Yoga Has Aged Me Well!

Yoga Has Aged Me Well!!

Just like a fine wine ages well if it sits long enough, yoga has aged me well!  After almost three years of practicing yoga, I have seen spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits that I never in my wildest dreams thought was possible at the age of 37!!

I started the three years with a lot of grit and determination.  I practiced and practiced beginners yoga, and built up my practice, until eventually I could go to a class that I consider extremely hard even for those who are in excellent shape and don't practice yoga often.  My point here, is that it takes patience, and determination before you see benefits of practicing yoga.  There are of course, immediate benefits, such as feeling more relaxed, feeling like your muscles have been stretched and revitalized, increasing the range of motion in your joints, increasing your metabolism, increasing your mood, increasing your sense of self esteem.  

After I could master the asana's physically, I found myself able to focus on my inner self.  If, for example, I was in child pose (Balasana), and I felt suffocated or emotional, I realized that the pose was opening up something in my past between my mother and myself that I did not release.  When ever we go through experiences that are traumatic, we store that experience in certain parts of the body.  Yoga helps to open up those parts of the body, and thus those emotions are released.  So it's not uncommon for people to cry or feel sad during certain poses.  Some poses teach us how to "let go" such as the Pigeon Pose.  Some poses teach us how to look at life from a different angle, such as The Camel, or the Headstand.

My point in this blog, is to show you that yoga has benefits that are not just physical.  That yoga is an art that can be utilized as a healing tool for past emotional trauma that you stuffed down and therefore placed into your body.  In a future blog, I will talk about how my crippling anxiety was virtually cured due to yoga.  

Namaste