keep in mind: yoga’s pretty cool

Besides the benefits of “stretching” there are a lot of reasons why yoga is such a great supplementary exercise for wellness.

Yes a series of poses where you fold, extend, twist, hold, release is the basic form of yoga but there is so much more behind it.

These stretches not just to reach your goal of one day doing the splits (definitely will help on that journey though), but there are benefits of your body’s systems in each stretch. Hips store trauma and fear, releasing this part of the body will allow us to feel release in our mind and potentially in physical anxiety. Twisting is a great way to flush and detox the metabolism. Any kind of rotation can be a slay for this.

You also don’t have to be pain free or injury free for yoga. There are so many variations and levels. Your amazing teachers at habitual are great for giving you access to poses that feel and are good for you! That simple.

Breath. A KEY for yoga is breath. Nose is for breathing, mouth is for eating. Inhale and exhale through nose as a general rule of ouija breath. This is nose breathing with a slight constriction at the back of the throat. Also named ocean breath. We discussed this in a previous breath blog post! This is the aim. In yoga a good timer is how many breaths, it also times how fast we flow. This is like breath in life, when we are still and calm we breath slowly, we breath faster as we move faster - yoga teaches us to control how slow and how fast we breath in our daily lives.

The poses of yoga are not there for physical benefit but mental. Challenging you to stay in the pose, humbling you when it’s tough and you fall, teaching resilience in trying again, and learning a process of strength as you develop as classes and time go on.

While a daily yoga practice is ideal a couple or once a week is a good reminder! It doesn’t have to be 60-90mins it can be a simple 5min wake up stretch or 5min bedtime calm down.

Yoga is a complete blessing. It is a practice, and it is for every single body out there.

So have a stretch! Hold a crow!

Until next week,