Sutra 2.43: As you purify your mind, body, and senses, you become much happier and joyous.

The goal is to reduce the experience of arthritic pain and its impact in the client's daily life. The client will be seen 3 times per week via zoom. Will do breath work, and gentle stretching, rotation, flexion of identified, particularly painful joints in her wrists and fingers. Progress assessed by subjective rating scale.

Client is a 49 year-old Hispanic female with a diagnosis or rheumatoid arthritis first made at the age of 25. She lives with her husband and her 8 year old daughter in a house in Ardsley, N.Y. She is otherwise in good health. She eats healthy foods and exercises regularly. She is a guidance counselor at an elementary school. She has been in yoga classes and private lessons with me on-and-off for 2 years. She has taken cortisone injections and other pain medications during flair-ups.

While I have been seeing the client for sometime, I have been incorporating the the teaching of concepts austerity, self-discipline, and the acceptance of pain over the past 6 months. My goal was to help the client come to terms with and accept her chronic pain as an important component of her life and, in managing it, be able to experience herself as a stronger and more resilient person, not as a person controlled by her pain but one who has come to grips with it and able to build from there.

I chose Raja Yoga as selected teaching because is the training I completed. My client has been practicing yoga for a long time and hearing about the treat of yoga that put it all together when she is practice helps her be connected with the asanas. The sutras is important becasue it helps us understand the core and phylisophical as well of understanding the practice and achieval goals for our practice.It takes us from a physcial practice to a spirituatl practice. Since they are 196 sutras Patanjali’s yoga sutras into your practice? Well, the yoga sutras explore the underlying meaning of yoga. They don’t describe the how — they explore the why.atanjali’s Yoga Sutras contain a description of the eightfold path – guidelines on how to live a meaningful and purposeful life. It’s called ashtanga, and its literal translation means “eight limbs” (ashta=eight, anga=limb).

Since the pandemic my contacts with client have been on Zoom for 45 minute sessions in the afternoon after she comes home from work. Client was attentive and engaged in instruction. Her breathing was steady and comfortable. Though often an anxious person who responds quickly in conversations, during our sessions she would become mindful and be present. A teacher herself, she was attentive and accepted suggested instructions. As a warm-up, we do sun salutations both standing up and on the chair, coordinating the exercise with the breath. Sessions began sitting down doing flexion and rotation hand and foot exercises. This was followed by back stretching. When she encountered significant pain she would stop, go into a corpse pose, and let me know the intensity of pain that she was experiencing (1-10). Exercises were then adjusted to reflect her flexibility that day.

Continue to follow up with her medical practioner on a regular basis, continue to practice the physical postures, meditation, savasana, and read a yoga sutra or join a group of the teaching of the sutras. Practice yoga It defines asana as follows: “Sthiram sukham aasanam” which means, “asana is a steady and comfortable seat.” be in the right frame of mind when practicing and with dedication. Client was advised to practice pranayama on a daily basis and take yoga classes weekly. preferably restorative yoga.

The client has been receptive to yoga interventions and instructions. She speaks quickly, has limited patience, and tends to interrupt. Client is by nature a somewhat self-involved person who demonstrates a limited propensity to look at her life in more spiritual terms. She tends to focus on the immediate situation rather than turning to and using suggested perspectives that could be a way to change the manner in which she sees herself. She typically has her own set idea of what her goal is and should be. She was able to see and accept the logic in the idea that her struggle has made her a stronger person which makes her feel better about herself. However, she rarely if ever seemed to truly incorporate this struggle into a positive aspect of her identity. Her illness remains a burden. In this way the goal was only partially achieved, there ultimately was limited spiritual growth.

I have to continue to practice myself the sutras so that they become easier to teach. It is also powerful when teaching how much we are learning from whom we are teaching. And how much our understanding is affected by others imput of how they ineterpret the sutras.

I think that my efforts were positive and helpful. Client was able to continue to benefit from the continuation of yoga and the exercises which I had already been teaching the client for sometime. I was able to help her see how her struggles have made her stronger which I think was of benefit to her. However, I also think that my efforts to bring the client to a higher spiritual level were less successful. I don't think that my efforts to try to take this next step were in anyway damaging to her, I think we simply reached a ceiling beyond which she was not inclined to go. Going forward, I might take into greater account individual differences when setting spiritual goals. The world is full of different types of people with different talents, skills, intellectual abilities, emotional attributes and spiritual sensitivities. They come to yoga for different reasons.