Yoga Saved My Life
And it will help you too
I know it sounds like hyperbole. How can something as simple as twisting and folding a body around on a foam mat make such an impact?
But during the most challenging, emotional, hopeless days of my life, I turned to yoga. Each time I felt anxious or frenetic, like my life was spiraling, I took the step to click “reserve spot” at an evening yoga practice and am so happy I did.
Yoga, I’ve learned, is so much more than stretching and power poses. In fact, it’s almost wholly not about getting aerobic exercise. Its value lies where it impacts your mind and your soul as it requests that you control your breathing, focus on strength and steadiness, and challenges your balance and flexibility.
Broadly, yoga encompasses some of the concepts that are growing in popularity among those who feel overwhelmed by life — and has done so for hundreds of years. Yoga is meditation, yoga is mindfulness, and yoga is gratitude. Given a talented and intuitive instructor, yoga can be a lot like therapy. I’ve seen people cry. I’ve come close myself.
Opening your body through yoga poses helps you open your mind and your heart to the world.
What we forget in modern cultures and modern times, especially in the West with its focus on pharmaceuticals and chemical medicines, is that the body and the mind are inextricably tied, one informing the other and vice versa. They’re an interconnected system, not to be considered in a vacuum. I was hospitalized in 2017 with what I first thought was a bad flu (after a week of being sick). It later become clear that I was simply allowing stress and negativity to consume me, by affecting my heart and liver. Perhaps these symptoms were correlated with the flu, but in my gut, I knew it was a mind thing too.
Yoga simultaneously addresses both the mind and the body, helping practitioners reconnect the pathways between the very tangible — muscles and joints and skeletal elements — and the less tangible — our conscious mind, our subconscious mind, and all the organs we can feel but not see or touch.
The best yoga classes I’ve been part of have always included a few key elements: a focus on breathing intentionally…
