Yoga for Rehabilitation, Recovery, and Healing: From Contemplative Wisdom to Empirical Inquiry
Yoga is a complementary and integrative health practice based in Vedic traditions dating back to 3000 BC. Currently, in developed countries, yoga is practiced as a broad remedy to manage health-related symptoms but this is only one aspect of yoga. The practices of yoga are multi-faceted and include physical postures (āsana), breathing practices (prāṇāyāma), concentration and meditation practices (dhārana, dhyāna), and ethical precepts for living a meaningful and virtuous life (yamas, niyamas). Burgeoning interest in yoga as a therapeutic intervention for a variety of health conditions has resulted in an exponential increase in research over the past few decades. A plethora of diseases and conditions have been evaluated in research-based yoga interventions, including musculoskeletal, neurological, immune, endocrine, cardiovascular, and psychological conditions, with many benefits reported. The field has expanded beyond efficacy research into: 1) elucidating the mechanisms of yoga, 2) translating the theory of yogic texts to contemporary conceptualizations of health, and 3) refined applications of yoga therapy.
Yoga offers a unique approach to health promotion, disease prevention, and treatment. As a complex and nuanced set of mind-body practices, yoga has garnered attention for its notable ability to simultaneously address multiple body systems through a dynamic and bidirectional process of top-down and bottom-up components to yield benefit in symptom reduction for many diseases. Main diagnostic entities, such as cancer, cardiovascular, respiratory, and metabolic diseases are rapidly increasing in prevalence in developed nations, in part due to aspects of a Western lifestyle such as substance use, stress, and inactivity. Although Western models of health emphasize stress reduction and recovery from disease or injury, yogic paradigms of health expand beyond these goals to include flourishing, resilience, and ultimately transformation of consciousness. Yoga and yoga therapy are increasingly being used as low-cost, accessible, and sustainable biobehavioural tools to counter these epidemics and to revitalize the mind-body-spirit trinity in a demanding world.
This special collection is a call for leading edge and innovative manuscripts that highlight current knowledge on the applications of yoga and yoga therapy, synthesize the wisdom of yogic theory with modern scientific models of health, and address special considerations in yoga research.