Several people get attracted to Yoga for a way to become fitter and healthier. Some might come in search of relief or even help for some ailment or stress. Yoga is such a powerful tool that it can help give you what you came looking for as well as much more.

Although yoga has often been linked to ancient beliefs, texts and values, it has benefits for people of the present times as well. It has numerous benefits to offer to make your body mind and soul healthier and happier.

Yoga helps you relax your body as well as mind, even if you are in stressful conditions or circumstances. Yoga helps you to learn how to control your breathing and hence it helps you clear out your mind of cluttering thoughts so that you are left with a deep physical as well as mental refreshment.

Besides that, yoga can help you to normalize your body weight. This can be especially useful for people who are either underweight or overweight. You can achieve your desired weight goal with yoga. Yoga practices principles of moderation and balance in diet as well as physical activity so that you are able to live a healthy lifestyle.

Yoga also helps to make you fight better against diseases. The different poses and movements that you do in yoga help to massage your internal organs thereby, enhancing your blood circulation as well as functionality.

Not only that, but it also helps to make you feel more energized and hence, more productive. Yoga can actually replenish your mind as well as body in as less as 20 minutes. This will give you enough energy to respond to your daily routine and challenges.

Above all, yoga helps you achieve an honest self-contentment and self-actualization. When you meditate, which is one of the forms of yoga, you focus your mind and take it away from any worldly distractions thereby achieving true happiness.

Yoga helps you achieve a unity of your body, mind and spirit through exercising, breathing and meditating. All these exercises pressurize your glandular systems and hence, increase their efficiency and overall health.

Yoga helps you learn that your body is in fact a vital instrument to survive in the world and hence, you should treat it with respect and care for it. You can practice yoga regularly and even daily to achieve a healthy and bright mind matched with a strong and healthy body.

Ten Good Reasons

1. Increased Strength. The first thing someone who hasn’t practiced yoga before will tell me is that they don’t do yoga because they’re not “flexible enough/at all.”  I have news for those of you who agree with that statement – SCRATCH THAT.  That doesn’t matter.  Yoga will focus on proper alignment and building strength, and the flexibility will come later.
2. Increased Flexibility.  With that said, if you aren’t flexible when you start doing yoga, that’s something that will come out of a regular practice as your muscles get stronger.  I can’t do the splits or anything, but I swear I’ve grown an inch since I started practicing regularly because my spine has lengthened and the muscles in my back have become stronger and more flexible.
3. Stress/Anxiety Management.  The reason I started practicing yoga in the first place was at the recommendation of friends who saw me trying to deal with far too much anxiety on my own.  I was having panic attacks in the shower before work, and panic attacks at night as I tried to sleep.  I had no outlet for this adrenaline that always seemed to course through my veins, and the movement associated with Vinyasa (flow) yoga helped provide a way for that energy to circulate without festering.  Yoga also gave me breathing tools and a way to mentally and emotionally connect the lessons I was learning on the mat with everyday challenges.
4. Self-Awareness.  What began as a stress management tool has since evolved into a strong introspective and reflective tool.  Yoga connects breath, movement, emotions, actions, and spirit.  A regular practice has helped me examine pieces of my life more closely and make changes and improvements that have largely contributed to overall peace and happiness.  I find inspiration for my writing on the mat, find peace through challenges, and ultimately learn to see life through a lens of love and acceptance – of myself, first and then also of others.
5. Spiritual Connection.  That being said, there’s an opportunity for a strong spiritual connection and practice in yoga as well.  It certainly can remain a physical practice, and can also be a transformative experience in spiritual growth as well.  Yoga has inspired me to see the world as a much more connected place than I had prior to a regular yoga practice, and has inspired a curiosity about other belief systems that help to further expand my worldview.
6. Community.  There is certainly community around a yoga studio and yogis in a certain city!  I’ve found this to be true in both cities I’ve practiced in regularly – Minneapolis/St. Paul and Boulder, Colorado.  CorePower Yoga (where I’ve completed a 200-hour Power Yoga Teacher Training program) certainly has a strong, supportive community and other studios as well offer additional workshops and chances to practice a variety of styles with great teachers.  My favorite teachers teach at more than one studio, expanding their reach further out into the community.
7. Quality Personal Time.  Maybe it’s your thing to get up for a morning run, or curl up with a book, but my down-time often starts with an hour in a yoga class.  I unplug from technology, stop thinking about to-do lists, let go of any challenges or conflicts in my life and spend an hour dedicated to love, growth, and reflection.  If you’re juggling a busy schedule, a hectic routine, or a to-do list that feels unmanageable, squeezing in an hour or two a week in a yoga class is an excellent way to bring a sense of balance to your life.
8. Work/Life Balance.  On that note, I promise you that the addition of a couple of hours of yoga into your weekly schedule will not put you behind on your personal and professional projects.  If anything, I believe (and have found) that it will make you more inspired, more productive, and more focused.
9. Self-Confidence.  And not just because yoga means stronger muscles.  I used to think the numbers on a bathroom scale were the best way to track and measure my physical fitness, and have since discovered that the numbers actually don’t matter at all.  Thank goodness!  Yoga’s taught me that it’s less about a number and more about a feeling of capability and strength.  When you find yourself balanced in a standing posture and holding it for longer than you ever thought you could stand on one leg, or fully up in a headstand for the first time, that feeling of capability far outweighs any feeling of “accomplishment” that is seeing a certain number on a scale.  I let go of weight awhile ago, since building muscle means that while shapes and sizes might shift around a little bit – the actual scale number might never change.  And that’s ok, because -
10. Overall Health.  You should add yoga to your lifestyle for the overall health benefits it provides.  Physical health and healing, emotional balance, mental stability, and control of breath and movement.  I plan to make yoga a lifestyle for me, and will practice as long as I’m alive.  And I’m counting on that to help me live a very, very long time.

