#548 Yoga Therapy to Reduce Stress and Tone the Vagus Nerve With Doris Puehringer
with Doris Puehringer
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, I’m Dr. Wendy Meyers. Welcome to the Meyers Detox podcast. Today on the show, I wanted to have my friend Doris Puehringer. She’s an expert in yoga therapy. She has a master’s degree in yoga therapy, and her popular weekly online yoga therapy classes attract attendees from over 30 countries around the world. She frequently addresses medical gatherings and retreats, sharing her unique approach. And as a professional yoga therapist, Doris has worked with hundreds of people to overcome neurological, psychological, and physiological disorders. Using her approach, Doris also teaches men and women how to transform themselves deeply and live healthy, disease-free lives. She’s going to be talking about using yoga therapy to reduce stress and to tone the vagus nerve.
We’re going to talk about the differences between regular yoga, the different styles of yoga and yoga therapy, and how you can use yoga therapy to address pain issues, to address neurological issues, nerve issues, anxiety, depression, and really use it as a therapy. Doris worked for over a decade with an actual MD neurologist with all of his patients. Doris also has a free class that you can take at DorisYogaTherapy.com/Myers-Detox. You can check that out. Lots of great info on the show today.
Doris, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Doris Puehringer
Oh, thank you, Wendy, for inviting me to your podcast. I’m admiring you, how you serve your clients, and I’m very excited to be on your show.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You’re an expert on yoga therapy, and so I wanted to have you come on because I love yoga, but there’s a lot of distinctions to be made between yoga and yoga therapy. Those are very, very different. Explain to us what that is and what got you so into it. You’ve got a master’s degree in this, and just explain that a little.
Doris Puehringer
How I got into yoga therapy, it started with me when I was a small child. My grandmother, from where I was raised in Austria, introduced yoga to me. And then it was yoga in that matter, since she went to India on a two-month trip and when she came back, she told my brother and me what yoga is. As we all know, yoga is a 5000-year-old lifestyle approach, physical, and mentally and spiritually. And she sat us kids down, and she taught us first the poses, and then she said, like, it’s a lifestyle, so that doesn’t only involve poses. It’s like breathing, it’s what you eat, how you live, your daily life, and all this and so on. And I was very fortunate through her that she told me all this.
So when I got into it really, actually in the yoga therapy, first it is the yoga, right? And then with the yoga therapy, it came to me quite a while ago., I was here in Los Angeles, an art director, and this was a very stressful job for me. I was very stressed out. I was basically every day in a fight and flight situation. And then, on top of it, I was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer, so that changed my whole life, and I thought, “Okay, I have to do something about it. Forget that job, it’s not worth it.” And I started to be a yoga teacher. And that quite honestly didn’t satisfy me either since it was great, you know, all these different styles, what you can try out in the Western world, but I wanted to go a little bit deeper and with more knowledge. So I went to Marymount University and studied yoga therapy for three years, and that really satisfied me, I have to say.
The biggest luck that I actually had was working with a neurologist immediately, even as I was still at university. I got that offer to have an interview with that neurologist, and we paired up together and created that Western-Eastern approach. I was very fortunate that a Western MD took me under his umbrella and under his wing. And so that’s how all yoga therapy started for me, and that’s what I’m doing very passionately for almost 16, 17 years. That’s how I started with yoga therapy.
Now the difference between yoga and yoga therapy, I mentioned it already a little bit, the yoga in Western world, there’s different styles. That’s like Vinyasa, Hatha, Ashtanga, Bikram, Hot yoga, Power yoga, you know, all these yoga styles. And it’s all great and it’s wonderful. Everybody has to practice different styles.
Dr. Wendy
Except for hot yoga! I hate hot yoga. I want to die!
Doris Puehringer
Me too! So I have to tell you a little story since you’re mentioning that. When I got into this, I tried all these styles out since I was so curious, and I wanted to experience all of those. And so I went to Bikram, and he was still in town. He got deported out of the country for some other reasons, but at that time being, I went to his warehouse where he had hundreds of people, and he had that room heated up. It was like hot yoga.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I’ve been to Bikram too, it’s just unbearable.
