Skip to main content

Higher Health Yoga - How a Movement Practice Can Help You Achieve Better Health

 Our physical and mental health are tied together in more ways than many people can imagine. An anxious mind and a body stuck in fight or flight can have trouble finding a sense of calm. 


Higher health yoga is an idea that by practicing the principles taught within yoga, we can find a greater sense of calm in our mind and body, which can help our body naturally remain in a state of health. 




Healing Meditation in Motion


Many people believe that we can heal our bodies using our minds. Although that is still a heavily debated topic, it is no secret that by creating a more relaxed and healthy inner atmosphere, our body can keep potential sicknesses at bay more easily. 


Whenever you meditate, you are participating in a mindfulness practice that naturally leads your body towards healing. According to this article published by Healthline.com, meditation is scientifically proven to help lower blood pressure, decrease cortisol, and reduce inflammation. 


Yoga is a form of healing meditation with the added benefit of movement, which helps create strength, flexibility, body awareness, and calmness. Yoga teaches us to become aware, focused, and relaxed while engaging ourselves physically. As a result, yoga shares a lot of the same attributes of meditation. 


For these reasons, we can generously refer to a gentle yoga sequence as higher health yoga. By achieving a greater sense of homeostasis in the body, you can allow yourself to heal and maintain better health naturally. 


Yoga and The Body


Yoga has three major components: physical, mental, and spiritual. The physicality of yoga contains countless benefits on top of the few we have already discussed. Many people practice yoga solely for the purposes of strength, flexibility, and mobility. And that is totally fine. Whenever you practice yoga, your body responds positively when more space and movement are created within its ecosystem. 


Inducing greater blood flow, flexibility, and awareness are things that our bodies crave. Even if you pay no attention to yoga's mental or spiritual aspects, feeling stronger and more flexible is enough of a reason to practice yoga in itself. 


Yoga and The Mind


By focusing on the controlled breath and holding your attention during challenging poses, you can find ways to become more calm and centered. Often, during everyday life, we are faced with uncomfortable situations that cause our subconscious minds to want to run. 


You strengthen your mind when you practice a challenging pose and continue to hold through the pain, and remain relaxed and focused. This is just one way to benefit mentally from yoga and achieve a greater sense of overall health. 


There are numerous other mental benefits of yoga including, reduced brain fog, increased grey matter, and greater self-awareness. 


However, there is another aspect to yoga that can aid in increasing your overall vitality and health. The spiritual side of yoga can allow you to go deep within and uncover nuances about yourself and your world that you may have been previously unaware of. 




Yoga and Spirituality


Yoga and spirituality go hand in hand. Although many people practice yoga solely for the physical benefits, there are also drastic mental and spiritual benefits. One of the nice things about yoga for today is that even if you're not as spiritually interested in the practice, you can still noticeably experience the physical benefits. 


When practicing yoga from a spiritual standpoint, you find a way to become more connected to the source of our universe. Gentle yoga sequences contain movements and salutations that have origins in divine connectivity. 


While a relaxed pose may feel fantastic for the body, on the spiritual side, it has a purpose and a meaning behind it, even if you don't realize it. The beautiful thing about yoga is that you can benefit from physical, mental, and spiritual components all at the same time. Or, you can focus merely on what is most important to you. 


Divine Clarity


During your yoga practice or meditation, have you ever felt a sense of deep calm? A feeling that you are connected to something greater and more powerful than you? Sometimes, when we go deep within our minds, we can achieve a level of stillness and calmness that is difficult to imagine during everyday life. Some may refer to this as "divine clarity."


This means that as you strip away anxieties and worries from your life, you move closer to your core and what truly matters. It is much easier to focus on being grateful for what we already have in a state of relaxation and awareness, instead of being worried about not getting what we think we need. 


Achieving this state of consciousness teaches your mind and body that it has everything necessary for happiness and relaxation without external substances. Once you realize this, it is much easier to allow small stresses throughout the day to roll off your back. You can always find your way into a calm state if you choose to. 


In that state of calm, you can find equilibrium for your body where it can maintain and achieve greater levels of health. 


No matter what you focus on with your yoga practice, you will experience higher health through yoga simply by participating consistently. Even if you only practice for 10 to 20-minutes a day a few times a week, it is enough for your body to feel the connectedness with your breath, increased strength, improved circulation, and flexibility. All of which contribute to a body and mind that is more aligned with the principles of better health. 


Flow With Us


You are always welcome to flow with us in our live 20-minute yoga flows or follow along to our website's on-demand videos. 


Flow and Go Yoga

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mental Calmness - 4 Ways To Find Clarity in Any Situation

Mental calmness is something we could all use a little more of. When your mind is calm, you can focus easier, you see things in a more positive light, and your body remains healthier. It seems that many people struggle to find mental calmness in daily situations.  Below we're going to discuss how you can find mental calmness in most situations. What is Mental Calmness? Mental calmness is a sense of groundedness and control over your reactions. You can't control what happens on the outside. But, you can control the way you respond to situations.  Mental calmness is a sense of perspective and a trust that everything will work out in the end and that you will make it through whatever your current situation is. You can see things with clarity and reasonable judgment.  The Benefits of Mental Calmness All of us have things that happen in our lives that make us feel fear, doubt, insecurity, or anger. That's natural. What you do with those emotions and how long you allow them to l

The Benefits and How to of Headstands (Salamba Sirsasana) - With Pictures

You've definitely seen the social media posts on inversions - headstands, handstands, elbow stands, and all kinds of arm balances. But what are the benefits of headstands? And, how do you do them? They make Yoga look elegant and fancy, and they take some practice, but headstands, in particular, are attainable by any yogi!  Why do we flip upside down and try to stand on our heads? Admittedly, most yogis you see do it for fun. What's not to love about being upside down and playing on the mat?  The Benefits of Headstands The largest benefit from a purely physiological point of view is that it helps blood flow return to the heart. Our bodies have miles and miles of veins - little blood vessels with one-way valves that help return the blood to the heart. The valves help ensure one-way flow, returning deoxygenated blood back to the heart despite gravity. A headstand, or other inversions, means that venous flow now works with gravity. If you have varicose veins, inversions are helpful

What Do You Learn From Yoga - The Top Three Things Yoga Taught Me

When I hit the mat for the first time almost a decade ago, it was very much a love-hate kind of relationship. With the exception of a class or two in university, I didn’t have any experience with yoga.  I was taken to a Bikram class by a friend of mine and while I was intrigued to try yoga, Bikram wasn’t my style. The teaching style is scripted and I don’t love prolonged periods of time in hot rooms. To be honest neither does my curly hair. It took some trial and error to find the type of yoga that’s right for me. As an active person who grew up on a farm, I was used to moving. As a respiratory therapist, I’m all about breathing well. When I found a vinyasa-style class, I was home. The transformation was - and is - incredible. I started to feel better, be more confident, and have more energy. I’ve learned things that I didn’t even think I would know about myself and it is nothing short of magical. If that wasn’t enough, everything I’ve learned on that mat has translated to my life off