Yoga focuses it’s stretching & releasing motions on increasing your joint flexibility, muscle tone and suppleness, and improving your circulation, lymph & nerve flow. In massage the goal is to flush toxins out of your body, loosen muscle and joint tension, and enhance the functioning of your blood, lymph, and nervous systems. Some schools of yoga (particularly the Ananda Marga method) even utilize a self-massage after completing your daily asanas to give you a more balanced, harmonious sense of your self. (Asana is the Sanskrit word for yoga posture: which translated means: posture comfortably held.) In a truly therapeutic, holistic massage, you’ll also find the therapist stretching & loosening your joints, spreading and elongating your muscles, as well as helping you gently relax into the most natural posture for your particular hips, shoulders, neck, etc.

A therapeutic massage is going to leave you realigned, deeply enlivened, and rebalanced in body, mind and spirit. Similarly, a well-facilitated yoga class or private yoga session will impart an invigorating tingle to your being that helps you feel completely connected psycho-spiritually, & from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. A properly taught yoga class actually does an internal massage on your endocrine glands, sebaceous skin glands, and internal organs; while a professional massage reaches deep into your musculature to massage your smaller muscles over your bony structure and balance your 12 organ pulses as well.

Even though both healing arts – massage and yoga, can achieve some of the same things, it does help at times to use both in your personal health program. Also, a yogassage, table session can help acclimate your body to the art of stretching for flexibility and releasing tension for deep relaxation, and all by utilizing your marvelous, built-in respiratory healer. In a group yoga class, it’s quite difficult for the instructor to attune to all of your particular needs, while ‘keeping an eye’ on all other class members as well. Yet, the benefits of engaging in a group yoga class while regularly receiving therapeutic massage is that it gives you a chance to re-pattern some of your key repetitive motion stress or unhealthy postures, and learn how to prevent some of your difficulties before you even get on the massage table. Many modern massage therapists are now beginning to give special discounts or consideration to those clients who are doing something outside of the massage session to ‘keep themselves well.’

Remolding your bodies’ soft tissues to hang out on your skeleton in a freer and more fluid fashion is the common goal of both current day yoga and massage. We all need artistic sculpting, and neuromuscular re-education from time to time in our lives, and both holistic massage and therapeutic yoga offer these benefits. As our culture continues to speed up in its demands on us, we all need more of the gifts yoga & massage can offer us to remove unnecessary toxins, fine tune our intricate systems, and calm our sometimes racing thoughts. See if a combination of these two excellent ‘self care –health care’ approaches is just what the doctor ordered to bring you into full appreciation of the precious present where joy & compassion abound. You’ll also find more intuitive guidance and creative decision-making coming as easy as water rolling off a ducks back For more on the yoga & massage relationship, write me at: smoothyoga2004@yahoo.com . (Note: A talk / with demonsttation on this topic was given at a local Lion's Club in October 2005 and was quite well received!)