Heal and Transform with Yoga
For fitness, yoga offers great benefits, which are valuable in their own right. At the same time, it is important to know that yoga offers a deeper potential for healing and transformation. Chronic stress, traumas, and past issues can lead to a variety of health and emotional problems. Depression, anxiety and stress affect more than just your mood. They affect our energy levels, sex drive, sleep patterns, appetite, elimination and physical posture. How we feel is influenced by how we breathe, move, and think.
Yoga can be an effective method to reduce stress and anxiety as well as lift depression. Yoga poses (asanas) and breathing techniques purify, strengthen, rejuvenate, and restore the body to increase the flow of vital energy and bring peace to the mind. It is not about achieving the perfecting pose. The aim of Yoga is all about the journey, the process of transformation.
Anger and guilt are often stored in the hips thighs. Certain postures allow for emotional release. Activating the diaphragm, opening chest and upper abdomen awaken and enrgize, helping to alleviate depression.
Yoga is about learning to know the body, cultivating awareness of what the body needs as well as learning our limitations. It is about taking small steps, exploring its effects on your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. When practiced with awareness, yoga creates many positive effects. Long, drawn out stretches bring a sense of relaxation and well-being. Moving the body takes us out of apathy and inertia and awakens us on many levels. By creating new, positive patterns, we become better equipt at letting go of habits that no longer serve us. We move forward and embrace lasting change and growth.
What often keeps people coming back to yoga, is the peace experienced at the end of class and the well-being felt for days after practice. Those who practice yoga regularly often appreciate positive shift perspective.
“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” ~Benjamin Disraeli
