Hatha Yoga at Home

The Case for Weekly Yoga Classes

Weekly yoga classes are the first step to maintaining inner calmness. It’s the baseline action you can take to clear out the build up of the emotional gunk that gathers around what you’re worried about, what responsibilities you have, how you care for your loved ones.

Taking yoga classes consistently is caring for yourself. It impacts all layers of your being, which makes it more comprehensive than a typical western exercise program. Physically, it decreases stiffness, relieves aches, maintains flexibility in the joints, increases tone and therefore strength and balance, and even has been shown to slow or reverse bone density loss. Regular yoga practice makes you safer to move through the world as you age.

Yoga can maintain the efficacy of your breath, promoting oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. More interestingly in my opinion, the awareness and manipulation of the breath is the first step in regulating the mental/emotional field. It’s becoming more widely known that emotions are held in the body. That our being is not a top down control structure. Our bodies are not puppets. We inhabit every cell. The combination of yoga postures and breathing techniques becomes a comprehensive modality for dealing with emotional and mental patterns that might otherwise become stuck and fester.

Looking at all of this it is easy to see how fitting yoga into your schedule can be made a priority. This is bigger than having a bit of fun. It’s more important than luxury. Yoga is a deeper and more important commitment to care than brushing your teeth and cleaning your body. Honestly, I’ve thought many times in recent years, how do people live without yoga? Is living just accepting aches and pains every day? Even with the yoga I still have tweaks here and there. But they stay tweaks instead of full blown injuries. And that’s just the body.

The most important part of a regular yoga practice is developing a deep and meaningful relationship with yourself. We’re so focused outside of ourselves. So much of our lives is lived in relation to what is outside of ourselves. That’s living in the world. Our society doesn’t place much value in what is deep and meaningful about ourselves and what that can mean for the quality of our lives. When we sit and consider who we are, why we do what we do, and how we feel about things, we become less burdened, less uncertain. We are so often conditioned to set aside our own feelings. The subtle guidance we get from being in ourselves and aware of our emotional/mental field is transformative. The further we discount our own subtle feedback in favor of what others think, the more dysfunctional our behavior toward ourselves becomes.

Make your life about you.

*You’re never locked into this yoga subscription forever. You can register for a month then cancel right away. If you have to miss a class there will be recordings to use, which are cumulative. You’ll end up with a yoga practice video library to use any time.

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