Saturday, August 23, 2008
Balance Your Energy With Yoga
...apidly diminish. Restoration and rejuvenation arise from the body's ability to self-regulate as the mind-body duality diminishes.
Yoga Tones Muscles
Life is movement and movement is life - how we move can bring balance or imbalance to our muscle tone. The practice of connecting to your breath stimulates the bodys natural intelligence to move into alignment when performing yoga poses. Therefore, the integration in the body develops balanced muscle tone and increased energy.A persons energy level is dictated by their metabolic rate, the rate at which their body is able to convert substances into energy. The expedience of this rate is based on a persons metabolism, a process that is contingent on their muscle mass; a person with more muscle tone will have a vastly higher metabolism than someone who has a small amount of muscle mass. In other words, a person with good muscle tone will have much more energy that someone whose muscular tone is minimal.
Yoga Stimulates Blood Flow
Yoga stimulates a persons body into an open highway, unclogging avenues through which blood, oxygen, and nutrients - all elements of energy - can travel. The way yoga does this is by cultivating balanced action when performing yoga poses... Balanced action is when we engage enough muscular energy to create stability and strength in a pose balanced with organic energy, extension through the bones, to create freedom in the joints. The breath always leads the way- it is what fuels the vehicle of the body into contraction and expansion of the bodys natural pulsation.
Balanced action helps your body to become flexible. Becaus...more
Discover How a Commitment to Yoga Can Change Your Life Forever
...While its true that youll get out of your practice only as much as youre willing or able to put into it, a committed approach to your practice can help you in ways that youve never expected. Indeed practicing yoga could be the platform and motivation you need to completely transform your life.
The basic benefits of yoga are widely documented and have been extensively researched. Research into the more controversial benefits of yoga continue at the time of writing, pubmed.org (a Service of the national Library of Medicine and the national institute of health) listed more than 900 research papers investigating the benefits of yoga. A search on the internet typically reveals benefits which include:
- Increased fitness
- Increased strength
- Fat reduction and weight loss
- Relief of back pain
- Better relaxation
Individually these benefits sound like compellin...more
Why Zen Yoga Poses Can Improve Your Health
...a exercises for your own specific problems. Masunaga offers this useful guide: "first find the exercise which is hardest to do... and then look for another one which is the easiest... If doing the easiest exercise causes an improvement in the performance of the most difficult one, or relieves a ... symptom, it is effectively reinforcing the Ki [energy] in the Kyo [deficient] meridian".
Masunaga was a leading shiatsu teacher in japan who organized meridian exercises into a system that people could use themselves. He actually wrote that the best way to learn about zen yoga poses, was to practice them! Zen yoga seems more difficult in theory than it is in practice. It's actually a very fun, playful and gentle style of yoga that can readily be adapted to any level of fitness and health. Like tai chi, it has great health benefits, which can be explored in more detail through classes or publications.
References: Zen Imagery exercises by Shizuto Masunagamore
How Yoga Helped Me Navigate Choppy Waters
... foot Schooner. Each day of the voyage I contemplated my position in the scheme of lifePeeling away at my personal layers of protection; I entered a place where fear and the unknown hold hands. It was a scary time. As the height of the waves increased and the speed of the wind mounted, my mind began to let go. I realized that my contribution to the globe was not as significant as my contribution to the three other members of the crew on the sailboat. Being present, being alert and aware of the moment to moment traverse across the body of water that seemed endless, was my focus. Taking care of the direction of my thoughts and my energy helped my crew and helped me to find a peaceful presence. There is a wonderful sense of freedom in the middle of the ocean. It is that exhilarating feeling of anything can happen here sense that draws the soul. Knowing how to ride the wave of anticipation and fear; adventure and the unknown take their place in your heart center and fill you up. What a sense of accomplishment when you finally reach land! There is just no feeling that can measure up to that first leap from the boat to the dock!
And once I hit the dock, I began to teach yoga on the beaches of the british Virgin islands. With the crew members of over 50 yac...more
