Modern Stress Relief: Try Ancient Yoga
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by: KimArcher
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Many of us in modern life today are under stress all the time. However, we still have to stay in control. If this goes on for a long time, we can react to stress with unhealthy eating habits, release of more stress hormones, and even by manifesting cardiac risk factors. However, there is a way to reduce these risk factors and even reverse them without turning to prescription drugs. All it takes is some discipline and to develop some habits over your lifetime that will work in tandem with your ordinary diet and exercise programs.
Yoga helps you to relearn that natural state that your body and mind want to be in: relaxation.
Yoga is one of the most prominent forms of meditative exercise within the growing mind-body health movement. Other forms include qigong, tai chi, and other exercise techniques that include meditation. Mind-body fitness comes from Eastern philosophies and religions. These practices improve both your emotional and physical well being.
The overall benefits of mind-body exercise are documented in an increasing number of scientific studies. They include everything from reducing cardiac risk factors to enhancing mood.
Yoga's soothing movements are easy on your joints while increasing strength, flexibility and muscle tone. In effect, it can make you feel better than aerobics, weight lifting, or running, which are much harder on your body.
Indeed, practicing yoga can impact every part of your existence. Most modern Western practitioners, for example, focus on the physical asanas, or positions. However, many others utilize yoga as a path to bliss and live their lives in its all-encompassing embrace.
Yoga certainly can be an ambitious undertaking, but in reality practicing it is amazingly easy and you can do it just about anywhere. If you utilize yoga to its full potential, you can incorporate its meditative and dietary practices as well as its code of ethics into your life. Usually, however, it's practiced as a mixture of asanas, meditation and breathing exercises, also called pranayama.
Authors have written entire books on how to breathe during yoga. When you deep breathe, you calm yourself, but you also energize yourself at the same time. You can feel very energized from a few minutes of careful deep breathing, but it's a different kind of energy than many of us are used to feeling. Not jittery or hyper, this type of energy is calm and steady.
If you're feeling particularly stressed, try this five-minute "breath break" to energize yourself and release stress. Read through the instructions several times before you actually try following the steps.
1. With your spine as straight as possible, sit in a chair or on the floor. If you sit in a chair, your feet should be flat on the floor with knees directly over the center of your feet. If your feet don't rest comfortably on the floor, put a book or cushion under your feet so that your knees are perpendicular to your hips. Your hands should be on the tops of your legs, palms down, open and relaxed.
2. Close your eyes gently and let them rest behind closed lids.
3. Think about your ribs, at the front, back, and at the sides of your body. Your lungs are behind those ribs.
4. Now, slowly breathe in, filling your lungs up from the bottom. Picture your ribs expanding out and up. Now, breathe out, slowly, with your lungs emptying from top to bottom and your ribs gently contracting back down and in. Don't push the breath out.
5. The first few times you do this, do it for 2 to 3 minutes, then do it for up to 5 to 10 minutes. At first, set aside a time at least once a day to do this. When you learn how good it makes you feel, you'll want to do it at other times as well.
About the Author
Kim Archer enjoys the health benefits and relaxation of yoga. A great source of information on this restorative practice can be found at Yoga Essentials.
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