Whether you’re discovering your love for yoga for the very first time or you’re looking to renew your commitment, the best way to enhance your practice is through knowledge.
Yoga is so much more than balancing and stretching. The practice certainly can improve balance, flexibility, mobility, and strength, but it also helps enhance your connectedness to your body, mind, and surroundings on various levels.
Yoga can be used as a tool to deepen a spiritual connection, explore your sense of self, and so much more!
How You Mastered the Art of Letting Go In Your Yoga Practice?
It’s human nature to hold on to negative emotions. In some ways, this benefits us. It’s meant to help prevent us from entering into harmful situations. However, there comes a point when holding on causes us harm.
Letting go of negative emotions, thoughts, and feelings is by no means easy. It takes practice.
It’s common to hear the phrase ‘let go’ in a yoga class. But have you mastered the art of letting go? Have you ever stopped to think about what it means to ‘let go’?
The expression is used to encourage you to open up to the moment. It’s impossible to live in the moment while stewing over the jerk who cut you off this morning or over-analyzing the argument you had with your partner last week. The never-ending loop of ‘what ifs’ of the future also robs us of the present.
Letting go means learning to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings, accepting them, and moving past them. If there is nothing you can do to change a situation or future outcome, your only option is to change your response.
This is much easier on the mat. During a yoga class, you’re in a calm environment and have a moment to catch your breath and reflect internally. To take the practice of letting go off the mat, we must learn how to carry this lightness with us. Just like mastering a challenging pose takes practice, so does the ability to let go.
Action #1- Make A List
I encourage you to take a few moments and consider what matters in your life. Write them down, so you have a constant reminder of these things.
Next time you’re struggling to let go of a worry or negative emotion, ask yourself if the way you feel is interfering with the things on your list.
Be patient with yourself. Remember to take a few deep breaths to reset your stress response. Over time, the act of letting go will come naturally.
Is Your Heart Open?
We all know where the heart is located in the body and have at least a general understanding of its function—to pump blood through the body. But have you ever considered why heart-opening poses are practiced in yoga?
Having an ‘open heart’ often refers to being open and receptive to receiving love. Whether it be familial, intimate, friendships, or self-love, an open heart is the key to healthy relationships.
Here’s something you may not know about the heart: it sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart! Thanks to the research from the HeartMath Institute, we now know that signals from the heart have a significant effect on brain function—influencing emotional processing as well as higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.
This means the heart and brain continually correspond with one another, it’s not a one-way signal as was originally thought. If you’d like to learn more about the relationship between the heart and the brain and how this impacts our physical and mental health, check out the research for yourself at https://www.heartmath.org/research/research-library/
Heart-opening postures in yoga are used to help you open the heart space in your physical body as well as open up your thoughts and emotions.
Action #2- Create An Open Heart
There are many ways to help you connect more deeply with others, your surroundings, and yourself. Here are a few techniques to help you practice opening your heart off the mat:
Spending time in nature can give you a sense of awe, allowing you to experience sweet, simple, effortless love.
The act of forgiveness, whether it is you or another who needs forgiveness, is an incredible heart-opening exercise.
Giving through an act of kindness allows us to experience human connection instantly and deeply. The joy experienced through others leads us to experience deeper levels of empathy regularly.
And of course, Yoga offers a plethora of poses for opening the heart chakra. Sphinx, Camel, Cat, and Fish are all heart-opening postures to help you create space (literally) in your heart center.
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