Are you looking for realistic truths to start practicing Yoga?
Let's adopt a a New Year Resolution ! After reading this post, I do hope you will commit to your practice.
Here are 10 proven ways yoga improves your health -- enough reasons to roll out your mat and get started!!
- Improved Flexibility : This is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you may not be able to touch your toes, leave alone try a backbend !! But, if you stick with it and consistently practice, you'll notice a gradual loosening of joints and muscles. Eventually, seemingly impossible postures do become possible :) Touching your toes in a deep forward bend actually happens - that's true joy!!
- Strong Muscles & Strong Bones : When you build strength through Asanas, maybe breathe in a pose like Virabhadrasana 2 (Warrior 2), you balance it with flexibility. This strength protects you from arthritis and back pain, and also helps prevent falls in older people. It's also well-researched that weight bearing exercises strengthens bones, helps keep the calcium in them and wards off osteoporosis. My favorite poses for this are Downward Dog and Plank -- my students are well aware that I include these in almost every class, and we all breathe with it, maybe groaning inwardly but definitely building strength, class after class !!
- Heart Conditioning & Blood Pressure : When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you lower your risk of heart attack. Even if the yoga class you attend is not completely aerobic, the deep breathing combined with yoga asanas definitely improves cardiovascular conditioning. And ,one of the best postures for lowering high blood pressure is Shavasana - the last pose of every class .
- Nervous system / Brain Waves : An important instruction throughout a yoga class is 'focus on the present moment' - basically, its an important tool to improve concentration, increase coordination, reaction time, memory and even IQ scores. It shifts the balance from sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight response) to parasympathetic nervous system. This helps in lowering heart rates, decreases blood pressure and is calming and restorative to the body.
- Generate Relaxation Response : Our world is over-stimulated, with mobiles, internet, so we are never really disconnected from work, or the outside world. This leads to constant bombardment on the immune system, and over a period of time, weakens it. Yoga can provide respite from the hustle and bustle of modern life. You can do restorative yoga, yoga nidra, shavasana, pranayama, and meditation to encourage Pratyahara, an inward turning of senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system.
- Immune system functioning : Regular practice of Asanas, Pranayama amd Meditation has been researched to prove that they increase the functioning of the immune system. You will fall sick less often, have more resistance to diseases, and will be able to do more without burnout! That's the power of Yoga practice !
- Pranayama - Just Breathe !! : In various studies, it has been shown that deep yogic breathing improves lung functioning, encourages breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it, humidifies it, removing pollen and other allergens you'd rather not take into your lungs. I stress this point because I know that loads of us do not breathe through the nose, we take shallow short breaths through the mouth when we are stressed.
- Good Relationships - with oneself / others : Love may not conquer all, but it can certainly aid in healing oneself and others. The emotional support of family, friends and community has been repeatedly shown to improve health and healing. One realizes that we are all inter-dependent, not independent..A regular Yoga practice can develop friendliness, compassion and a connection to oneself and others. Try this for yourself -- it really does work!
- Healing Hope : I feel Yoga practice gives you the tools to help you change, the more you commit to your practice, the more you benefit !! You get involved in your own self-care, you make better choices in your diet, you become more aware when your body & mind need rest and do the needful and in this way, the effects are cumulative -- because they affect deep, lasting change in you in a holistic way, or 'whole'istic way --
- You connect body, mind and spirit !
- The Last but Most Powerful Benefit ( And you already know this!): As you have read all the ways Yoga improves your health, you probably noticed a lot of overlap. It feels like I'm saying the same thing again and again, just using different words --
Change your posture and you change the way you breathe.
Change your breathing and you change your nervous system.
Change your nervous system, become calm - and your Life is enriched!
This is the biggest Truth which Yoga teaches -
Everything is connected....Your knee to your hip-bone, your neck to your head, you to
your family, your community, your community to the world.
This inter-connection is vital to understanding Yoga, accepting that the inner and the outer world
are deeply connected.
Well, enough of this lecture.
Let's roll out the mats and get to practice!
See you all in class :)
Asha
No comments:
Post a Comment