9 Ways Yoga Can Change Your Life
You may have heard before that Yoga has the ability to completely change your life, but there you are thinking: how can stretching and chanting change my life?! Having a regular yoga practice has benefited so many people all over the world & we have to say, until you experience it, it’s hard to explain just how transformational this practice actually is. Often people turn to yoga for the physical benefits (like wanting to sort out your posture and neck pain) and then find that the mental health benefits have the biggest impact on their life. There is no doubt that when you practice yoga it has a powerful and magical effect… and over time can inspire huge change and transformation. So here are 9 ways yoga can bring incredible changes to your life.
Physical Strength, Flexibilty & Balance
From a physical point of view the poses in yoga help us build muscular strength, a greater range of motion and an ability to balance on one foot! For us here at Move & Inspire yoga is the discipline that has changed our bodies the most over pilates, running and going to the gym. Yoga has the ability to increase strength, increase joint mobility, find greater range of motion, plus yoga can help you fall in love with how incredible your body actually is. The key is to make sure you are practicing with a teacher who knows how to bring strength cues into the practice - yoga wants to have a balance between strength & flexibility in order to allow us to grow into old age as the strongest grannies and grandpas we can possibly be!
Balance
This time I mean balance in life rather than standing on one foot! I believe that finding time for yoga means finding time for ourselves, which allows us to create more of a work / life balance. In yoga we focus on ourselves, not on what other people are doing in the room. We also create a balance between rushing around, as a lot of us do, and being still. Each class ends with savasana which is a time to lie down and “just be.” How many chances do we get during the day to do that?! My guess is not many!
Yoga brings a whole new perspective to your life, a greater appreciation for the smaller things and a beautiful balance between strength and ease - something the yogis call sthira and sukha. Yoga stops us pushing ourselves so hard, it quietens the ego down allowing us to find out what we truly want, rather than focusing on everyone else around us. Yoga & meditation allows us to cultivate awareness, and awareness truly is the greatest driver for change. With awareness we have the power to make changes, to understand where we are being driven by fear and the ego, to understand our patterns, to understand the importance of finding balance in all areas of our lives.
Compassion & Kindness
It’s very easy for us to be incredibly tough on ourselves. Our inner critics are often in full force, doubting ourselves, questioning ourselves, ridiculing ourselves… and before we know it we have totally and utterly crushed any sense of compassion and kindness towards ourselves. Yoga helps you pay attention to that inner critic and to meet it with kindness and compassion. When we are kind and compassionate towards our selves we find it easier to do the same for other people too. When we judge ourselves a little less we are likely to stop judging others as well. Yoga allows you to think more rationally, react less and therefore look at things with a better perspective - again allowing us to create change.
Connection
We hear it all the time, how disconnected we all are. To our bodies, to our minds, to our emotions. How often do we check in with ourselves and say, “hey my love, you feeling ok today?” Not often. Yoga allows us to check in constantly throughout the practice. Paying attention, observing, noticing sensations, becoming aware of what’s going on are all part of a yoga practice. It sounds super simple but we promise you it works! Yoga changes lives by taking us from a disconnected place to one full of connection.
“...Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression & anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.”
The Power of the Breath
The breath is the most incredible way to change the state of our nervous system. We have the ability to calm everything down simply with the breath. We can move out of our fight and flight mode into our rest and digest mode by taking a few long, deep breaths. Yoga reminds us to breathe, to focus on the power of the breath and to realise the full capacity of the breath. Most of us during the day take short shallow breaths into the chest without realising that we can breathe so fully and deeply. The breath can be truly transformative.
Need somewhere to start? Try the 4:6 breath - lie down on the floor or your yoga mat with one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly and start to gradually breathe a little deeper. After a good few breaths see if you can lengthen each inhale to a count of 4 and each exhale to a count of 6. This breath is very soothing to our nervous system and can help with moments of stress, panic and anxiety. It can be done anywhere - as long as you can take a moment to close your eyes and focus inwards you can do this on a train, in a toilet, at a boring work meeting….!
Being in the Present Moment Changes Your Life
Living in the present moment has to be one of the most important things when it comes to personal growth and happiness. We are so often stuck in the past or the present. We look to the past with regret, blame, shame… and we look to the future worrying about all the things that will likely never happen to us anyway. We waste so much time and energy living in a place that has absolutely no relevance except inside our heads. Living in the present moment brings so much joy and freedom. It allows you to live mindfully, it allows you to experience so much more adventure, it allows you to be open to the flow of life.
Yoga Inspires Healthy Living
Yoga and meditation brings you into a place where you automatically want to live your life more consciously. You start to question the way you have been doing things, you start to have a new found understanding of life, you allow yourself to process pain and difficult emotions, you give yourself space for you to be you, fully. This might all sound so far fetched right now if you haven’t practiced yoga before… but stay open and give it a go! There’s nothing to loose but so much to gain. Many of our role models have a regular conscious practice such as yoga and meditation, and it makes total sense to us. To be truly inspiring, to be leading the way in this world, we believe you have to be connected, you have to let go of your ego, you have to cultivate kindness and compassion, you have to be able to live in the present moment.
Come Join us!
Want to bring some of these awesome benefits into your life? Want to learn how to change your life through yoga? Want to start practicing yoga?
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