yogis. Reading this book is as if a knowledgeable and wise yoga teacher would give you a private lesson at any time.
The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga was co-authored by Marlynn Wei, a psychiatrist and certified yoga teacher, and James E. Groves, a psychiatrist and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The guide openly addresses the risks associated with the practice of yoga by minors, and the authors are aware of the situations in which these risks are relevant.
This is the first overview of the scientific research to date on the various assertions made in relation to the practice of yoga. The authors cover important topics around yoga and specific health conditions, including physical and mental health, yoga and pregnancy. Later chapters on the modern science of yoga will present specific scientific research that has grown in recent years on the positive effects of yoga on health and well-being.
The program is taught by leading physicians and experts in mind-body medicine including Dr. Rudy Tanzi and Michelle Williams, SCD, both specialists in scientific and practical research in mind-body medicine. Participants will be provided a live stream transcript of the session for online viewing for 60 days after the conclusion of the course.
Dr. Benson is author or co-author of more than 180 scientific publications and twelve books. The Harvard Medical Schools Guide to Yoga is worth reading as soon as possible and can be found in any of my personal reference libraries. It is the lack of spiritual focus that bothers some readers and delights others, but it is the basis of science that attracts those who dismiss yoga as airy and fairy-tale.
Yoga and Science
Neophytes will find many benefits in this book, but I suspect that advanced practitioners will gain insights even if they have not read the scientific evidence. The Harvard Medical School Guide to Yoga is a welcome addition to Yoga literature for the price of a high-quality paperback (also available as an e-book).
The best part is that the author has an 8-week guide at the end, which contains a sequence you can go through. Detailed voice-over and visual instructions work well to perform poses and breaths. Photos and other graphics are needed for Chapter 3, but they are sparse for a book about practising Tai Chi.
If you have never practiced yoga, breathing techniques, meditations and poses can be intimidating. Those who are inclined to see through the various principles to be heard in the classroom, such as a non-judgmental attitude and self-acceptance, can penetrate the flesh of practice and spend some time there, which can be useful.
Yoga expert Natasha Noel, of Mumbai recommends several apps and online platforms that can help beginners improve their health with detailed yoga asanas. Install these apps on International Yoga Day to ensure a healthy mind, body and soul.
The Yoga world needs to clean up in order to find its right place in the world of medicine, and this manual is a necessary step. By giving more information to people and helping them find their way, I see this as a great purpose for a book about yoga.
A manual from Harvard Medical School by Dr. Marlynn Wei and Dr. James Grovess. Complete with illustrations of dozens of yoga breathing and meditation techniques, adaptable sequences and basic principles of yoga safety, this guide will guide you to health and well-being. Whether you want to try yoga or be intimidated by fancy and challenging poses, this is your guide to true healing at the heart of yoga by sharing techniques that Dr. Wei and Mr. Grove have used with great success with their clients.
My work is to educate the general public about yoga and yoga therapy science and research as well as yoga therapists as yoga practitioners and yoga teachers. This work has been done through lectures at conferences and publications of the Yoga organization, including reviews in peer-reviewed biomedical journals and books for the general public, including Your Brain on Yoga: An Introduction to Yoga, a Harvard health publication, and a medical textbook, Principles and Practice of Yoga in Health Care, which includes international contributions by leading yoga researchers and therapists. I also work to promote yoga research, including chairing the annual Yoga Research Symposium and editing the Peer Review International Journal of Yoga Therapy.
I began practicing Kundalini yoga when I was teaching Yogi Bhajan students in Toronto in the fall 1971 as part of a bachelor program at the University of Toronto. Today, millions of Americans, from young children to seniors in their 80s and 90s, practice yoga.
The good news is that yoga has the power to help dozens of different kinds of health. Peter Wayne combines rigorous Western science with Eastern wisdom in this brilliant book to present an enlightening modern view of Tai Chi. “Peter Wayne has been at the forefront of scientific research on how Tai Chi can improve health and well-being.