Today’s post is a guest post by Millie Lowe on the benefits of yoga!

Yoga is simple in practice but result-oriented in nature. It is an effective exercise. Yoga’s disciplinary and therapeutic movements assist your body to release stress quickly and promote positive energy. It gives your body a feeling of soothing.  It makes you whole again in no matter of time. 

Yoga is a practice, an exercise, and an experience. In Yoga you experience yourself. It connects you with yourself. It connects you with nature too. Yoga’s simplicity and purity help you regain yourself from a stressful environment. It gives you back to yourself. Where gyms and some of the best fitness equipment fail to protect people from stress, Yoga becomes a remedy. Here is how Yoga benefits millions of people worldwide every day in reducing stress and improving the quality of their lives.  

Mind, body, and soul are at the heart of Yoga’s philosophy. Put them at peace, you are stress-free. In Yoga, away from your life’s hustle and bustle, you are no one but you. Besides nature’s songs and scenes, you are only who you can listen to, feel, and experience. This gives you time, space, and a chance to know yourself. It gives you spirit, motivation, and realization of yourself. 

As a mystic said “you learn through reading but understand with love”– by learning and understanding yourself you become aware of yourself and your surroundings, which are a source of disturbing your peace and causing stress. It makes you love yourself again and take care of your mind, body, and soul.

2)   Connecting with self

When you are busy in your demanding life, you become forgetful of yourself. You don’t have space, time, and energy to connect with yourself, to communicate with, to listen to, to notice, to know, and understand yourself better. You ignore the demands of your body and soul, let alone making an effort for meeting them. No matter how long you have been lost in the jungle of your daily life, Yoga will locate you. It will help you find yourself.

Yoga creates an urge in you to step back from your life for a moment. You sit on a mat or on the ground at home or in the park where you are no one but you, then you remember nothing but you. The moment of nothingness is when you finally look for yourself. It is probably the first and only time when you feel you are with yourself.   

3)   Connecting with nature

Your ecology is nature’s sights, scenes, and songs. You should listen to them, see them, and experience them to stay fresh, full of energy, and healthy. When you ignore them. When you are out of contact with them, you are lost. Connect yourself with nature. It is as important as connecting with yourself.

 In urban settings, you have everything but nature. Everything but nature is not enough to live a quality life. You cannot come in terms with peace. You are stressed and tense. You have no energy. You are down and depressed. You have all life luxuries. Your life is convenient. Yet you are empty. It is time to bring nature into your life. Yoga can help you build a connection with nature and fill the void.

Yoga’s calm and healing postures are exactly the opposite of a hectic lifestyle. It is a popular practice worldwide. It is also in high demand in the US and Europe, where all modern exercise facilities and the best fitness equipment are not helping people to avoid stress.

4)   Exploring self

You practice Yoga every day. You grow into its movements. The practice becomes a journey to you. You seek to explore yourself more and more. You test your limits. You reach new levels. Then you want to take it to another level, to the next level. You reach that level too. You have an urge, motivation, and energy to explore yourself further and further.

Your exploration of yourself becomes an experience for you. It becomes a journey, a journey into yourself. You look to break free from negative thought and energy. You seek positive energy. You feel and experience your life closely and thoroughly. It becomes a cycle, a process. It is an evolution.

5)   Finding self

The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore. It separates pure from contaminated and truth from falsehood. It is relevant to knowing, understanding and finding yourself. Yoga releases stress from your body, mind, and soul. You discover your true self.  Until then you were injured and buried under the debris of your life pressures and demands. You were not living your life.

The purity lies in limited and simple. Yoga’s philosophy demands you to retrain yourself from greed for more. It motivates you to stay more limited. It helps you find yourself in the limited. It asks you to find your peace there.

6)   Coming to peace

Yoga is a walk. You take one step, two steps, then more steps and you grow into it. Every day you come closer and closer to the later part of your travel. It is when you see early signs of peace. You can feel peace approaching your body. Your body tones down to relax and calm. You are as calm as water in a pond. Stress eases away. Yoga cleanses your body of stress as water cleanses it of dust. An important sign of peace is that you enjoy your life. You smile. You live in the moment. You live in present. You are not worried about your past that you have already lived. You are not concerned about your future that is yet to come.

7)   Freeing self

You are not stressed. You are not down and depressed. It is first time you feel free! You feel free of your life pressures, your attachments, and compulsions. Freeing you from yourself and your attachments is what Yoga is all about. Yoga gives you freedom at its outset.

If you are tired and sick of doing everything to get rid of stress or if you’ve tried and exhausted all exercises and methods to bring peace in your life. It is time for you to think and try Yoga. Even the smallest start will set you on the course of a longer journey, your journey to your freedom.

Reference Resources: https://www.verywellmind.com/the-benefits-of-yoga-for-stress-management-3145205