Yoga's Many Benefits

I discovered yoga in 2007 while in college getting my BA in creative writing. I was looking for a way to manage stress. I wanted to find something that would help me relax. Yoga’s breathing techniques are what does that. Managing the breath is why people practice yoga, to begin with. Yoga poses are only held upright if you breathe into it. There are different types of yoga for different purposes. Yoga can help manage pain issues as well. Yoga helps the practitioner build an awareness of your body as well as how your mind affects that body of yours.

Yoga increased my flexibility a lot to the point where as I’m writing this, I miss my knee way too much. While that is improving, I felt too wiped out to do my physical therapy today. Yoga helps increase muscle strength as well since you are working on many different muscle groups that are dependent on the pose. Yoga helps maintain energy because you breathe energy into that pose, you use your kundalini in some cases. Although in my situation, I cannot activate my kundalini too much. Yoga also helped me lose weight back when I hit 139 pounds because of Zyprexa.

The thing is, yoga helps me cure myself of anxiety. One class is good for a week, two classes, a week and a half. My anxiety just vanishes, and I love my medication for this as well. Yoga is also good for cardiac health since my heart murmur doesn’t exist anymore, period. Some claim that yoga can help with athletic performance (let me try this when I go back to martial arts class). While yoga can protect from injury, let’s not forget I injured myself in yoga class doing a left lunge where I dislocated my entire kneecap, as well as fractured my tibia at the knee, in one day.

Yoga has many different kinds of styles in that particular field. Yoga can actually help with your body if you are injured in some way, even if you have to be careful anyway. The triangle pose is helping me with an injury I have to my right thigh because of madly cleaning the house before my family came back. Yoga can make you get sick less because you manage to somehow fend off germs just by breathing a certain way with each pose. A regular yoga practice can kick illness out of your body, really fast.

Illness could be caused by having too much heat, according to ShareCare and Yogi Cameron Alborzian. Yoga can also help with situations where there is too much moisture. Yoga postures can reverse various physical “imbalances,” and I myself have experienced my propensity for getting every illness I’m exposed to since my genetic disability causes a run-down immune system. Yoga improved my flexibility as well as my back issues since I have scoliosis. Yoga helped me improve my posture so I became less of a slouch. Yoga can also heal bone strength despite the fact I fractured a bone while in yoga class.

Yoga helps drain your lymphatic system, that I had to deal with badly in college only because I was scared of my swollen lymph nodes due to my acne infections. I had an acne bacteria called P.Acnes. Yoga also improves cardiac function. I’m sure this has played a role in how my heart murmur healed itself. My former heart murmur is not something I deal with anymore, period, according to my medical record.

Yoga makes me feel better since it lowers my cortisol as high cortisol happens from stress responses that make people eat more. Back when I was in yoga, I noticed a reduction in anxiety. I have had to use this skill the last few years because I’m an anxious person anyway, with many anxiety disorders that my medical record calls an “anxiety state,” because my anxiety haunts me daily. The savasana pose makes me able to sleep better. I should practice this pose nightly as I get anxious before I go to bed, tossing and turning, even if I only woke up twice today, and managed to get a good night’s sleep.

Works Cited

Benefits of Yoga

Can Yoga Help Prevent Illness?

38 Ways Yoga Keeps Fit