Yoga is an ancient Hindu spiritual discipline, incorporating a system of physical movements and breathing techniques that focus on posture and your breath. ‘Yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit word Yuj, meaning “to join” or “unite.”
However, this begs the question, to join or unite what to what? The answer is to join your body and mind via the breath and promote physical and emotional well-being. A wise man once said about the practice of yoga, “it’s like taking a break from asking and having a little time to receive the answers.”
The yoga practice was initially founded in ancient India and has exploded in popularity over the last few decades. Yoga is practiced by large and larger numbers of people searching for health and mental peace.
The main goal of practicing yoga is to attain “moksha,” which means “liberation.” According to yoga teachings, there are five main goals or elements of yoga and healthy life.
The five main elements of Yoga
- Air: This element involves lightness, movement, and expansion. It gives you rhythm, compassion, awareness, mobility, and an open mind.
- Water: Representing fluidity, adaptability, and connection. The water element helps us connect to our feelings and emotions.
- Fire: This element fuels our sense of independence, motivation, inner strength, confidence, and willingness to change.
- Earth: Earth is about being centered and is the expression of everything we do. It brings a sense of being, survival, stability, and support.
- Space: This element governs the space and openness, a sense of acceptance, truth, communication, integrity.
Yoga provides a lot of benefits to our body, health, and mind. Here are just a few of them.
1. It improves your body’s flexibility.
Yoga can help make you more flexible and agile, especially with regular practice yoga. This flexibility can help prevent injuries or strain and help relieve muscle and nerve pain.
2. It helps build muscle strength.
With regular practice, yoga can also help build muscle strength and tone. This strengthening of our muscles can also help protect us against pain and various diseases like arthritis.
3. It improves your posture.
Yoga can help improve your posture, preventing backaches and neck pains, and strain. Young yoga practitioners have also reported an increase in height due to the improvement in their posture. A straight spine can balance your whole body much more easily than a spine that lacks good posture. Poor posture can cause your body to strain and cause you to feel lazy and tired. It also puts you at higher risk for degenerative arthritis of the spine.
4. It improves the overall health of your bones.
Yoga can help improve your bone strength and health and prevent breaks or fractures.
5. It regulates the circulation of your blood flow.
Regular yoga practice can help improve your blood flow circulation, especially in your feet and hands. Helping prevent your body from swelling or becoming inflamed. A healthy and regulated flow of blood in your body encourages overall better health. It also helps provide oxygen to your lungs and regulate the transfer of oxygen to your tissues by boosting the level of red blood cells and hemoglobin in your body. All of this can help reduce your risk of stroke and other forms of heart diseases and illnesses.
6. It lowers stress levels.
Yoga brings you mental peace by helping you manage your stress levels through deep breathing exercises and practiced mindfulness.
7. It helps maintain your blood pressure.
Regular yoga practice can be very beneficial in maintaining your body’s blood pressure.
8. It helps in regulating your adrenal glands.
Yoga can help lower your cortisol levels, helping to regulate the functioning of your adrenal glands. Healthy adrenal glands can help you in losing weight and maintaining overall health.
9. Helps with weight loss.
Yoga can help you shed pounds if that’s your goal. Yoga burns calories, and it can help you get in the right mental space to make decisions that will help you lose weight.
Final Thoughts
Yoga is a technique that we may utilize to understand our bodies better, how they move, and how we use them. We may connect with our mind and learn about it, including where it travels regularly and how to focus it. We can also work with our emotions and become more aware of how we tend to react. Afterward, we can build on it and create space to not always respond to external stimuli.