Yoga will transform your life
Article by Jason Brown - Updated November 2021. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
We all recognize that in order to condition our bodies and improve our fitness, we need to take up some sort of physical exercise. However, it is often missed that the same concept applies to our mind, and that in order to condition our thoughts, emotions, and internal experiences, we need to take up some form of inner exercise.
When I first heard of yoga, my initial impression was that it just involved middle-aged moms doing aerobics on a mat in an unnecessarily hot room. Luckily, my open-mindedness and curiosity prevailed, and I eventually discovered the many different dimensions of yoga.
On the surface, yoga may seem like an alternative version of exercising for people who prefer to stay out of the weight room, but upon closer examination, you might find that there’s more going on under the hood. While yoga certainly does provide a number of physical benefits including flexibility, core strength, and posture, keep reading to learn how yoga can transform your life beyond the physical benefits.
Practice Mindfulness with Yoga
It is so easy to get distracted by the hundreds of stimuli that fight for our attention every single minute of the day. Whether it’s our thoughts or the physical things around us, these distractions can make it seem like your default state of mind is to bounce around from one thought to the next. It really takes a deliberate effort to be present with the moment and aware of what is right in front of us.
Most who first start practicing yoga will find themselves impatiently thinking of other things, such as wondering how much time is left until the end of the class. The more you practice, the more you learn to let go and not worry about the time, instead focusing on the movements. The reward is much greater. With the uniquely challenging activities found in yoga, to master and perfect the poses you will eventually be required to completely clear your mind. Once you start to practice losing yourself in the flow you will start to notice that you legitimately feel different when I walking out of each class.
With my personal yoga practice, I eventually realized that the potential to lose myself in the moment existed with every activity that I encountered in my day. This skill can be learned by anyone. Use yoga as a way to practice mindfulness and apply that to your daily routine in a way that resets and reorients your perspective.
Relieve Stress with Yoga
His holiness the Dalai Lama
A mantra you might learn in your yoga practice is “let go of the things that no longer serve you.”
We hold onto so much weight, from our past experiences to little day to day stresses, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that reliving or over-analyzing our grievances serves very little purpose.
Of course it's possible to learn from reflecting on our mistakes, but reflecting on a mistake 50 times does not teach you any lessons that can't be learned from reflecting on it once.
Yoga practice strengthens and develops the mind so it’s no longer a battle to calm your thoughts, allowing clarity of mind to develop. Just like a storm at sea, when the storm abates you can now see to the horizon.
“Let go of the things that no longer serve you”
By thinking, reciting, or chanting this phrase in or outside of your yoga or meditation practice, you can learn to actively let go of thoughts and outdated beliefs that add no value to your life. Release yourself from the bounds of your Not-Self. Once these steps are taken and mental solitude is established, be amazed by how much less stressed you are day to day.
Learn Patience with Yoga
Ever been waiting in line and looked around to see that literally every other person in line has their head down looking at their phone? In truth, this probably occurs to you everyday! Generally speaking, most people lack the patience or ability to wait for something without distracting themselves with their phones. Yoga has the ability to teach patience, both with your mind and body. From the moment we wake up until the second we go to sleep, we are faced with thousands of opportunities to escape our own thoughts through technology, socializing, entertainment, or some form of consumption. Use the opportunity yoga provides to develop a new relationship with your thoughts so you can be both productive as well as mindful during the little down times of the day. You might find that those moments to yourself are sometimes the most enjoyable parts of your day.
Develop Discipline with Yoga
Motivation and inspiration cannot solely be relied on to produce results in life. While it is certainly helpful to have ambition and drive, the main trait that you can rely on to make progress and achieve your goals is discipline. Inspiration and motivation are emotions. Emotions come and go, they are flux states that are dictated in large part by environmental factors.
Discipline on the other hand is a routine habit that you develop to work towards your vision no matter what mood, emotion, or feeling you’re currently experiencing. With discipline, you learn to experience emotion differently, let them wash over you and you recognize them, but stay distant and in control unless you decide to engage. Being emotional isn’t a problem, it is what makes us human, but emotions can also change your focus and disrupt your mindfulness.
If you have problems fostering discipline in your life, make a positive step forward by committing to something long term. Yoga is a great avenue for this, and over time you will learn that cultivated discipline throughout all aspects of your life can work miracles and enable you to achieve more than you ever thought before.
If you have trouble with discipline, start with your health. Wellness is a foundational element required to enjoy a blissful existence, and developing discipline by taking care of yourself and exercising your mind is a great place to start. Yoga is the scientific practice developed to cultivate this very thing.
Enhance Focus with Yoga
Multitasking is something that has come to be celebrated as a strength and a sought after skill. What a lot of people fail to realize is that, as cool and useful as multitasking seems on the surface, the potential for productivity is far higher when we focus and concentrate our efforts on one task at a time, entering into a flow state.
Being in the flow is a mental state when everything seems to come intuitively and naturally, no matter how difficult the objective. The best athletes are celebrated for their ability to enter into flow states at those critical buzzer-beater moments.
The human brain is incapable of competently accomplishing two tasks simultaneously, and in order to be fully present and engaged in a conversation, we have to mindedly focus our efforts on the people we’re interacting with.
Learning how to focus will greatly benefit your life across the board, from work to social interactions. Without practice though it isn’t easy focusing on one thing. Being hyper focused can actually be very challenging if you don’t practice the skill, especially if you consider all the distractions of modern life.
Yoga is excellent for teaching focus as it challenges you to focus your attention on a single exercise, or breathing style, mantra, or awareness at a time. Yoga elevates your consciousness to new bounds, and the exercises in yoga often push you outside of your comfort zone to the point that you really have no choice but to cut the noise if you want to execute the pose properly.
Ready? Take Your First Shavasana
Taking one yoga class is not going to immediately thrust you into spiritual enlightenment, but if you develop a deliberate and intentional practice, you will discover serious life benefits from yoga over time. You might even look back to that first class as the genesis moment that helped you create a new lifestyle, a new mindset, and…a new you.
A healthy mind has the potential to bring a little more calmness to your life and can do wonders for your relationships with other people. If you’re thinking about trying out a yoga class, most studios offer a 1 or 2-week free trial so you can get a sense first hand of what a yoga is like. There are so many different types of yoga so it can also be difficult to choose where to begin. For most beginners, a restorative flow is best.
Most practices include both physical and mental elements, but if you really want to hone in on the inner work and mindfulness part of yoga, I recommend seeking out a Kundalini Yoga class in your area as a good place to get started.