Many of us in modern life today are under stress all the time. However, we still have to stay in control. If this goes on for a long time, we can react to stress with poor eating habits, release of more stress hormones, and even by manifesting cardiac risk factors. However, there is a way to reduce these risk factors and even reverse them without turning to prescription drugs. All it takes is some discipline and to develop some habits over your lifetime that will work in tandem with your ordinary diet and exercise programs. Yoga is one of these; it can help you relearn the state of peace and harmony that you want your mind and body to be in. It will help you relax.
Yoga is one of the most prominent forms of meditative exercise within the growing mind-body health movement. Other forms include qigong, tai chi, and other exercise techniques that include meditation. Mind-body fitness comes from Eastern philosophies and religions. These practices improve both your emotional and physical well being.
The overall benefits of mind-body exercise are documented in an increasing number of scientific studies. They include everything from reducing cardiac risk factors to enhancing mood.
The kinder, gentler movements typical of yoga improve flexibility, strength and muscle tone and can be more youth-promoting than the wear-and-tear of daily aerobics, weights and running alone.
In fact, practicing yoga can impact every part of your existence. Most modern Western practitioners, for example, focus on the physical asanas, or positions. However, many others utilize yoga as a path to bliss and live their lives in its all-encompassing embrace.
Yoga has lofty goals indeed, but in fact practicing it is wonderfully simple and you can do it anywhere, anytime. If you take yoga to its extremes, you can utilize yoga’s dietary practices and moral codes as well as its meditative practices. More commonly, though, it’s utilized as a combination of asanas (or postures), meditation and breathing exercises, also called pranayama.
Entire books have been written on yoga breathing. Deep breathing is both calming and energizing. The energy you feel from a few minutes of careful breathing is not nervous or hyper, but that calm, steady energy we all need.
If you’re feeling particularly stressed, try this five-minute “breath break” to energize yourself and release stress. Read through the instructions several times before you actually try following the steps.
1. With your spine as straight as possible, sit in a chair or on the floor. If you sit in a chair, your feet should be flat on the floor with knees directly over the center of your feet. If your feet don’t rest comfortably on the floor, put a book or cushion under your feet so that your knees are perpendicular to your hips. Your hands should be on the tops of your legs, palms down, open and relaxed.
2. Close your eyes gently and let them rest behind closed lids.
3. Picture your ribs at the back, front and sides of your body. Your lungs reside behind your ribs.
4. Now, slowly breathe in, filling your lungs up from the bottom. Picture your ribs expanding out and up. Now, breathe out, slowly, with your lungs emptying from top to bottom and your ribs gently contracting back down and in. Don’t push the breath out.
5. The first few times you do this, do it for 2 to 3 minutes, then do it for up to 5 to 10 minutes. At first, set aside a time at least once a day to do this. When you learn how good it makes you feel, you’ll want to do it at other times as well.
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