Let's Do Yoga!
🧘🏽♂️Healing for the Mind & Body🧘🏽♂️
Practicing yoga has been long revered as a way to ease anxiety and promote balance and calm. But what is it about yoga that helps with these concerns?
Chloe Hodson Watkins, a yoga instructor and owner of Santosha Yoga in Crozet, Virginia, says,
“We live in a frenetic and fast-paced world, which leaves little
opportunity for the digestion and integration of all of the things we
experience on a daily basis. It’s almost as if our minds and our
bodies create a bottleneck to our experience of life. Yoga and
meditation offer us an opportunity to clear the bottleneck. An
opportunity to turn off our phones, our work, and our families to be
quiet and spend an hour or so of time reflecting, digesting, and
downregulating from our active fight or flight sympathetic nervous
system into our rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. This
lets our physical bodies repair and heal and put mental bodies back in
a place of equilibrium.”
So, is it the movement that serves as the key factor here? Or is it the breathwork component? What about a sense of community? Is it the feeling of safety? Might they all contribute to why yoga is beneficial? It appears so. We know that moving our bodies changes our minds. And, studies show that breathwork plays an essential role in stress resilience and keeping our mental health in check by quickly bringing our mind to the present moment as we focus on breathing intentionally.