Living A Yogic Lifestyle

Incorporating yoga into your life can be one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences you can take on your journey! A nurtured yoga practice can transcend you by creating a disciplined mind a strong and physically fit body and no matter what religion you practice, like any religion, yoga can be a bridge to enhancing your spirituality.

Practicing yoga is associated with establishing harmony, equanimity, balance. It has been well-publicized in mainstream media, recommended to patients by their doctors, and praised by its many practitioners.

Bring the practice of yoga into your life! Learn the top reasons why yoga should be in your life. Discover the key factors to incorporating yoga into your life. Learn to eat like a yogi. Awaken your spiritual life with yoga and use it to improve your love life. Get information on Ayurvedic health care. Take the dosha quiz and determine how to use it to better your health.

Reasons To Incorporate Yoga As A Lifestyle

1. Creates Discipline: Discipline is a necessity in life. Discipline is essential for achieving any kind of success in your life! It is the secret to the most effective, efficient and well strategic plan you can give yourself! Being successful, losing weight, maintaining relationships are not tasks that come easy for most people. They are all things we must work hard on creating, keeping and maintaining!

2. Improves Circulation: Poor circulation is the cause of over 1000 diseases! From a healthy heart to a good sex life, the proper flow and circulation of blood in our arteries is one of the most important things we can do to maintain good health and push back the aging process. There is a common denominator between good arterial health and disorders such as heart attack, obesity, diabetes and high glucose levels, as well as sexual health. That common denominator is blood circulation.

3. Increases Flexibility: Yoga is the way to a more pliable, flexible body. It creates a supple and more resilient muscular structure suited to react quicker to falls, accidents or in any kind of sports. As we age, the flexibility improved by doing yoga has shown to be a deterrent in injury related accidents.

4. Quiets the Mind: A disciplined mind is a free mind. Gain control over your thoughts and you maintain control over your life. Retrain your mind and you regain your freedom. Calming the mind is a behavioral technique used to interrupt, minimize and eliminate "psychological noise". Obsessive, repetitive thoughts, anxiety and fears are all apart of negative, self-destructive patterns that can benefit from the power of yoga and mind quieting.

5. Improves Breathing : Breath is life! Exchange of electrons. Flow of energy. Air is the primary nutrient. Survival without it is measured in minutes. It is so important that you do it without thinking. Your breathing is the voice of your spirit. It's depth, smoothness, sound, and rate reflect your mood. If you become aware of your breath and breathe the way you do when you are calm you will become calm. Yoga helps us to practice regular, mindful breathing and can be calming and energizing. With the addition of music and it's rhythm, the "musical breath" can even help stress-related health problems ranging from panic attacks to digestive disorders. Fall into the rhythm of the music and breathe. Focus on your breathing as you move through your yoga poses.

6. Brings Awareness: Through your yoga practice, you can gain a broader perspective in self awareness. Being able to open up your mind, allowing a free flow of thoughts and ideas can be liberating. Welcoming a new opinion or way of doing something can bring new meaning to your life. If you give up your closed thoughts and make way for a different opinion, you may be surprised at the outcome. Through your yoga practice, you learn to strive to meet difficult goals as you are pushed to stretch the horizons of what you think is impossible. You can then share the ways in which obstacles and challenges have made you stronger, and given you confidence to continue setting goals and dreams in your adventures, your business, and in your day to day life. This is conscious living.

7. Improves Nutrition: The source of fuel you find to nourish you on a daily basis changes as you become a yogi. The demands for a healthier diet make your journey more important. The Ayurvedic science of food is based on incorporating the 6 flavors (pungent, salty, sweet, bitter, sour and astringent) into each meal. The Three Humours or Tri-dosa are Ayurvedic body types that tailor a diet and digestive routines that are best for you.

8. Betters Your Sex Life: As mentioned earlier, a healthy heart and the proper flow and circulation of blood in our arteries is one of the most important things we can do to maintain good health and a satisfying sex life. Not only that, just think how much more limber you will be. Not to mention, stamina.

