Yoga

Yoga helps all of us discover self-awareness. Stop, ponder, and become aware of the situations, in life, which cause you the most stress. What kind of stress sends you ?off the deep end?? When you become aware of what causes stressful situations, in your daily life, it is time to develop a pro-active plan to manage your health.

Yoga contains many Pranayama techniques for stressful situations. Natural breath, Dirgha Pranayama, Kapalabhati Pranayama, and Ujjayi are just a few of the many useful Pranayama techniques you can learn in a typical Hatha Yoga class.

Once you learn these Pranayama techniques, you can easily incorporate them into your daily life. Many Yoga instructors ask their students to practice Yoga techniques such as: Pranayama, asanas, meditation, and moderate eating habits at home, but unfortunately, the day is busy with many tasks. What is the solution?

If you intend to make a positive change in life, through Yoga practice, you must make some time for yourself. Set an appointment aside for you to practice Yoga at home. If this is not possible, you should set aside some time for formal Yoga instruction, with the guidance of a competent Yoga teacher or Guru.

Many students of Yoga feel more energized, and much less stressed, after Yoga instruction, than before. This is interesting when you consider that the most common reason people do not attend Yoga classes, more often, is that they feel too tired. These same people, who do not attend Yoga classes often, complain about insomnia and irregular sleep patterns.

This is a stress, fatigue, worry, and insomnia cycle, which will ?shave years off? your life, while draining you of life energy. We know that the body contains energy; in Yoga, we call it Prana. You have the power to recharge your life energy through Pranayama, or you can get medical prescriptions.

Why would doctors of western medicine recommend prescriptions, in the above- mentioned case? Many doctors are burdened with patients who refuse to be pro-active about their health. Remember the old saying, ?You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.?

Yoga practice is the ?water,? which will break the stress, fatigue, worry, and insomnia cycle, but only a comparative small number of people, on this planet, are pro-active about health. Do you think this is cynical?

Consider this: If everyone was pro-active about health, the tobacco industry would have already diversified to selling health products. There would be more health clubs than liquor stores - if all of us took action.

Also, the fast food industry would be geared toward serving more quality products and would have more vegetarian choices on the menu. Industries ?sprout up? to meet consumer demand. If we collectively demand more healthy products; we will receive them.

Yoga has many solutions for stress and complete health, but all of us have to take responsibility for our own health. The public cannot expect the pharmaceutical industry to produce ?magic pills? to compensate for poor health habits.

? Copyright 2006 ? Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

There are many factors that influence the quality of your yoga practice and your satisfaction with the overall experience. These factors range from the style of yoga you practice, the instructor you choose through to the environment in which you practice. Some of the factors you can easily control, others may be more dependent on what’s available to you. When starting out practicing yoga, you should keep searching for the perfect combination that makes your practice the most satisfying and enjoyable.

There are however three factors that are 100% under your control, that affect not only your enjoyment of your practice, but just as importantly, the benefits you receive from each practice.

Challenge yourself

One of the purposes of yoga, like every exercise regime, is to incrementally improve your body’s physical capabilities. Yoga of course has the added advantage that it also helps to improve many aspects of your health and well-being that general exercise cannot.

Even with these increased benefits, yoga is not a magic cure-all. Achieving these benefits requires your commitment and effort each time you practice. Achieving incremental improvements to your capabilities requires (and allows) you to further challenge your own physical limitations. Over time gradual improvements result in large gains in your yoga abilities and the health benefits of your practice.

In every posture you should be looking to make sure first that you are stable and comfortable in the posture. You should then be aiming to slowly and smoothly deepen the stretch as far as it remains pain free for you to do so. In all postures you should feel the stretch in the relevant muscles and deepen into the stretch in a controlled manner to avoid damaging your muscles and ligaments. You should challenge your own abilities in order to achieve new yoga abilities, but also listen carefully to your body to know when to stop.

Breathe

There is a lot of discussion and research into the importance and health benefits of yoga breathing. While these may well prove to be real benefits, adopting relaxed, controlled yoga breathing definitely helps to improve your overall yoga practice.