Doris Puehringer
It was unbearable. And I totally agree. And we are like sweating, and there was the mat on mat and I’m like looking, oh my God, I don’t even know this person next to me and they’re dripping the sweat over to me. So that was like an experience, but I totally agree with you, it’s not our cup of tea. Going back to all those styles, and then there is, of course, restorative yoga now, they came with the yin yoga. So the yin and yang concept, the Taoist concept. It’s like the movement is the yang, the sun, the energy. And the yin is like the moon, the calming, the nurturing. And that’s what actually most of the time I provide. And I provide this from young age on to people who are bedridden. So this is an ongoing process. This is like what yoga therapy is about.
Yoga therapy is like almost 4000 years old and originated as well in India. The difference between yoga therapies, first of all, you need to be a certified licensed yoga therapist, and for that reason, you need to study anatomy. And then, ideally what I was very fortunate, I was practicing for over 10 years with a neurologist in his private office. So we had almost like 8 to 10 private patients every day, and it was lovely since in the morning when we met… And he had other providers there, health providers, we met and we talked about our clients, and it confirmed the Western approach and then the Eastern holistic approach. The main thing was what happened, and I wish more doctors would do that (in our society now, some of them practice that already) where Western and Eastern is combined on a daily basis with patients, especially when they are in a private practice. And especially with neurologists since you are hitting so many different fields of pain management, neurological issues, major illnesses, and so forth.
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Dr. Wendy
It makes sense because yoga therapy helps dramatically to reduce stress and calm the nervous system. It’s one of its many benefits. And that’s one of the main things people need help with, is stress reduction and calming that nervous system or toning that vagus nerve, etc.
Doris Puehringer
Absolutely. You hit right now the vagus nerve, talking about that, going into really helping some people. So let’s say I specialized with neurological disorders and that was involving like pain management. And it could be like if people are sitting way too long on the computer or on electronics, and they have neck pain, head pain, they have brain fog. This is all related to also neurological disorders where unfortunate heavy illnesses like ALS or MS, or they get like trauma, where there is PTSD, or just like migraines, headaches. All those issues. Fibromyalgia is now coming up really big since people are so stressed out, and they don’t know how to do little daily tools. So yoga therapy, the difference between yoga and yoga therapy is like, you go through the waves. Some people, they stay on yoga, they do it for a while, and then they fall off the wagon. With yoga therapy, this is a lifestyle, and you want to do this the rest of your life. So that’s the difference. And even when you do it for five minutes or 10 minutes, but you want to practice, that’s like your change of lifestyle, what you want to create.
Just talking a little bit about what I experienced with the neurologist, going back to this, it was so beautiful. So we all met and we talked about the patients and then we did our job. Three times a week, I got our team together and before our patients came in, I did with the staff and with my colleagues, we did breathing techniques and we did like for 10 minutes, something just to loosen up. Like to loosen up your shoulders or your neck. And they told me where they were very stiff or tight or where they have back pain. And we worked on that and it was such a beautiful intertwining and staying focused and being there for our clients and our patients. We’re not like running there and just working on it where you forget about yourself, since when you yourself are not in sync and in balance, how can you really perform a good job? Especially in my career. I have to always make sure that I’m balanced out and I’m not all scattered all over since that happens still to my day. So what then I do, I just relax myself with certain tools that I use.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So you mentioned a few health issues. What are some of the main benefits to people doing yoga therapy? Why would people want to do yoga therapy and engage in this practice?
