Developing a Healthy Relationship With Yourself Through Yoga
How's your relationship with a very important person - yourself? Finding time to connect with yourself and appreciate your unique qualities can be difficult when you have a busy lifestyle. Fortunately, yoga offers the perfect solution for multi-taskers. The mind/body practice focuses equally on improving your body, encouraging personal growth, and nourishing your spirit.
Yoga Provides a Sense of Accomplishment
Demanding supervisors, tough family situations, and minor and major life disappointments can affect your confidence and self-esteem. Yoga classes offer many opportunities to succeed and grow, helping you feel more accomplished. During yoga classes, you'll receive detailed instructions and guidance that will help you perform a variety of yoga poses, called asanas.
Mastering these asanas is quite an achievement, as mastery requires complete control of your body and mind. As you overcome challenges and perfect your technique, you'll learn just how strong, resilient, and accomplished you really are. Celebrating these victories boosts your self-esteem and self-confidence and may help you change your mindset when dealing with challenges or setbacks in your personal life.
Practicing Yoga Can Help You Improve Your Outlook and Process Your Emotions
Negativity can have a devastating impact on your life. If you think you can't win that promotion, find love, or learn how to surf, you may be right. Negative self-talk affects your initiative and causes you to doubt yourself. Once negative thoughts take hold, they tend to multiply. Eventually, you may find yourself thinking negatively about almost everything.
Mediation, an essential aspect of your yoga practice, helps you change the way you respond to negative thoughts. Contrary to popular belief, meditating doesn't have to involve clearing your mind completely. In fact, it can be difficult to prevent stray thoughts from passing through your mind when you're meditating. Rather than trying to ignore these thoughts, you'll acknowledge them and dismiss them without dwelling on them or paying much attention to them.
When you practice yoga regularly, you'll learn to pay no attention to negative thoughts even when you're aren't in class or practicing at home. The lessons you've learned from meditation can also help you remain calm when difficult situations occur.
Yoga also offers a natural way to manage anxiety, depression, and stress. Women who participated in a yoga study reported lower levels of stress, depression, and anxiety after just 12 yoga sessions, according to a study published in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Are You Kind to Yourself?
Are you more critical of yourself than you are of other people? If your standards for yourself are unrealistically high, failures are inevitable. Yoga teaches you to be kind, not just to others but also to yourself. Thanks to your yoga practice, you'll become more accepting of yourself and view disappointments in a much more positive light, while focusing on your many positive traits.
Yoga Helps You Accept Your Body Type
No one's body is perfect, yet perfection is what we see in magazines and social media. Thanks to Photoshop and other photo editing apps, models and influencers seem to have no flaws. Unfortunately, in real life, there are no tools to instantly make your waist thinner or your jaw slimmer.
During yoga classes, you'll focus on what your body can do, not what it looks like. In fact, you can succeed at yoga no matter what your shape, size, or weight. As you celebrate your ability to perform complicated yoga poses, you just may find that you no longer care about attaining an unrealistic standard of perfection.
Are you ready to improve your life with yoga? Get in touch with us and sign up for one of our convenient yoga classes.
Sources:
Yoga Digest: The Art of Self Care Through Yoga