5 Reasons Yoga Makes Sex Better

1) Yoga can be a beautiful way of getting comfortable in your own skin, coming home to your body, becoming more alive and aware, energized and open to life and love. Rather than seeking to go beyond the body, yoga is for most of us a way to reclaim an awareness of the body itself as sacred.

2) Yoga makes sex better! Yeah, you heard me – I said it… Yoga systematically makes us more aware of our sensations and trains us in the art of using breath to open into our experience rather contract away from it or attempt to clamp down and control it. This makes us more available to the dance of intimacy, plethora of sensations and waves of pleasure that can turn sex into a mind-blowing form of embodied spirituality – or just make it more satisfying and rich, which as far as I can tell is really the same thing..

3) Yoga gives us time and space to connect to our inner lives. Sensations, emotions, the accrued layers of stress and anxiety, questions we carry about our choices, actions, intentions, desires – all can be meditated upon as we use the ritual of breath and movement to focus the mind, connect to the heart, listen to the body and reflect upon how we really want to live our lives.

4) Yoga can be fantastic physical therapy. In both a healing and preventative way, yoga can be used to promote healthy flexibility, strength, and range of motion. Practiced with intelligence and taught with anatomical knowledge, yoga just works!

5) Yoga can be an integrative vehicle for self-healing. More and more information from science and psychology demonstrates the healing benefits of yoga and meditation. Somatic psychology research and new data from neuroscience show the importance of mindful present attention and body awareness in rebalancing the nervous system, processing through unresolved emotions in the brain and healing from trauma stored on the body. This is real transformation.

If you think about it: healing traumas, keeping your body healthy, strong and flexible, being in touch with your inner life, and being comfortable in your own skin all make you more able to be present in your own body and connect with empathy, intuition, passion and playfulness with your partner’s body. Seeing as how our sexual nature is a core (and I would suggest innately spiritual) intimate aspect of who and what we are, all of this indeed makes sex better. In turn better sex is an expression of healthier relationships in a more integrated, open, authentic and ecstatic human life!