Yoga reflects life. Your biggest growth opportunities in life are presented when you come up against challenges. The same is true for our practice. Yoga is designed to bring out the best in us by bringing us face to face with ego, fears,negative emotions, destructive unhealthy habits and hidden demons that we often suppress or ignore in our everyday life. The effectiveness of yoga is lessened when it is too easy.
While easy yoga feels good and is relaxing, we don't live in a world where everything feels good and is relaxing. You walk out of the controlled environment of your candle lit yoga studio where the music is soft and everyone is peaceful and sweet and back into your normal everyday life where the kids are screaming, your boss is cutting your pay, you still can't fit in your jeans and the car won't crank, and stress immediately returns and you feel bad again. Then you are stuck in a cycle of having to come back and get your fix. However, if you chose a yoga practice that takes you to your edge and pushes your buttons, you learn stress releasing tools on the mat that you can integrate in your everyday life.
How Doing The Hard Stuff Translates Into Your Everyday Life
Practicing every day, even when you don't feel like it, teaches discipline. Change often takes time and sustained effort. Our yoga practices teaches us that when we commit to something, our goals are realized.
Practicing poses and techniques you hate teaches that your are always stronger then your circumstances and that you can overcome even the hardest and most difficult challenges.
A daily practice at the same time and the same poses allows you to see how diet, lifestyle and stress effects your body.
Unhealthy lifestyle habits are eradicated. It is not possible to maintain a consistent, steady and powerful practice while out of breath, overweight, lacking sleep, being dehydrated, without energy, over scheduled, over committed, with a disheveled state of mind or with a diseased body.
Yoga Helps Us Learn How To Process Emotions. When you are taking your body and mind to the edge, negative emotions such as frustration, unworthiness, anger, and impatience come to the surface. By using the breath and being with the pose, we learn how to let the emotions flow through us instead of getting stored in the body as stress and disease.
Video of the Day