9. Improves Your Quality of Life: You are now breathing better, are more flexible, have found a new sense of purpose, drive and direction in your life. Welcome change! Through this gateway, your idea of nourishment has changed. Not just what you put in your body, but what you allow or don't allow in your life any more. Yoga is like the lotus flower. It teaches us to unfold one petal at a time in order to reveal the raw beauty underneath.

10. Brings You Closer to Nature/Spirit: Finding spirit and a higher sense of purpose comes to you as you evolve in your yoga practice. It can show us what is truly important in life. Allowing all those things that monopolize our time, to begin to have less value and stress inducing effects on us. Especially as you grow as a yogi.

Key Factors of A Yoga Lifestyle

Bringing yoga into your life can change many aspects of it. To make this all encompassing, pay attention to:

1. Your Awareness is the key to yoga. With a clear awareness of Self, anything we do or experience can become a form of yoga. Self-awareness is connection with all of life. With connection comes joy and deep inner fulfillment. If we can expand and stabilize our awareness then we have achieved something of great importance in our lives. Awareness and consciousness are synonymous; however, one distinction is that awareness can be defined as the illumination of consciousness. Awareness is that part of us that allows us to be conscious, to know, feel and experience.

2. Your Prana or life force is that which gives you life. Everything that exists, animate and inanimate, is a manifestation of energy in one form or another. At the macrocosmic level, this energy is called Maha Shakti, which means ‘great power’. Within the microcosm of living beings Maha Shakti is called mahaprana (which means ‘the great life force’), and it is a very special form of energy. It is our life-force or vital energy, our inner power and strength. Mahaprana in the body is divided into functional divisions in the pranic body. When mahaprana is involved in respiration it is called prana. The word prana can also be translated as breath.

3. Yoga Nidra or conscious sleep is a powerful healing tool that is fundamental to yoga therapy. This is because yoga nidra is an ultimate method of inducing profound relaxation and deep rest. Resting the body-mind is the basis on which true and deep healing takes place. Most people find it very difficult to rest deeply, especially when they are ill. Many will not take time off from work during an illness because of commitments, or because they are so driven. This reluctance to slow-down may lead to more complex and difficult to manage illnesses.

4. Your Meditation Practice is the foundation for cultivating awareness. Whenever awareness is present in a part of our life, that part can improve. Awareness is the key to health, greater intelligence and intuition, higher knowledge, and to uncovering our hidden abilities. Through regular meditation we develop our powers of perception and begin to see things as they really are. Awareness, which is cultivated in meditation, allows us to manage life, with its joys, sorrows and difficulties, with greater intelligence and creativity. To develop meditative awareness we need to learn a range of skills that cultivate our internal abilities. Each skill brings its own benefits, including relaxation, introversion, concentration, self-reflection, contemplation and the capacity to generate higher states of mind and being. All of these processes have one main aim, to cultivate greater and more stable awareness of who we are. We can then use meditation to benefit our physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.

Eating Like A Yogi

Eating healthy and nourishing meals are the best way to reward your body and therefore, your practice. When your body is filled with foods that serve you, you have good energy, healthy skin, better assimilating and eliminating capacities and you honor the mind and spirit.

An Ayurvedic diet should reflect the needs of an individual's constitution, their dosha imbalances, their current state of life and the current season they are in. The foods that are best for an individual will reflect what best supports their body and their yoga practice. This is determined by their Prikruti and their current state of imbalance. Also to consider is the personal ethics of the yogi. Serving the self, serving the earth and honoring all living things are some of the ethical reasons behind a yogi's food choices.