Doris Puehringer
Great question, since that’s the main thing, like what people should do, especially when they have health issues. What I said before with pain management, that would be more the simplest, that would be just like something like they do more exercises, more poses, like a little sequence I would put together for them. That would be more for pain management. Also for migraine or headaches, I’m putting sequences together. And this is all customized since everybody’s different, there are so many different kinds of migraines, so many different kinds of headaches. That’s more the pain management. With fibromyalgia, same thing. Back pain is huge and this is not only related structural—it’s also related mentally. That’s emotionally, when people are really stressing out. That’s like an emotional stress and most likely where it arrives, it’s in your head, neck related. And when it’s an old issue, let’s say you were in an abusive relationship, or in your childhood, when we are going back, most likely it arrives in your lower back. And that’s where you have to focus on hip and low back relaxation poses, and they need to be done probably until you don’t feel that pain anymore.
Dr. Wendy Myers
When it comes to back issues, for me, it was a combination of, yeah, stress and relationships, but also tightness, at the same time weakness. Where you’re tight and you’re weak and your core is weak. And in yoga, you’re strengthening, you’re stretching, loosening, it’s just so fundamental to prevent and to repair back issues.
Doris Puehringer
Absolutely. And this is huge now in our society. I was reading an article that was pretty interesting. We are living in the loneliest time in history. And so why? It’s all the electronics, that’s also like the average is basically single, and that is a sad situation when you think about it. And what do they do? They sit from in the morning until not only work-related, also then in their private life, they sit in front of their phone or their tablets or computer and just get constantly bombarded, as you know, since you’re the expert in it. With the EMF, radiation, what is absolutely toxic for our body. And in our society, we need to move and we can do this in different ways, and those are the tools I provide as a therapist.
My biggest tool, what I provide in the beginning, what I always do with private clients, for example, I want to evaluate them since that’s my job. I have to assess them in their physical matter and also in their emotional, since I work on both modalities. Also on the intellectual, since sometimes people need quite some loosening up where they think right, but then they block themselves. And so this falls all together as a yoga therapist, that’s what I’m working on. So the biggest tool, coming back to that, is breathwork. I’m having lots of different breathing techniques that I’m working on with people, and I think that gets more and more important in our society, that people would do daily breathing work. That’s my biggest one.
And then of course, depends physically what you’re going through, you have to work the strength, you have to work the balance. Balance is another thing. And I can see that even with very young people, they have vertigo, they have balance issues. That is related again to like they have all these electronics bombarding them and they lose their balance. And that’s a huge issue in our society now since people are not going out for a simple walk, just enjoying nature. And that’s what I work a lot, like where people have to focus on coming back to what our ancestors did. They just had no electronics. They were just working when the sun rose, then they got up, they did their thing. And in the evening, they had that calming downtime. So those are all those issues.
Now with neurological issues, you are moving into, as I said earlier, MS, ALS, migraine, headaches. Those are all neurological issues. I think the main thing is the lifestyle, how you create on a daily basis. Regularly, a change in your life. And that’s when I’m coming in. And not only with illness since I also have lots of clients where they say like, “I want to feel better, I want to lose weight, I have sleep apnea, I can’t sleep. What do I do? I’m just up and working on the phone in the middle of the night. My husband is asleep, meanwhile, I’m like tripling around on the phone and watching some social media.” And I say, oh my God. And on top of it, she’s eating what she shouldn’t eat in the middle of the night. Those are major criteria that we should eliminate.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about the breathing because that’s so fundamental. It’s so fundamental to calming the vagus nerve and reducing stress. And it’s very easy to kind of forget about breath. I’ve done yoga for many, many years, and yoga is almost like a breathing meditation, where your breath is flowing with the poses, and you just feel so relaxed afterwards because of so much deep breathing. Can you take us through a breathing exercise or what you recommend people can do on a daily basis?
Doris Puehringer
First of all, I want to encourage you so you can see all the different breathing exercises when you get kind of confused and you think, well, what should I do, and this and that. They are basically free on my website, and you can scroll down and I have plenty of breathing exercises on it.
Dr. Wendy
What is your site again?
