5 Reasons to Partake in National Yoga Month!
National Yoga Awareness Month is in full swing! Advocates from all around the nation have been celebrating National Yoga Awareness Month for over 10 years now. In 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services appointed September as National Yoga Awareness Month. They did this because yoga offers enormous benefits to promote healthy living for just about everyone. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), many individuals practice yoga to maintain their health and wellbeing, improve physical fitness, relieve stress, and enhance their quality of life.
What is Yoga?
Yoga is a mind-body practice that combines physical poses, controlled breathing, and mindful meditation. Make yoga a part of your healthy lifestyle routine and you will surely notice a change in your view of the world. Participants become calmer, stronger, less stressed, more conscious, flexible, and even more intuitive. Yoga offers too many health benefits for the mind, body, and soul for one not to try it.
Yoga helps people concentrate and remain focused. Yoga can help one destress, sleep better, eliminate depression, have better/more sex, and keep balanced while strengthening the core. This month in honor of the celebration of yoga awareness there are specials going on in hotels, gyms, studios, and various other places for those who are interested in checking out the benefits of yoga. A simple search will lead to all types of yoga opportunities throughout the community you are in, online, and the nation.
5 Reasons to Add Yoga to Your Life
Destress
Yoga has been known to decrease anxiety and lower blood pressure, simply by being still in the moment. A simple pose can take away a day’s stress in a matter of minutes. The Sukhasana (easy pose,) is a pose that can be done anywhere in as little as a minute for some quick relief.
Breathing exercises along with various poses are a great way to destress. Keeping company with positive, uplifting people and events as much as possible can be helpful too.
Restorative yoga is the perfect yoga that promotes emotional/spiritual physical, and mental relaxation.
What do you enjoy doing that helps you destress?
Who do you enjoy being around that brightens your day and makes you feel good?
Sleep
Adding yoga into your weekly regime can help with sleep issues. The more relaxed you are the easier it is to fall asleep. The child pose and corpse pose can be helpful in getting some good sleep. As a bonus, they are poses that can be done before bed. These poses will not keep you up like some other poses. They will, however, relax you enough so that you can fall asleep like a child.
Depression
Serotonin and endorphins which both impacts the mood in a happier sense are given off when the body takes part in yoga. Serotonin helps to regulate anxiety, happiness, and mood, while endorphins are known as the happiness hormone that helps to alleviate pain within the body, making one feel good; hence forgetting about all the troubles if just for some moments.
After yoga, anything else that may come up to mind may need to be journaled to release the negativity through the fingers.
Sex
Keeping with a yoga routine helps to decrease cortisol, which causes the body to loosen up. When the body is in a state of relaxing, one is more conscious of what is going on around and within them causing them more pleasure. Try the Happy Baby (Ananda Balasana) pose during your next yoga session. If you are new to yoga; ease into it slowly. This pose is not hard to do and is helpful with opening up the hips, which enhances pleasure and allows one to try various positions with ease since flexibility is improving.
Balance/Stability
Being in control of your body's movement throughout a yoga session is how the body works with gravity to build strength. The ability to hold the poses for a certain amount of time helps the body build strength. If you can do so, consider the Eagle or Tree Pose for a minute or two on each leg to see how you do. Though these poses may look easy to do, it takes a quiet mind and strong body to be able to hold these poses that are also excellent for strengthening the core. The eagle & tree poses help to balance and stabilize the body. Yoga not only helps with balance and stability participating in it regularly aids the body in getting more flexible and stronger and helps to alleviate falls.
In conclusion, September is the perfect month to engage in yoga whether you are already doing so or not. There is so much happening in your community, throughout the country, online and so many benefits to not take time to give yoga a try, but especially this month. While at it, visit our online store. Check out the Tree Pose or New Meditative earrings that are selling like hotcakes this month. Keep in the Yoga Spirit!
*Check with your doctor before participating in yoga, especially if you are not accustomed to doing it. If you suffer from a chronic disease or metabolic syndrome, please check with your doctor first before signing up for anyone's yoga session. Remember to go at your own pace if you are going at this alone, slow is best. If you want to advance, do so at your own pace or invest in an instructor(s) who is certified. The goal of yoga is to destress and feel no pain.
References:
Celebrate National Yoga Month.
Cortisol and antidepressant effects of yoga