How Practicing Yoga Helps Me Be My Best Self

How Yoga Helps Me Respond vs React, How the Body Knows if You’ll Listen & Ways to Add Yoga into Your Life

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Yoga Helps Me Respond vs React

Yoga is a lot more than a stretchy little workout. As you practice, you learn how you talk to yourself, how you cope with physical stress, how maybe the lessons on the yoga mat are transferable off the mat.

Practicing yoga has become a key part of filling my own cup… it helps me show up as my best self in other areas of my life.

I find myself more hurried in the day when I don’t put time into my personal practice. Setbacks seem more vexing, traffic doesn’t seem to flow, and I find a parrot of negativity on my shoulder more often than not.  

Taking just a few minutes to stretch the spine, ground myself on my little mat in the world, and tune into my breath – leaves me so much more centered than if I had skipped this personal ritual.

(My practice these days looks like at least ten minutes on the yoga mat doing a physical practice, as well as a meditation or affirmation practice for at least ten minutes.)

Your Body Knows if You’ll Listen

As I practiced this morning, I held a pose longer than normal, intrinsically feeling the need to wait for something here. Sure enough, like a massage therapists’ steady hand on a muscle, the muscle finally relaxed where it was. I wasn’t pushing or pulling anything – just waiting and sending breath into the body.

It had me thinking that the body is so interesting – in how it just knows. If we let it, we have a lot of wisdom locked away in there.

The other thought was how I could have tuned out the call to stay here and not found this muscle release. You really get what you put into the practice – and you can just do the movements, and just follow a script and only do say, five seconds of each pose. But if you’re tuning in, and listening to the body, and really “yoking the body & mind together”, the breath and the body together, you can hear what it needs to tell you. You already know what poses your body wants from you.

“The word yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “to yoke,” or “to unite”. The practice aims to create union between body, mind and spirit”.

Yogapedia

A sore neck might be calling for some semi-circle rolls, or a head stretch with the ears tapping from shoulder to shoulder. Maybe eagle arms or hugging the body to wrap the fingers around the shoulder blades.

Tired legs might want to be in legs up the wall pose, sitting with the seat on the base of the wall and the legs up.

Yoga has taught me to listen better… to myself… and therefore my world around me.

How to Add Yoga into Your Life

So, I sneak yoga in where I can. The practice doesn’t have to be a half hour of time on the mat (although this is my goal these days) but it can be some stretches as you watch your favourite show in the evening. It can look like a lunch time walk and meditation. It could be practicing some yoga poses that are calling to you, in between activities. Challenging your family members to try this new pose you learned. It could be restful seated mobility movements, gently twisting the spine, and opening the chest and trying some side bends. Or listening to a guided meditation before bed.

I hope this post inspired you to add in a few minutes of listening to your own body in your day. Adding yoga into your life can add much peace to your outlook. The benefits of turning inward and listening to your own body will ripple out into other areas of your life, as you suddenly find yourself “more in tune”.

Thank you for joining me for another article here at WLE.

We will be taking a break over the holidays – so a very Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

See you back here in the New Year.

With Love,

Esta