As complementary and alternative medicines and yoga continue to enjoy a boom in popularity so does the need to raise standards and improve practice. The study of medical sciences is an essential part of the education of all complementary and alternative medicine practices including Yoga. This is because a good knowledge of anatomy & physiology will help us to understand some of the theory behind yoga practices and will also help us to more fully understand many of the benefits of practicing yoga.
There are two main benefits from this, the first is that yoga is always concerned with raising awareness and as such increasing the sensitivity of our inner body will help us to maintain health or an inner equilibrium, helping us to better listen and respond to the body’s needs, and secondly by becoming more aware of our body we can more easily rely upon inner guidance to help us work with the different practices of yoga, ultimately this will also help us in our quest to become more self-reliant, where we look for an inner cue than for outer guidance.
Becoming sensitised to the different structures and functions of the body will be especially helpful for you as you aim to develop your own yoga practice and it will also mean when you do attend classes and work with a teacher you will be more able to observe your own inner experience of any yoga practice such as asana or pranayama ensuring you do not blindly follow his or her instructions but check them against your own inner experience. This is a very important point because when we practice yoga the primary focus must always be an inner focus rather than an outer one where we are assessing how we look, and hopefully a good yoga teacher will always help with this by providing instructions on where to look inwardly to ensure you are working in the right way with proper alignment, using the correct muscles, with the right amount of effort and so forth. This means right away as a first principle of working with yoga we must set the right intention or mental attitude towards our practice where we are focusing upon our inner experience.
Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology trining can easily be gained from the comfort of your home and at your own pace through home study courses. One company, Alternative Training, offers high quality home-study courses in Yoga, Anatomy & Physiology and Pathology & Disease.
The study of these subjects has, in the past, presented many problems with very few texts being specifically written for complementary therapies. There are many fine medical books, but their content is usually too detailed or too biased towards the needs of medical practice. Alternative Training have developed their courses to provide a simple means for you to easily extract relevant material from carefully selected textbooks and to guide you step-by-step through your study in an interesting and easy way.
This approach is aided by additional clarification and expansion of many of the topics covered, with learning feedback provided through both self-assessment questions with model answers and tutor marked assignments. You can take any of their courses on their own, but the Anatomy & Physiology Course provides the ideal preparation before you start on the Pathology & Disease Course.
If you want to know more take a look at the Alternative Training website www.alternative-training.com