Why Yoga?

If you've been around for a minute, you've probably heard the word yoga at some point in your life.

Even more and more doctors are recommending yoga to their patients.

A lot of people have heard of yoga, but still many don't know what it's about. They think it's woo woo and something that only calm, flexible folks do. But calm and flexible are actually only 2 of a plethora of benefits one can receive from practicing yoga. 

In this little article, I'm going to list a bunch of benefits of having a consistent yoga practice and why adding yoga to your life is so good for your body and mind.

Let's begin shall we?!

Why Adding Yoga To Your Life Is So Good For Your Body and Mind:

1. Improves posture and makes you more aware of your posture when you are standing in line at the store or sitting down at your computer, in your car or at your table
2. Improves body image
3. Increases your ROM - your range of motion
4. Increases muscle tone
5. Improves balance
6. Increases flexibility
7. Greater endurance
8. Reduces stress and helps you become more capable of handling stressful situations, events and difficult challenges that arise (and they will arise)
9. With reduced stress, your immune system has a chance of functioning better
10. Reduces pain
11. Gain clarity around what's important to you in life
12. Decreases chance of injury (in sports, and falling as get older)
13. Gain awareness of your body - what's that mean?
    1. More awareness of your body means you're more in tune with it so you can better read the messages your body gives you such as when needing rest, food, water, certain attention etc.
    2. More awareness of your body, again, means better posture and use of muscles for better overall movement (which again, can mean less injury)

Side note: For every action there is a reaction so by practicing yoga, you will become much more awarer of your actions.

What's that mean?

Let's look at a very possible example. Let's say your child does something that gets him or her in trouble at school.

You can react with anger and yell at him/her and send him/her to their room.

Or,

You can respond by first taking a deep breath (because you learned about breathing in your yoga classes) and then have a conversation with your child about what happened and calmly come up with an action from there (maybe you still send them to their room). 

Which do you think would feel better overall and be even more of a learning experience for your child? Remember, they see how we react and learn from that.

I had a very reactive father. He would get angry first and yell, and then feel bad and talk later. In my experience, it wasn't a pleasant feeling for me and I could sense his regret about it as well. Luckily, I was a good kid so that rarely happened. But when it did, it had a big impact. I could only imagine that if he had the awareness to take a deep breath first, and respond instead, how much bigger of an impact that would have had on the situation. I don't have children myself, but I would hope that if I did, I would not have taken on his form of reaction. 💜🙏🏽

Ok, back to the benefits:

14. Because yoga is about learning about yourself and your relationship with life and others, you can move through life with more fulfillment. This is due to the fact that you begin to understand more about what makes you suffer and when you know that, you realize you have a choice in how to BE which in turn can reduce your suffering greatly.

15. Increased concentration and focus

16. Can be done every day

17. Can target different body areas and bring more awareness to some areas we rarely think about (wrists, ankles, toes, fingers)

18. It's a great movement practice for the body

19. It can be practiced at practically any age.

20. It is good for all body types

21. Good for all sorts of issues; physical, mental, emotional

In other words, if you can breathe, you can practice yoga and receive the benefits of a consistent practice.

Of course there are more and more benefits of yoga being learned in various studies. But I hope this little article gave you some incentive to continue on with your yoga practice or gave you a little nudge to finally start one.

Lastly, yoga is a lifestyle, not an exercise that you do on your mat and then you're done with. You will come to see that what you do on your mat gets infused into your life 'off the mat'. It's quite an experience!

If you are not already a part of our community, we'd love to have you! Check out all the classes and packages we offer. 

You can look at the classes by clicking here and peruse our class pricing and packages by clicking here.

big love,

gina 💜

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