The natural tendency, when practicing an asana (yoga posture) that tests your physical abilities, is to shorten your breath and in some cases, to start breathing through your mouth. This stressful breathing technique encourages you to tense your muscles and fight against the asana and the stretch. This is the opposite of the desired state for practicing yoga. Instead it’s important that you concentrate on your breathing, completing a long, controlled inhale exhale cycle that fills your lungs to capture the maximum amount of oxygen for each breath. Focusing on your breathing in this way, helps you to remain relaxed and allows you to be more aware of your physical condition enabling you to better feel the stretch, be aware of tension in your muscles and concentrate on releasing that tension and loosen to muscles you’re working on. Through this increased awareness of what you body is telling you and by noticing and releasing tension in your muscles, it’s easier to accept each stretch and go deeper into each asana and hold it for longer without injury.

Practice, Practice, Practice.

As with all exercise, the benefits only come with a commitment to regular practice. Only through regular practice of exercise does the body start to develop, strengthen, adapt and change according to the physical demands you are placing on it. Practicing yoga is no different. Regular practice helps to build the muscle strength required to hold asanas. More than that, you’ll develop increased lung capacity and provide the regular stimulation to the internal organs that helps balance chemical and hormone levels. Frequent practice helps to learn any new skill or ability and yoga is no different. In particular repetition helps your body learn the correct position balancing postures, to the extent that it becomes second nature - just like riding a bike. Another area where frequent practice is highly beneficial is learning how to slow and calm your mind, to purge your thoughts of the worries and stresses of the day.

Every time of year, there is an occasion for stress with work, holidays, family obligations, education, moving, and weddings. There is no shortage of reasons to be stressed out over something. Here is a Yogic method, which can help you handle stress all year long.

Learn from a Yoga teacher who remains calm ?under fire.? It is easy to have the appearance of being calm and quite another matter to actually put it into practice daily. In life, you will see stressful situations and hectic moments, but the person, who remains calm, during a naturally stressful time, is a person you can learn from.

Now, what if the calmest person you know is not a Yoga teacher? You should learn by watching him or her, in action, and enhance your own powers of observation. Later, you could visualize yourself being calm in a similar chaotic situation.

Does this sound unrealistic? No, but the Sanskrit word ?Grahana? comes to mind. This is a complex word, but one of the ways it can be defined is, as a perception, or the process of seeing things as they are. Grahana is a meditative state where your mind focuses on observing without judgment.

Some people scoff at the idea of Yogis, who practice positive visualization and observe life, with mindfulness. You may hear people say, ?That will never work,? or ?Meditation is a waste of time.? The truth is the person who is negative in life, does practice his or her own negative brand of Grahana. In fact, some Yoga teachers would say negativity is the opposite of Grahana because it is non-acceptance.

On the other hand, if we constantly look at the world with a pessimistic viewpoint, is this a truthful perception of life? To the pessimist, a negative perception of life is reality. A negative perception creates the ?cloud of doom,? which follows this person around in life. Self-pity and negative thoughts are created, envisioned, and become a constant daily cycle, within the life of a pessimist.

Remember the saying: ?Be careful what you wish for.? You could also say, ?Be mindful of what you visualize.? A mindful and positive perception of life is ?light baggage,? in comparison to the burden of negative thought.

Look at stress as a tool, which you can use for good. When you come to a Yoga class, you will notice that some of your problems seem to evaporate. What happened? You filtered thoughts, concentrated, meditated, and prioritized all of the day?s problems.

If you took part in a Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, or Kundalini Yoga class, the muscles in your body feel much less tense - due to the physical techniques you learned and practiced. When you finish your Yoga class, you are ready to put the daily stress of life to good use. This is a form of ?Yoga off the mat.?

Yoga is not a ?magic stress killer,? but Yoga does have many techniques for effective stress management.

? Copyright 2006 ? Paul Jerard / Aura Publications