Office Yoga (Tackling Tension with Simple Stretches You Can Do At your Desk)

This book is based on yoga, a system of physical, mental and spiritual development which originated in India at least 3,000 years ago. Its roots lie in Hindu philosophy, and its aim is to bring about balance and harmony on every level of one’s being, by means of techniques which have been tested and proved over thousands of years, not only in India but by practitioners all over the world.

In this book, some of the basic practices and underlying principles of yoga are applied to working life. It is a kind of survival handbook for the desk-bound: a practical manual of simple yoga-based movements which can be done at the desk, a few minutes at a time throughout the day, to help relieve the tension and stress of working life. But although it is an essentially practical book, I think — I hope - that it is true to the spirit of yoga.

Office Yoga is meant for anyone whose working hours are spent mainly at a desk, whether in an office or at home. Students, writers, draughtspeople and designers - anyone whose work requires a great deal of sitting - will find it helpful too. It can also be used by anyone who, for whatever reason, is unable to exercise from a standing position.

You will be able to use this book whether or not you have practised yoga before. If you are new to yoga, I hope you will find it clear, comprehensible and useful. Possibly it will inspire you to go further ~ for yoga is there to help us to fulfill our potential as human beings, and the possibilities are vast.

If you have had some yoga experience —- if you have attended classes, and/or practised on your own, or are quite adept — you are probably already aware of the importance and value of bringing yoga as much as possible into your daily life. I hope you will find in this book some new ways and means of doing this.

If you work in an office, you probably experience physical tension from time to time (if not most of the time). It’s also quite likely that you experience mental tension: the result of your continual effort to deal with the pressures of work and with the demands that are made upon you.

You have my sympathies. In my own thirty-odd years of doing various jobs behind various desks I have experienced my fair share of office tension, and I am fully aware of how draining and debilitating it can be. I know the insidious effect it can have on the quality of your life — not only at work, but on the rest of it, the part outside work. And I also know that it is possible to tackle it: to relieve it when it takes hold, and even to prevent it taking hold at ail.

The ache between the shoulder blades, the pain in the neck, the stiff lower back, the sore eyes, the feeling of shattered exhaustion at the end of a long, fraught day - which a student of mine has described as ‘concussed’ - may be your familiar, unwelcome companions, as they have been mine. They may have come to seem inevitable to you: occupational hazards, part of the job.

But they aren’t inevitable. There is a great deal you can do about them, as I have learned, and as I hope to show you in this book.

No-one is exempt. Whatever your job - computer programmer, receptionist, secretary, designer, manager, or company chairman — you are vulnerable to the conditions I’ve described, and have probably experienced them. Office life is stressful and tension- inducing.

There are several reasons for this.

Office life is sedentary

The human body is made for movement and activity, and suffers when deprived of it. Joints maintain their mobility, and muscles their elasticity, only if they are used. And all the body systems - respiratory, circulatory, digestive, etc — need movement if they are to function efficiently. Movement is natural and necessary, but most office jobs seem to require you to sit for long periods in a more or less fixed position.

You sit at a desk which may not be the right height for you and which, unless it has a sloping surface, is not at the proper angle for comfortable working. You sit in a chair which, unless you are very lucky, has not been designed for correct, comfortable sitting. All this adds up to a sure recipe for neck-ache, back-ache, head-ache, eye-ache and brain-ache.

Office life deprives vou of vital oxygen

You need fresh air and a plentiful supply of oxygen as well as exercise, but because you are indoors most of the time you scarcely ever get any - especially if your working environment is air-conditioned. This, combined with the fact that you possibly do not breathe fully and deeply (few people do) means that you do not get a sufficient oxygen supply, and also that you don’t fully expel toxins from your system. This affects vour physical health, your mental and emotional balance, your concentration and your temper.

Office life is emotionally wearing

You are closely confined for upwards of eight hours a day with other people who are also trying to cope with these conditions. Some may be better off than others. The chairman may have a better chair than the receptionist, and a private office with a window that can be opened. The secretary may have more opportunities to move around the building and get more exercise than the manager. Essentially, though, vou are all in the same boat: sitting uncomfortably and for too long at a stretch; more or less deprived of vital oxygen, and consequently often tense and irritable.

You all have to cope with one another as well as with your work and your working conditions, so at times your working environment may feel more like a madhouse or a zoo than a community of rational human beings. In times of stress you may get on one another’s nerves, bite one another’s heads off, snap at and score off one another. Possibly you contribute to the atmosphere yourself — not only by behaving like this, but also by regarding others as responsible for creating the situation and yourself as a victim of it, and by putting the blame on others for how you feel at the end of the day.

Office life can generate anxiety

If for any reason you feel insecure in your job — perhaps because you work in a highly competitive industry, or for an institution vulnerable to government cuts, or because you don’t get on with your boss - the resulting anxiety creates further difficulties for you.

If your company is the scene of ‘office politics’ and power struggles ‘from which everyone suffers whether personally involved or not) you may well feel as bruised and battered at the end of the day as though you had spent it in the thick of battle.

You have to get to the office and back

If you work in a big town and live on its outskirts, your working day is sandwiched between struggles with rush-hour traffic or the crowds on public transport, and with inevitable delays in the form of traffic holdups and train cancellations. On a bad day, you may arrive at work infuriated and steaming, or in an exhausted heap, feeling that you've already had your fill of hassle. And you may reach home in the evening too tired to do anything but eat your dinner and fall into bed.

All these conditions are difficult enough to cope with even if you find your work fulfilling; even if you are doing what you want to be doing and are satisfied with the way your career is progressing. If you don’t like your work - if you are bored or feel under-valued; if you are frustrated in your ambition or ‘stuck’ in a job you feel you can’t leave; or if you have been over-promoted into a job that is beyond your present abilities - you have additional problems.

Of course, no-one experiences all of these trying conditions all of the time. But we all experience some of them some of the time, and because they are all extra to the work we are doing and the problems we are paid to solve, we don’t even think about them very much. We just put up with them, grit our teeth and battle on, paying the price in all sorts of ways as tension and stress accumulate.

My own work, in publishing, has always required me to sit a great deal, doing jobs involving close, detailed work such as proof-reading. The physical aspect of ‘office tension’ is all too familiar to me: I know what it is to feel soré and knotted at the end of a busy day.

I actually like working in an office. I like the excitements of publishing, and I especially like the companionship and cameraderie of like-minded people which I've been lucky enough to have. For the past six years I have worked in an environment which is probably almost unique: a medium-sized firm in which people value and support one another and in which there is no back-stabbing (or even biting) - a real fellowship of responsible adults working together in reasonable harmony most of the time. Yet even here, I have experienced my share of stress: deadlines to be met, conflicting priorities, sheer pressure of work most of the time, and so on. All this, as well as the physical tension, has had to be coped with.