Have You Fallen In Love With Yoga?

I am in love with yoga – are you?  Are you a devoted yogi?  Have you never attended a yoga session?  Yoga is so much more than a “workout” or a date with “meditation”.  I’ve participated in my share of group exercise classes, everything from Zumba to step to circuit training but the one class that I cannot live without is yoga.  It’s more of a focused choice to say, “I cannot live without it”, I choose to make it a part of my fitness routine.

This week in my yoga practice we have been practicing “heart openers”, you know with it being February and Valentine’s Day and all.  Heart openers are achieved by a series of poses where by we gently fold our shoulders back and down, we press our chests open and forward and up.  Poses with names like “camel” and “Supta Baddha Konasana”, a reclining , bound pose, also “cobra” and “extended side angle”.  Sounds intriguing – right?  Well, let me tell you, these poses open up the chest, the airways and the heart, healing ones mind, body and spirit.  These heart opening poses actually release the stress and tension we hold in our chest.

A thought that was offered to help us focus on opening our hearts in our practice this week was of a lotus flower.  It was said that, a lotus flower only blooms in muddy waters.  Our thoughts and feelings are often muddy or muddied by outside forces, but we have the ability to be like the lotus and bloom in spite of the mud.

Water color by: Claudia Tremblay

All of that said to get to what you need to know – The Benefits of Yoga- or why you should fall in love with yoga!

There are numerous benefits to practicing yoga.  Let’s start with creating strength, awareness and harmony in ourselves, something for everyone!  If you’re a mature woman, like me, or a millennial or somewhere in the middle there is a reward for each of us.  We can all expect to experience increased flexibility, increased muscle strength and tone, and improved respiration, energy and vitality.  If you are in the first category, let’s just say, “over 50” and you are starting to experience aches and pains from arthritis, lower back pain or chronic pain in general, yoga offers a way to innately address these issues.  Incorporating meditation and breathing technique offers all of us mental clarity, calmness, centers our attention and sharpens our concentration – tell me if you do not need any of those benefits, because if you don’t, I’d like to know your secret.

art by: SkyBlueWithDaisies

I am in love with yoga because I reap the rewards.  It’s an hour a few days a week that I am unwilling to give up for myself.  If you’ve not tried yoga, or tried it once and thought it was silly, or have a preconceived idea that you can’t hit the poses, you are silly – give it a real try.  I mean attend a yoga practice regularly, you may not strike all yoga poses like other yogis in the class, but who’s looking?  I am in love with yoga because it makes a vast difference in my day to day demeanor, my thought process and the way it makes me feel physically.

Start today – February is the ultimate month to begin your yoga practice, I mean with all those hearts posted in shop windows and Valentine’s Day celebrated and all that jazz…just go fall in love!