Greetings! It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for checking out my video. I’m going to talk about yoga and Candida today. Can yoga cure Candida? Is it some sort of magical treatment that help you eradicate a yeast infection? What do you think? Is yoga some sort of mind control? Some sort of paranormal extraterrestrial kind of anti-Christian mind control system like some patients have told me? Some people are really skeptical of yoga. Don’t be skeptical. Yoga has been around for a long time and it’s been practiced by millions of people for such a long time now. An incredible number of people in the west are taking up many different forms of yoga. There is an incredible amount of forms of yoga that you can do.
So how does yoga work? Is yoga some kind of a system that helps you to change the way you think about things? Does it improve the way your body functions? Does it help you to relax more? Yoga does lots of different things for lots of different people. I’ve just been looking on the internet, and I’ve found some really nice websites on people who have spoken about their experiences with yoga and yeast infection or yoga and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Yoga and autoimmune disease or yoga and thyroid dysfunction, adrenal fatigue, many different things.
What I want you to understand is many people believe that Candida comes from eating the wrong kind of foods. Many people believe that Candida comes from antibiotics. Some people have got strange belief systems and really look for external causes for the yeast infection when they’re forgetting all about their inner world.
I’ve written many times in my articles, and also spoken on this YouTube channel, written in my book about the stress connection. Yoga is one of the most profound stress release therapies that you’ll ever find. When practiced properly, it has a very beneficial effect on balancing the autonomic nervous system. It helps to reduce sympathetic overload, helps to push up parasympathetic dominance. The sympathetic nervous system is the “fight or flight.” You may be aware of that. The parasympathetic is the “rest and digest.”
Many people have an imbalanced life. Every day in my clinic, I hear stories from people under a lot of stress. Their father died, their sister got murdered, their mother died of cancer, they went bankrupt, their son’s in jail for drugs. You think about it, everyone has got their own stress. We all have our own story to tell. It’s the culmination of all of these stresses in a person’s life, coupled with many other factors that will account for stress and will account for how that person is going to cope with the stress. We all cope in our own different way. Some people cope with booze, some people cope with sex, some people cope with drugs, some people cope with running away to another country. Some people I meet cope by getting a parrot. What a dumb thing to do. I’ll introduce you to my parrot one day in my videos. I’ve got a lovely parrot, which I spend a lot of time with.
The parasympathetic nervous system is the system that very much controls the body’s ability to come back from a stressful state. Yoga has an ability to really increase parasympathetic dominance. That’s what we’re really trying to look for with people. Any kind of chill pill we can give someone to me is very much worth it. Yoga is a beautiful system that increases a person’s ability to relax. I’ve got this website I’m looking at that has a couple of silly statements when it comes to breathing. A lot of people are still under the illusion that we need to get deep breathing to get as much oxygen into the system as possible. That’s not correct.
I want you to try and understand breathing is not about deep breathing. It’s in fact very slow breathing where the breath is almost imperceptible. I’d like you to check out Buteyko breathing. I’ve spoken a lot about this. I have a very good friend up in Auckland, Glenn White, who’s spent many years studying breathing and was trained by Professor Buteyko from Russia. This video is not going to be about Buteyko, but I want to emphasize that one of the most powerful ways for you to relax is to learn how to breathe properly. Deep breaths – ramming oxygen down is not the way to relax.
Many people in sympathetic overload find themselves catching their breath. They can’t quite get the air down there. The sympathetic nervous system will do that. As cortisol and adrenaline increases, it’ll quicken the pulse, the heart beats faster. The breaths become more shallow. The mind becomes more alert. The immune system shuts down. The blood even thickens and changes viscosity under stress. Cortisol does all that. Cortisol creates anxiety under high stress. It has the ability to even eliminate white blood cells from the circulation, increasing chances of infection.
There are many reasons why you don’t want to be in a sympathetic state. Sympathetic state also reduces peristalsis – it slows the bowel function down. It reduces production of digestive enzymes. This is why people bloat, fart, burp and get constipated under stress. Rest and digest. Parasympathetic dominance – cortisol becomes more balanced. Breathing becomes much more natural and not shallow. The mind becomes more relaxed and anxiety drops off. Digestion improves. Constipation disappears.
The burps, farts and bloats go away. Your sleeping gets better. All the things that you’re looking for you can get with the sympathetic/parasympathetic balance.
I’ve spoken about this on many videos about the sympathetic is the accelerator pedal or the gas pedal, whereas, the parasympathetic is the brake. Very nice people to be in a car with understand the balance between the gas pedal and the brake pedal. Inexperienced drivers will take you on a hayride. They’ll fly around corners and hit the brakes when they see something. Experienced chauffeurs understand to anticipate the corner coming up and to slow down gently and very gently turn around the corner then gently accelerate. Same with a person who can anticipate stress in their life. They’ll see the corners coming up; they’ll understand that they need to back off the sympathetic and increase the parasympathetic.
Yoga is going to allow you to negotiate the roads to see what’s coming up. See the potholes, see the pedestrians jumping in front of you. Yoga will take an edge off anxiety when you’re driving the car. It’ll take the edge off anxiety in your life, with your job, with your partner. I’m a very big fan of people who practice yoga regularly, or meditate or do tai chi, or pray, or whatever they find helps them cope with life in general. Whatever they find that can help them get that autonomic balance back again. I’m a very big fan of that. Why am I a fan of that? Because it gives the person the ability to not to have to take things to feel better, because they’re making changes in their life. They’re anticipating what lies ahead. It’s understanding that stresses can affect you very bad. In turn, the stresses affect your immune system, increasing your chances of you getting sick and staying sick.
Most doctors will tell you nearly all patients that come to their clinic just need a chill pill. An aspirin, a dummy pill/placebo, then they go home, and ring me in the morning. Usually things are all right. You think about that carefully. Yoga is clever. It has nothing to do with religious belief systems. I’ve had some Christian patients being very worried about me talking about yoga, saying that “It’s satanic. It’ll convert your mind and make you sacrifice goats. You’ll burn in hell.” Well, I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen. I want you to separate your belief systems from yoga, and see it a meditation, a relaxation. Meditation has got nothing to do with religion. Let’s keep religion out of this YouTube channel. Let’s keep politics out of it. We’re just looking for ways and means to allow people to improve their lives. Put belief systems in a pot over here, put the lid on it. I respect your belief systems, and I don’t want you to think that yoga is some kind of mind control or some sort of anti-Christ kind of movement because it’s not. I’ve got many patients who do practice this from all kinds of denominations.
It’s important that you find the right yoga to suit you. There are different types and styles of yoga. I’m not familiar with all the names of them, but I have patients often mentioning these names, these yoga systems. You need to find something that works for you. To me, it’s like tai chi. It’s meditation in motion. It improves all aspects of your being. Spiritual being, the psychological part, the biochemical part, the structural part, all of these parts of you as a human will be improved with regular application of yoga in your life.
Am I a fan of yoga? Absolutely. I’d like you to think carefully about yoga or tai chi. I’m similar about tai chi. I find this to be wonderful as well. If this is something that you’d like to take up, I highly endorse it, and think it’s a huge step in the right direction for you. Not just to get on top of the Candida, but to get on top of health problems in your life in general. Thanks for tuning in. Click on the link below please if you haven’t already downloaded my Candida report, and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you for watching.