Yoga & Wellness Advocate

Tuesday, 10 June 2014 00:46

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Yoga & Wellness Advocate

JUDIT TOROK

A regular visitor to Tokyo, New York City- based yoga instructor and interculturalist Judit Torok shares her techniques for alleviating big city stress.

Fight Off Stress with Your Breath

Imagine you have an acquaintance, a person you've known for a long time - perhaps as long as you can remember. He comes to your house any time, uninvited, and stays for as long as he wants. Rude and inconsiderate, he imposes his presence on your life, makes a mess and doesn’t leave. You try to be nice at first and reason with him, but he only gets more annoying with time. You try to ignore him or even pick a fight, but he comes right back again and again. This unwelcome and annoying acquaintance is called stress.

A universal hardship of modern life, stress affects people regardless of age, education, economic status or ethnicity. Many popular medical journals cite that over 60% of adults in the U.S. and Japan and well over 50% of Europeans suffer from physical and mental stress. Stress doesn’t discriminate; it affects schoolchildren, teenagers, business people, and artists as well as the elderly. Wherever we turn, stress seems to have taken hold of our lives.

Stress is my unwelcome associate as well. We have known each other for a long time and have negotiated a complicated relationship over the years. It was after many years of dedicated yoga practice that I realized that creating space can be effective at combating this destructive impostor. tj

The complete article can be found in Issue #274 of the Tokyo Journal. Click here to order from Amazon.

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Written By: Judit Torok

Tokyo Journal columnist Dr. Judit Torok is a philosopher, intercultural thinker and yoga instructor. She was born in Hungary and learned Japanese fluently at an early age. She has visited Japan many times and worked for a Japanese company for more than a decade. She received her doctorate degree in philosophy at the New School University and uses her intercultural background and education as a springboard to focus on theories of ethics, aesthetics and multicultural marginality. She is an energetic, creative and certified yoga instructor who promotes a holistic and healthy lifestyle for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, incorporating general wellness, alternative medicine and nutrition into her classes.