Elevate Your Yoga Practice with Meditation

After a refreshing yoga workout at home, or at your studio class at the gym, it’s time to unwind and relax in a comfortable position. Whether it’s Legs Up the Wall, the Happy Baby pose, or the Corpse Pose, for no more than ten minutes, it’s time to be mindful of any negative thoughts by closing your eyes with calming chants or mantra with meditation. The focus remains on you at all times. Do you prefer the sounds of silence, or filtered white noise with or without a guide? Meditation decreases stress and wipes away any worries from your mind. It provides an inner calmness to relax, helps you stay centered and keeps inner peace. There are many healthful benefits on why meditation is useful to Yoga class or on its own for your emotional well-being and overall health. After your session ends, you’ll feel calm through the rest of your day, and manage symptoms from certain medical conditions or stresses.

In Meditative Yoga, you use controlled breathing exercises to promote a flexible body and calm mind, when you perform a series of postures. Through each pose, it requires a balance and concentration when you’re focused less on your stressful day and

For Your Emotional and Physical Well-Being

With meditation, it diminishes any negative emotions while you focus on the here and now. With slow steady breaths, it lowers your resting heart rate and blood pressure. It help improves your creativity and gives your imagination a boost. It increases your self-awareness while you’re building new skills to manage your stress levels by increasing your patience and tolerance. You’ll be gaining a new perspective on how to handle stressful situations and provides plenty of rest while improving your sleep quality.

Cures What Ails You

If you’re stressed by a recently diagnosed illness, meditation might be useful to help you heal and manage your symptoms for your health conditions. Along with your other treatments, it can be useful to add meditation if you suffer from anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and tension headaches. It’s also beneficial if you have cancer, high blood pressure, asthma, irritable bowel symptoms, heart disease, and chronic pain.

If you have a spare notebook, notepad, or binder, use it for your yoga journal. This is a good way to track down your practice, whether at home, at the gym, or both. It might take awhile to get used to to write down your thoughts and feelings after you finish your practice.There's no right or wrong way to write in it since this is for you only. Make it a habit to write whatever comes in mind. A word, a sentence, a graph, or a whole page.

Set a meaningful purpose for your practice. Make it mindful. It might help you on and off the mat and throughout the day until your next practice. When you write it down, it would deepen this intention. Write down those feelings before and after class, your emotions, physical and mental feelings we need to be tune in to.

Ask yourself these questions. What did you learn during practice today? Was it about yourself or the class itself? What was your energy level before, during, and after practice? How Was Your Breathing? Was it shallow, or mindful and deep? Held for a certain point? And what did you want to work on next time? A certain pose or sequence, more time for meditation, trying a pose with a yoga strap or another prop?

Be creative and innovative. Use stickers for those exercises and how you felt after it. A sad face for a pose you're stuck on and having trouble with, a smiley face for those you've mastered and challenged yourself. Use folders and plenty of paper as well. This should take you a few minutes of time to track it down after you've completed your workout for the day. Reward yourself with a treat, too.

Another way to elevate your yoga practice is by using a yoga strap. It can come in handy for any level in yoga practice. If you’re having back pain and slouching, it helps corrects your alignment in various poses like the forward fold or the Mermaid pose. It allows you to practice those poses without risking yourself to injury and easier to build up strength to perform the full poses without straps and working with the right muscles. It also advances your practice by being motivated to try mastering new poses and gives you access to those poses that were impossible to do before. It also provides a good feeling on how it feels and being grateful for the things you body can do. Want to go deeper? With a yoga strap, it deepens your stretches for a better alignment. It’s also useful to lengthen your body by avoiding compression and reaching further in a pose. If you don’t have the strap, grab a belt or a soft towel to work in its place.