Doris Puehringer
It’s DorisYogaTherapy.com. Actually, I want to practice with you a breath work when you don’t mind. This is something people do even unconsciously since they did this their whole life. And they are probably more calm and more centered and happier and having this aura around them where you are drawn to them since they don’t have this sad look and they have almost a smile always on their face. That’s what I just was teaching the other day in my group class, what I want to tell you too later on. When we think about something, immediately your face changes. So let’s talk about the happy things and not the sad things. The happy things is when I’m telling you something that makes you smile, this creates happy endorphins, and that’s what we want to do in our life. And that’s what the breath does. When we are going in illnesses, let’s say you have asthma, breathing issues, you have allergies, what’s a huge thing now in our society, lots of people are going through all these different allergies. For every illness, so to say, there is a breathwork, what you can do.
Now, a basic one would be like the diaphragmatic breathing, the belly breath, but I don’t want to explain now since it takes some time. But a very easy one, and maybe you and I will do this together, it’s like almost like when you go out and you hear a bumblebee, right? You hear that sound of a bumblebee, that’s what we want to create, and that’s the humming. And you can do this anywhere to also shift your mindset and it’s almost magical. It only works, every breathwork and also certain sequences, your nervous system needs six to eight weeks until it will read it. So when you say like, “Oh, Doris, you know what, wonderful. I did it now today and yesterday but I don’t feel anything.” Yeah, well, you need to do it for six to eight weeks, every single day until your system will read it. So it takes that time. Breathwork, certain poses, certain stretches if you work on flexibility or strength. So the bumblebreath, when we go into it, you visualize you hear a bumblebee, and that’s exactly what we do. I will demonstrate it. So it’s just like that [makes a bumblebee sound]. And you can go in different sounds, if it’s higher pitched or lower pitched, you can do it longer, or you do it shorter. And so we just do it together. What do you think?
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. [Makes a bumblebee sound.] It’s kind of like an ohm breath, but with your mouth closed.
Doris Puehringe
Right. And so you create [bumblebee sound]. Immediately you should feel it, you are creating a vibration in your throat, in your neck, and it’s resonating with your ears. So you are engaging your senses, engaging your ears. The sound. And the sound is one of the most soothing vibrations. Also, what you are creating, the highest vibration in our body is the pituitary gland and that’s what you are calming down or that’s what you’re engaging. Depends. Some people need, like this is a calming down breath and you can do this anytime, anywhere. There are breathing techniques you do where you need to be energized since people are fatigued or they want to sleep all day long. Or they have brain fog, they need to be switched on, or you have to accomplish something important. You want to do breathing techniques where you get engaged, where you just get moving and shaking and then you need a breath. So you would obviously not do an energizing breath before you go to bed.
The calming breath is the bumble breath, that you can do all day long. And there’s, of course, breathing techniques for anxiety, for depression. Again, you just have to do it consistently. I have some clients, they do it like all day long. They just close the office, they put it on a timer, and they do it for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, it depends. Everybody’s different. The key in yoga therapy is consistency and this is until the end of your life. I’m planning to be a yoga therapist until the end of my life since I’m super passionate, and it fulfills me when I can help people in a way where they are happy for themselves. All that I do, I give them the tools, and that’s the beauty in it. I don’t make them addicted to me. Even so, I have clients for 15 years with me. Of course, I appreciate and I’m grateful for them, but the tools I give them is like the know-how to live their daily life from the morning until the evening.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Tell us how yoga therapy kind of tones the vagus nerve, because that’s so central. I think so many people, their vagus nerve is not working correctly, not connected. We’re stressed out, there are so many things that are working against our vagus nerve, which innervates all of our organs and our digestion and we really need that to be toned and working properly. Tell us how yoga therapy can tone the vagus nerve.
