Yoga was developed thousands of years ago as a way to bring glowing health to every member of a community. Part of yoga’s amazing strength is that it truly is for everyone. No matter what your body shape or size, no matter what challenges you might face, yoga has a way to work well for you.
What are Some of the Benefits of Yoga?
Yoga is about coordinating physical movements with breathing and mindful attention. Most parts of our body require gentle motion to remain in good health. Our immune and lymphatic systems require motion to circulate their fluids. Muscles need motion to keep them working properly.
Here are more benefits of yoga:
Yoga and Balance
Yoga’s various poses help the body build its sense of balance and equilibrium. You don’t have to do upside-down feet-in-the-air poses to achieve these benefits. Simply standing with your weight shifted toward one foot, such as in tree pose, can bring immense boosts to your balance. This then can spell the difference between safely taking that step off a curb or falling and hurting yourself.
Yoga provides a foundational strength in our core which helps with nearly every action. From lifting groceries to playing with children, from handling household chores to enjoying our world, yoga gets your body in shape to do whatever it is you wish to do.
Yoga and Mental Focus
Studies prove that yoga trains the mind to be better able to focus, concentrate, and tap into the calm energy reservoir which lives within all of us. That energy provides the foundation for the yoga practice – and it then becomes available as we tackle just about anything in life.
Whether it’s remembering the names and faces of people we meet, concentrating on a task we need to get done, or focusing fully on the conversation before us, yoga’s training helps us be our best.
Yoga and Anxiety
Life nowadays seems to breed anxiety. From political clashes to global warming, there are endless issues to be anxious about. Our own personal lives just add to that chaotic mix. It seems as if any glance into the future comes with a warning label.
Yoga reminds us that life continues on. Every moment exists along an endless stream. We cannot change the past. We cannot alter the future. We are only here in this one now. This now is where we can impact our world. The more we are present in this now, and draw our attention here, the more we can achieve. At the same time, anxiety sloughs away as we see we can only do the best we can with this one moment we have.
Yoga and Serenity
Our modern world is go-go-go, full of beeping cell phones and blinging social media. Yoga trains us to slow down. To tune into our full range of senses and reconnect with the moment.
We can use our yoga session time as a way not only to work with our breath and our body, but also with our spirit. By attentively choosing aromatherapy options which align with our intentions for the day’s practice, we can foster energy, compassion, calm, focus, or any combination of the above. It could be that to one person, rose signifies loving-kindness and lavender means serenity. By creating an aromatherapy pairing of those two, that practitioner has now customized their yoga experience to bring them exactly the mindset they seek.
Another practitioner might be seeking strong energy and great patience before they head off to a challenging set of meetings. For them, it could be the combination of tangerine and musk which have them perfectly aligned for the tasks of the day.
Discovering your own aromatherapy combinations is half of the fun of developing a healthy yoga practice.
Yoga brings a wealth of benefits to each practice session. It heals our body and opens our eyes to the true nature of this world we all share. Through attentive sessions where we are fully present, we allow ourselves to reach our fullest potential and to make the best use of this brief time we have on our Earth.
