In this time of uncertainty, anxiety, seclusion, and fear, we all need to find ways to improve our mental health. For centuries, yoga has given practitioners the tools live in a healthy way. Now is the perfect time to find a yoga class or deepen your yogic journey!
Effective yoga teachers seek to significantly improve students’ health and well-being. Traditional yoga practices (including movement, mindfulness, and breath work) can help everyone balance their nervous systems and stay healthy, mentally and physically. The methods taught in well-planned yoga classes build lifelong skills from the inside-out, teaching practitioners to recognize their present state, label the sensations in their bodies, and build a tool chest of coping skills to choose behaviors and responses that bring them back to balance in a healthy, sustainable way.
Yoga postures:
- Yoga promotes balance in the nervous system by moving through both stimulating and calming postures.
- You begin to recognize which postures make them feel energized and which make them feel soothed.
- You notice how their bodies and minds react to stressful, uncomfortable sensations in challenging postures.
- Moving the body is a healthy way to release stress, to focus attention, and to feel strong and capable.
- Yoga postures build confidence and positive body image.
- Yoga postures can build resilience by helping you physically release pent up trauma and tension.
Breath work:
- Breath is our most portable form of stress management.
- Long, smooth breaths calm the nervous system, particularly via the vagus nerve.
- By experiencing a variety of simple and effective breaths, you gain the coping skills to choose which practice works best for you.
Mindfulness:
- Through mindfulness practice, you become more aware of your feelings, sensations, thoughts, and emotions.
- You learn to connect with and value your inner experience, rather than rely on outside stimuli.
- Mindfulness improves self-regulation and confidence as you learn to control your own thoughts and actions.
- With mindfulness practice, you learn to separate your feelings from your actions and choose healthy responses to outside stimuli.
- Mindfulness is learning that you are not your thoughts, that you can shift from how you are currently being/feeling to how you want to be/feel.
Explore more about wellness, the physiology of yoga, the science behind the practice, and the peaceful power that yoga cultivates in our classes, Y4A’s unique workshops, and on our Facebook page.