Doris Puehringer
First of all, it depends. Some people are more hyper and some people more lethargic. I would say the vagus nerve gets like… First of all, you need to do also meditation. Meditation is really important, and there’s millions of different meditations. I do music meditations, other people need guided meditation, some people need to see somebody for meditation. Right there, the vagus nerve needs to be in balance through calmness. Once you’re jittery, your vagus nerve is already out of balance, and this goes back into, like, anxiety and panic attacks. The biggest tool I teach people is definitely breathing techniques with the vagus nerve. And then there are a few poses I recommend, what I can show right now, that would be related mainly to breath work and that has to stay on. The vagus nerve will only be in balance in a body when you put the effort towards it that you practice that daily. That’s what is with any kind of illness that you have or any kind of like… Mood wise, even the mood, the mood even affects the vagus nerve. It works with psychological, physiological, emotional, with all those components, then you’re out of balance. And that’s what actually happens. When you’re out of balance, your vagus nerve is down, your mood is down, your whole system. You don’t have that oxygen, as you mentioned before, in your organs. And what happens then over years and years, and you can go on for years like this, but then some organ says, “Oh, I don’t like that anymore. I have to show you. This is the sign I’m giving you.”
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think there are so many health issues tied to the vagus nerve. Namely digestive issues, poor digestion, poor peristalsis, constipation. Just so many different issues related to the vagus nervous nerve and anxiety and depression and things like that. You teach classes online, yes? What does that look like?
Doris Puehringer
I worked with the neurologist for over 10 years, what I’m super grateful for, and we had a beautiful relationship. But then, when COVID-19, the pandemic happened, everything was shut down, and I was very fortunate I got introduced to Zoom online classes. And in a blink of an eye, I had to design a website and I started with teaching online private and group classes. The private classes, I recommend even just one private class. And it’s all on my website, you can buy packages of one class or of five or 10 packages. I recommend first, I need to know somebody, their issues. Even when they are happy as can be, there is always something. Unless you are 10 years old—you have most likely no issues when you have great parents! But otherwise, issues arise in our society when you live an urban lifestyle. And I recommend that they would come to me so I can give them a private class first to know their issues, and then they can sign up for group classes.
And I have international clients now, all over the world. They come to my group classes and I teach like three times a week. And in these three times a week, even when they’re on different time zones, what I offer, they can be live. When they don’t want the camera on, they have the camera off, I have different ones. And they can also do the replay since I offer them a three-day replay, and that’s included in that price. So even when you take only one class. For the private, it’s more recommended that you just start with one and then you sign up for a group class.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You have a great offer for my audience. You have a free class that you’re offering. You can go to DorisYogaTherapy.com/Meyers-detox and get a totally free class and just try it out. Highly, highly recommended. I’ve done your classes before, I absolutely love them. They’re very different. It’s a very, very different kind of approach to yoga. I’ve been doing yoga for over 25 years, and I’ve tried a lot of different kinds, but I like that focus on doing the positions correctly. The correct breathing and getting very kind of detailed about the techniques and things like that. I think it’s really valuable skills. Because we live in such a stressful world, we need therapies like this to destress. As we get older, we need to work on our balance. One-third of falls are fatal in the older populations. No joke! For me, I do yoga because I want to work on my balance and maintain my strength and flexibility and all the benefits of that so that I can live a good quality life for as long as possible. And I’m thinking and planning for that. It’s not going to just happen by accident.
Doris Puehringer
Exactly. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill, it’s your own input
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. And yoga therapy is part of my strategy, so highly recommend you guys go check out the class. DorisYogaTherapy.com/Myers-detox. Easy to remember. And so what can someone expect on taking the free class?
Doris Puehringer
In the free class… What I do in the group classes, I want to tell you. When you join my group class, I’m working on chakras. And I don’t know if people are familiar with chakras, I want to just mention it a little bit. We have seven chakras in our body, and I work on different body parts. The class, I think what I offer as a gift is like the third eye chakra. This is where our pituitary gland comes in, high intuition, imagination, you’re working on that. You work on consciousness, you work on psychic perception, all those things. So that’s that class. Every week, I work on a different chakra. Let’s say when I work on the first chakra, what’s all about the grounding, that’s like balance. That’s like, can you stand on one leg? Are you falling over? That’s why I’m saying I want to see first, like, where is your balance? What else is happening with you? How are you emotional? Is there anything you need to release more emotional where you’re physical?
