Yogic Path

Dao Flow Yoga for Women’s Health and Fertility with Dr. Robin Saraswati Markus

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In this Conscious Conversation we’ll be exploring Dao Flow Yoga for women’s health and fertility with Dr. Robin Saraswati Markus. Dr. Saraswati is a holistic gynecologist, seasoned yoga teacher, and thought leader in natural hormonal balance in women’s health and fertility.

Her signatures style Dao Flow Yoga combines the subtle body energetics of acupuncture and the meridian system into yoga to unlock your personal body code for self-healing and vitality. Her work has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Magazine, LA Yoga, Spirituality & Health and Integral Yoga Magazine.

Visit her: http://nourishinglife.com/

CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS:

  • “There’s nothing more radical than reclaiming your own life force. How you think, feel, believe and perceive the world around you has great impact on the secretions and receptivity of your reproductive tissues. Every cycle, including your menstrual cycle has both a yin and a yang phase. By gathering, coordinating and harmonizing the interplay of yin and yang energies, hormones can be rest and optimized. As human beings become more synced with the rhythms of nature, resisting the urge to push, fight, control, the body gets healthier and stronger just by going with the flow.”
  • “Maybe what Daoism and certainly that’s something that’s embodied in Dao Yoga is zooming out our perspective which is a major principle of really this recognition that nature is at the center of our experience and by observing nature and her rhythms we can gain some insight into the rhythms going on inside our own body and embedded in that area some of the solutions as well to the ways we feel out of balance.”
  • “What I find is a major cause of hormonal imbalance and disease process in general, where the seeds of imbalance begin, is where we over-identify with the thinking mind and we may call it the stressful mind. That is not embodied.

All of that is happening from the heart, the throat, the third eye, the crown and these upper chakras become almost the languaging I’ll use a lot is just congested with thoughts and to do lists and worries, regrets, concerns, how to control what’s coming in front of us and they congest.

The literature, the spiritual literature, talks about our senses being these open, clear, bright opportunities to receive information, like insight. If they’re clogged we can’t connect to this wisdom body so that’s a major piece of finding harmony is opening the upper part of the body. Think about it, that’s where our stress gets usually held is in our jaw or in our temple, our migraines, top of shoulders, chest pain, anxiety, depression, or insomnia. All of this is happening in the upper body.”

  • “In general, a very common way that medical practitioners, holistic medical practitioners, will think about the menstrual cycle is the time from the menstruation through the ovulation as a time where the body is shedding what has been — it’s when the cycle begins again and if you will, blood, and when I say blood now I mean the Chinese medicine blood which involves hormones and other healthy, fertile markers and secretions and so forth that usually happens around ovulation.”
  • “All this communication of hormones is happening through the bloodstream which is a key point that we should remember to come back to as it relates to practice of Dao Flow Yoga. All of the communication of your brain to the ovary is happening through the bloodstream. Remember that’s essentially what a hormone is. It’s a messenger, it’s sent from one part of the body to a distant part of the body and it travels through the bloodstream and once it reaches the tissue and is taken up through the tissue via a receptor site, then the tissue performs a certain function or activity.

The hormone gives a message to tissues to do something, right? You can imagine if for some reason the blood is not flowing well or the tissues are turned off, they’re like I don’t want to take up that hormone right now because I’ve got other more important things to do, which is truly how the hormonal system works. That’s part of how hormones become imbalanced and it doesn’t take very long.”

  • “Our brain and the specific glands in the brain — the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland to be more specific — reads our environment and determines if it is safe to let down our guard and the body is always choosing between either a relaxed growth or a contracted protection.”
  • “All of those, the functionality meaning how well they work and respond and their predictability, their meaning, is based on blood flow and the hormones moving through them. So, the brain is reading its environment and deciding if it’s in a hostile environment or in a relaxed and nourishing environment and then body — those all turn into brain chemicals — and the body either is in an open stance, ready to experience life like it is — which is another definition of dharma — or is it in contracted and braced and trying to take control of things which will lead to the tissues actually, literally from the western side, the vessels clamp down and even further, those receptor sites slow down.”
  • “We can actually have a little bit of a stressful experience, but maintain this feeling of relaxed, growth, or a dynamic receptivity and that’s the key to take that off the mat and into your experience. That’s the way to move through our life and treasure your resources, whether you’re in your reproductive years or moving through towards menopause. This work that one does, she does, you do, the audience does to treasure her fertility is exactly the same thing that is going to help her walk through menopause.

It doesn’t have to be this time of deficiency and depression and needing external hormones. You have laid the groundwork, planted the seeds for your body to operate naturally, grounded. It has the resources inside it to be healthy and strong for your whole life, not just until you’re 50 and then suddenly you’re deficient.”

Transcript

OSMARA: Welcome to Motherhood Community .

In this Conscious Conversation we’ll be exploring Dao Flow Yoga for women’s health and fertility with Dr. Robin Saraswati Markus. Dr. Saraswati is a holistic gynecologist, seasoned yoga teacher, and thought leader in natural hormonal balance in women’s health and fertility.

Her signatures style Dao Flow Yoga combines the subtle body energetics of acupuncture and the meridian system into yoga to unlock your personal body code for self-healing and vitality. Her work has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Magazine, LA Yoga, Spirituality & Health and Integral Yoga Magazine.

“There’s nothing more radical than reclaiming your own life force. How you think, feel, believe and perceive the world around you has great impact on the secretions and receptivity of your reproductive tissues.

Every cycle, including your menstrual cycle has both a yin and a yang phase. By gathering, coordinating and harmonizing the interplay of yin and yang energies, hormones can be rest and optimized. As human beings become more synced with the rhythms of nature, resisting the urge to push, fight, control, the body gets healthier and stronger just by going with the flow.”

I love that Saraswati! Welcome. How are you?

SARASWATI: Thank you. I am doing so good this morning. It’s beautiful to spend some time with you, Osmara.

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