The Yogi Diet 1. Include the six tastes at every main meal In ayurveda, foods are classified into six tastes--sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent. Ayurvedic healers recommend that you include all of these six tastes at each main meal you eat. Each taste has a balancing ability, and including some of each minimizes cravings and balances the appetite and digestion. 2. Choose foods by balancing physical attributes In ayurveda, foods are also categorized as heavy or light, dry or unctuous/liquid and warm or cool (temperature), and different qualities balance different doshas. A balanced main meal should contain some foods of each physical type. Within this overall principle, you can vary the proportions of each type based on your constitution and needs for balance, the season of the year and the place you live. 3. Choose foods that are sattvic ayurvedic classification of foods is by the effect they have on the non-physical aspects of the physiology--mind, heart, senses and spirit. Sattvic foods have an uplifting yet stabilizing influence, rajasic foods stimulate and can aggravate some aspects of the mind, heart or senses, and tamasic foods breed lethargy and are considered a deterrent to spiritual growth. Everyone, whether actively seeking spiritual growth or not, can benefit by including some sattvic foods at every meal because they help promote mental clarity, emotional serenity and sensual balance and aid in the coordinated functioning of the body, mind, heart, senses and spirit. Almonds, rice, honey, fresh sweet fruits, mung beans and easy-to-digest, fresh seasonal vegetables and leafy greens are examples of sattvic foods. 4. Opt for whole, fresh, in-season, local foods Authentic ayurvedic herbal preparations are made by processing the whole plant or the whole plant part, not by extracting active substances from the plant. Similarly, from the ayurvedic perspective, the most healthful diet consists of whole foods, eaten in as natural a state as possible, the only exception being when removing a peel or cooking helps increase digestibility and assimilation for certain types of constitutions. If the digestive fire is not strong enough, even wholesome foods can turn into ama (toxic matter) in the body. 5. Rotate menus and experiment with a variety of foods The sages that wrote the ancient ayurvedic texts would be horrified by our current fascination with the low-carb diet or the no-fat diet or the juice diet--from the ayurvedic perspective, any diet that is exclusive in nature is by definition incomplete in its nutritive value and ability to balance all aspects of the physiology. Eat a wide variety of foods for balanced nutrition--whole grains, lentils and pulses, vegetables, fruits, dairy, nuts, healthy oil or ghee, spices and pure water all have their roles in the balancing process. 6. Include spices and herbs in your daily diet Spices and herbs are concentrated forms of Nature's healing intelligence. They are particularly revered in ayurveda for their ability to enhance digestion and assimilation, help cleanse ama (toxins) from the body and their yogavahi property--their ability to transport the healing and nutritive value of other components of the diet to the cells, tissues and organs. The Author: Shreelata Suresh is a yoga instructor from the Bay Area who writes for various publications on yoga and ayurveda. For more information on ayurveda, please visit http://www.ayurbalance.com

Spiritual Life

Yoga is not mind over body. It is harmony between them. In yoga, the mind is used to perceive (diagnose) and guide (heal) the body. Not to "control" it and never to force it.

The big lesson is that yoga takes time. Time for muscles to coordinate. Time for tissues to grow. Time for breath, spirit, and energy to flow. The time you invest in yoga comes back with interest in greater vitality, presence of mind, reduced need for sleep, and longer life.

Yoga should be conscious action not "learning routines." The skill, grace, and poise develop naturally as an inevitable result of regular practice. No major effort is required or even effective. Trying hard will make your practice painful, even injurious, and will actually slow your progress! The therapeutic effect of yoga comes from involving your mind totally in inspiring (breathing) your body to wake.

Love Life

Tantra Yoga: yoga to awaken body's energies.

Tantra yoga is much more than the commonly understood "yoga of sensuality".

Tantra is actually a philosophy which emerged in India approximately 2,500 years ago. It has a modern counterpart in the worship of the "goddess," as tantra honors the feminine principle of cosmic existence. Tantra yoga teaches that one can use the power of this feminine energy, shakti, to facilitate a state of liberation. Various rituals and meditations awaken shakti energy, sometimes called kundalini energy, by which the practitioner of tantra enters a new state of consciousness.

"The tantra yoga student uses the energies of the body to transcend worldly attachments." -Swami Rama

Unlike traditional yoga, tantra yoga does not reject the experiences of this world as hindrances to wholeness. Rather, tantra techniques are designed to help the student see the Divine as She exists in all aspects of the world. While the yogi may attempt to control the body, for example, the tantra yoga student uses the energies of the body, sometimes the sexual energies, to transcend worldly attachments.

