Veterans Mitigate PTS Through Yoga

SEDONA, AZ--(Marketwired - October 31, 2013) - One out of three soldiers deployed to the Middle East struggles with post-traumatic stress (PTS) or traumatic brain injury. For a growing number of veterans with serious mental health problems including PTS, depression and brain injury, yoga is an option proven to provide relief.

When 23-year Air Force veteran Chris Eder is practicing yoga daily and meditating, he needs far less medication for depression, anxiety or PTS, conditions impacted by his military career.

Young Americans go to war and come back "messed up" and in need of loving support, which this generation does not provide as readily as generations past, says Eder, who lives in Baltimore and is the father of three. Eder teaches yoga and educates yoga teachers about the military; he is on the faculty for a special February curriculum at the Sedona Yoga Festival to teach yoga teachers how to work with veterans across the country.

The Yoga for Veterans training at the Sedona Yoga Festival is the first of its kind. Marc Titus, festival founder, was particularly inspired to help veterans due to his first-hand knowledge of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. Titus is the son of a Vietnam veteran who was "affected by PTSD and never even knew it." His wife and partner Heather is the step-daughter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

** This Veteran's Day, please consider featuring yoga's healing effects for U.S. veterans. We can connect you with veterans who have been helped by yoga as well as key players in the yoga for veterans realm, including Rob Schware of the Give Back Yoga Foundation and Marc and Heather Titus, who will spend Veteran's Day together in Sedona. **

"This is an ever-mounting problem in our country," says Marc Titus. "We can provide veterans with tools to relieve the symptoms of trauma and other injuries that are causing families and communities to suffer."

Veterans with PTS use yoga as a method to regain control over a nervous system that is always "on edge," and to gain control over self-destructive behaviors and habits.Since trauma lies in the body, mind, and spirit, a holistic, integrated treatment that includes yoga and meditation can be a way to reconnect with the self in the present moment, returning practitioners to feeling comfortable in their own skin and keeping the traumas of the past at bay.

A regular yoga practice canhelp combat veterans and others who have experienced traumatic events to heal. Yoga helps trauma survivors find inner peace, better sleep and an alternative to the "fight or flight" cycle they lived in during their military career.

"With Mindful Yoga Therapy for Veterans we are training a growing number of veterans to bring this back to their peers and also training yoga teachers to reach thousands of veterans," says Robert Schware, executive director of the Give Back Yoga Foundation (GBYF), which has the largest yoga-for-veterans program in the nation based on practical and clinical experience working with veterans coping with PTS and other psycho-emotional stress. GBYF is a partner in Sedona Yoga Festival's Yoga for Veterans Training February 6-7, 2014.

November 11th is Veteran's Day because it was the date on which World War I fighting ceased in 1918; it became a legal holiday in 1938.

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Veterans Mitigate PTS Through Yoga