And so the group class is just like where I’m tuning in every single week with different chakras. I work also on colors since I think colors are very important, and people love that. Since I’m bringing in, for example, when I’m talking about the first chakra, it’s red or black. (Secondary color is black.) So now it’s amazing to me since people all wear the red shirt and the black yoga pants, or any kind of outfit again. My yoga style, it’s not like yoga, so to speak. I have people that cannot do any yoga sitting down cross-legged. They have to sit on the chair, or they are bedridden. I do private calls also in my city where I go to people, and I do basically physical therapy, so I have to move the limbs and that’s different, and I do the breathwork.
But the group class, the beauty in it, every week is different, even when I’m always going to the chakras, and I focus on one chakra in that week. And even when they sign up only for one class or all three classes. It depends—some people want all three classes since they want to get into it, and some only once a week. It’s the color, it’s like I encourage them what they should eat at that chakra since that’s important too, what they should eat. Some people work with crystals, it’s also related to the color.
Then, of course, I work with like anything emotional, so that comes into my class. Like when you have no balance, most likely you are insecure since you cannot stand on one foot. Unless you have heavy-duty vertigo, that’s a different issue. But when you cannot stand on one foot, and you are in your thirties, there is a big issue. When you are in your eighties, then that’s more understandable. But still there is no excuse that you cannot stand on one leg when you are 80 years old. That’s all about yoga therapy. Also, what I want to mention, some people come to me with one issue. And I’m saying now an easy one, so to say, one lady came to me, and she had heavy-duty asthma. We worked on that, and then she said, “You would not believe what happened. Since I told you my neck is so stiff since I’m working like four hours on the computer, and I’m not aligned with my neck, I’m rotating it out, my shoulder is tight. My chest, I cannot breathe. Then when I get home, my husband drives me crazy, and at that point, I’m just like, I don’t know who I am anymore.” And that’s when her asthma kicked in even more. And she had to use the inhaler and all that stuff. So I got her totally off the inhaler. It took me like three months, but in three months, I got her off. What’s a miracle? That was when I worked with the neurologist. We minored medication for heavy-duty illnesses. That’s unbelievable, right? Going back to an MD—unbelievable. That was like one of a kind.
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Dr. Wendy Myers:
Yeah, you wouldn’t think about using yoga to get off of medication, or you wouldn’t think of it as being that powerful. But yeah, that’s very, very fascinating.
Doris Puehringer
And then she said, also, “I don’t know, my whole body, my lower hip loosened up” since she learned breathing techniques, what I taught her a few different ones and a few specialized sequences. And they don’t take long. They take maybe some of them like 10 minutes. I have a very encouraged client, he just had like back surgery, major back surgery. He’s in his eighties and he says, well, 10 minutes doesn’t cut it for me. He was an MD, retired, and he said, “I need really something that takes me at least half an hour so that I’m zoning out, and then afterwards I feel better.” So it’s like from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to 40 minutes. It depends how long somebody has time. That would be what you have, that devotion for yourself.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And you can find that time in the day, you absolutely can. I have a very structured morning where I take my mornings for myself to start the day out right and destress and have my exercise and have a healthy meal and all the stuff before I get on the phone and the computer and working, etc. But you’ve got to make that space in your day to create the health and the stress levels and the life that you want.
Doris Puehringer
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the whole lifestyle. Since people, when you join a yoga class and you want to sweat, or you want to tone up, or you want to be more flexible, that’s all good. There’s nothing against it, I think this is all great. But at a certain time in your life, you say, “I need a structured lifestyle, so I feel good about myself. I can also encourage my family, my friends. I’m not running around and blaming the world for it.” We are our own masters and that’s what that lifestyle comes in. As you said, you are structured, you have in the morning, you want to center your nervous system to a level where the frequency is just calm and not already like where you’re jumping in the shower, and you’re sliding, and you break your leg. I mean, all this stuff happens.
