Form and Function

I spent the weekend at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park steeped in anatomy, not the least of which was an acute awareness of being sore in just about every muscle group from my elbows to my knees. Child's pose? I'll meet you there in about 5 minutes because it will take me that long to get down to the floor. But I did attend one lecture towards the end (a lecture! sitting on a chair! i've never been so happy to see a chair in my whole life) that touched on the relationship between both anatomy and the chakras and the biochemistry (physiology) and the practice of yoga.

First, the chakras. I'm not necessarily a woo-woo chakras kind of girl, but the speaker did make an interesting point about the location of the chakras in relation to the major endocrine organs and their functions. As I search around online, this seems to be "common chakra knowledge" but it was all new to me. The piece about the gland functions connecting to the chakra functions isn't really firmed up in my mind yet so I'm going to skip writing about it, but here's the anatomy piece.

1st chakra - base of the tailbone - no endocrine activity
2nd chakra - pelvic region - gonads
3rd chakra - just inferior to the ribcage - pancreas and adrenals
4th chakra - level of the sternum - thymus gland
5th chakra - at the throat - thyroid gland
6th chakra - between the eyebrows - hypothalamus, pituitary and pineal glands
7th chakra - crown of the head - no endocrine activity

Okay, so that seems interesting. The speaker also mentioned a study showing that yoga increases GABA levels by a significant amount, accounting for one's feeling of well-being after yoga class. I could only get to the abstract and the study itself has some design issues as far as I'm concerned (total of 19 participants, not controlled for other types of exercise), but the results looked promising:
"There was a 27% increase in GABA levels in the yoga practitioner group after the yoga session (0.20 mmol/kg) but no change in the comparison subject group after the reading session ( −0.001 mmol/kg) (t = −2.99, df = 7.87, p = 0.018)."