Traditionally tantra yoga is divided into two schools; one is the "right-hand" path, which consists of more conservative practices. The "left-hand" path consists in part of ritualized practices such as sexual intercourse and meat eating (unusual in the vegetarian culture from which it sprang). Both paths are designed to bring the student to liberation. Under no circumstances did the student attempt only the sexual practices out of context with the other disciplines, and never without years of training under an experienced guru or teacher. In fact, it was assumed that the student of tantra was adept in the basic yoga practices of asana and pranayama as well. We honor the tantric spirit in several ways. See Sex, the Art of Tantric Massage, and Tantric Schools of Thought.

Namaste: The Significance of a Yogic Greeting

In a well-known episode, it so transpired that the great lover god Krishna made away with the clothes of unmarried maidens, fourteen to seventeen years of age, bathing in the river Yamuna. Their fervent entreaties to him proved of no avail. It was only after they performed before him the eternal gesture of namaste was he satisfied, and agreed to hand back their garments so that they could recover their modesty.

The gesture (or mudra) of namaste is a simple act made by bringing together both palms of the hands before the heart, and lightly bowing the head. In the simplest of terms it is accepted as a humble greeting straight from the heart and reciprocated accordingly.

Namaste is a composite of the two Sanskrit words, nama, and te. Te means you, and nama has the following connotations:

1). To bend, 2). To bow, 3). To sink, 4). To incline, 5). To stoop

All these suggestions point to a sense of submitting oneself to another, with complete humility. Significantly the word 'nama' has parallels in other ancient languages also. It is cognate with the Greek nemo, nemos and nosmos; to the Latin nemus, the Old Saxon niman, and the German neman and nehman. All these expressions have the general sense of obeisance, homage and veneration. Also important here is to note that the root 'nama' is a neuter one, the significance of which will be elaborated upon later.

The word nama is split into two, na and ma. Na signifies negation and ma represents mine. The meaning would then be 'not mine'. The import being that the individual soul belongs entirely to the Supreme soul, which is identified as residing in the individual towards whom the namaste is directed. Indeed there is nothing that the soul can claim as its own. Namaste is thus the necessary rejection of 'I' and the associated phenomena of egotism. It is said that 'ma' in nama means death (spiritual), and when this is negated (na-ma), it signifies immortality.

The whole action of namaste unfolds itself at three levels: mental, physical, and verbal.

It starts with a mental submission. This submission is in the spirit of total surrender of the self. This is parallel to the devotion one expresses before a chosen deity, also known as bhakti. The devotee who thus venerates with complete self-surrender is believed to partake the merits or qualities of the person or deity before whom he performs this submission. There is a prescription in the ancient texts known as Agamas that the worshipper of a deity must first become divine himself, for otherwise worship as a transaction would become invalid. A transaction can only be between equals, between individuals who share some details in common. Hence by performing namaste before an individual we recognize the divine spark in him. Further by facilitating our partaking of these divine qualities, namaste makes us aware of these very characteristics residing within our own selves. Simply put, namaste intimates the following:

'The God in me greets the God in you The Spirit in me meets the same Spirit in you'

In other words, it recognizes the equality of all, and pays honor to the sacredness of all.

Conclusion:

As much as yoga is an exercise to bring all levels of our existence, including the physical and intellectual, in complete harmony with the rhythms of nature, the gesture of namaste is an yoga in itself. Thus it is not surprising that any yogic activity begins with the performance of this deeply spiritual gesture. The Buddhists went further and gave it the status of a mudra, that is, a gesture displayed by deities, where it was known as the Anjali mudra. The word Anjali itself is derived from the root Anj, meaning "to adorn, honor, celebrate or anoint."

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References

What is your experience with yoga? Sharing your own experiences often helps others. We'd love to know in the Peacefulmind Community.

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