Also what you eat. I also work on how people should eat, when you should eat, and that’s also fine-tuned since everybody’s different. Some people need more food in the morning, some people have their intermittent fasting, they don’t need that. Then when should you stop to eat? In general, to have longevity (and I just talked about it yesterday), you should not eat later than 5 pm to 6 pm. This is like an old person who would say, okay, we are going to the five and six o’clock dinner, you know.
Dr. Wendy Myers
The early bird special.
Doris Puehringer
Exactly, the early bird special!
Dr. Wendy Myers
Whent I’m eating at five, I’m having the early bird special. But I know like last night I ate really late and I paid for it. I woke up at 3 am, kind of a little bit miserable. I know better, but it just happens sometimes. But yeah, you can’t eat and go to bed. It just doesn’t work.
Doris Puehringer
No. On a daily basis, I would say during the week at least—unless you are going out and there’s a special occasion, then, of course. But otherwise, as you said, eating late, your digestive system has to work but you want to sleep. How can you sleep when you just ate in that moment? Another thing is with electronics. People just don’t do that. You should have an hour before you go to bed, no electronics, and definitely not in bed. And our young generation, brain tumors, 80% of Americans, teenagers, have brain tumors. Eighty percent, think about this. Why? Since they have their 5Gs in their bed with their laptop. And it’s on, it’s not even in airplane mode.
Me personally, for years, I don’t have any electronics in my bedroom. None. There is no need. And when you have to have the phone since there’s an emergency or you need to be on call or whatever, put it at least on airplane mode. This is all lifestyle habits—how you eat, how you live your life, when you shut the electronics off. What do you do the last thing before you go to bed? Maybe you need another meditation, maybe you need to do another breathwork, maybe you need to do two or three stretches since you’re super tight, you know, your whole body is in tension.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That’s a great way to just relax and destress right before you go to bed. And also I highly recommend everyone take your free class and get a series of classes, and learn all of these techniques so you can do them on your own. I worked one-on-one with a Pilates instructor for about a year or two, and I learned so much about how to do Pilates correctly, and I don’t need a teacher anymore. I really was able to perfect my techniques. And the same thing with yoga. You work with like yourself, with a really good teacher, you can take those skills for the rest of your life and use them to your benefit. So I highly recommend everyone take Doris’s class. (Go to) DorisYogaTherapy.com/Meyers-detox. And Doris, thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything we left out or any other things you want to share with the audience?
Doris Puehringer
The only thing I want to share with the audience is when somebody would work with me, I want to give them my tools, and they will hopefully be life-changing for them. And that’s what I did when I went through certain lifestyles where I recognized it’s not healthy. Not everything in life is. You don’t need so many things, so many consuming things, what we are bombarded with, we’re engaged through society. A lot of people, we put so much pressure on ourselves since we say we need to have that car, we need to have that house, we need to have this and that. We need to go shopping. A big thing is like, oh, let’s go shopping. Well, what do you think about changing your life for a different lifestyle when you go to certain countries like you and I did? Last year, we both went to almost like third-world countries where they had nothing, and they were happy as can be. And it was so inspiring to see these people, like they have nothing but they have a smile on their face. They are there for their family, for their neighbors, for their community. And it’s so isolating in our society now, in the Western society, that people really have to tune in (and ask), what is the essence of life? What do I want in my life? I want to be healthy, I want to be happy. Right there, we have it all figured out. That’s all that we need.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes. Doris, thanks so much for coming on the show. I love talking with you, I’ve known you for many years, and I’m glad we finally got to do a show and talk about your expertise on yoga therapy. Everyone, go visit Doris at DorisYogaTherapy.com/Myers- detox. Sign up for the pre-class, you have nothing to lose.
And everyone, thanks for tuning in every week to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and it’s just such a pleasure to bring you experts from around the world every week. I love doing this show and giving you the tools that you need to dramatically improve your life. I know it can be tough when you’re looking for answers, looking for resolutions to your health issues. There are so many rabbit holes to go down, and I feel like I’ve gone through a lot of that stuff in my life. I really try to give you guys the experts to give you the answers you’re looking for because you deserve to feel good. So thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests’ qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
