There is significant research that shows a direct link between a regular yoga practice and specific health benefits.
Research suggests that yoga might:
- Improve mood and sense of well-being
- Counteract stress
- Reduce heart rate and blood pressure
- Increase lung capacity
- Improve muscle relaxation and body composition
- Help with conditions such as anxiety, depression, and insomnia
- Improve overall physical fitness, strength, and flexibility
- Positively affect levels of certain brain or blood chemicals.
By changing ones relationship to the body, Yoga offers exercises and poses to assist practitioners in their own healing. Yoga can increase circulation, relieve pain, enhance respiration, stimulate adrenal and immune function and maintain muscle and body mass. Yoga provides a means of self-discipline, helping practitioners understand how to respond to stress and recognize the causes and consequences of their actions, which in turn instills self-empowerment.
Yoga is an affordable, community-oriented, energizing and self-affirming discipline that anyone can learn regardless of physical limitations, age, or religious background.
Sources:
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102250803.html
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/yoga/introduction.htm#status
In addition to these very real health benefits, you will need to discover for yourself how yoga is going to change your life. In addition to breathing easier, sleeping better, and losing weight, you may also find a renewed sense of meaning in your work and relationships or become open to new adventures that only seemed like distant dreams. As your practice changes, so will the benefits.
You might come to yoga for one reason, but find that you benefit in a host of ways that you might not have expected. Coming to a studio, rather than doing yoga with a DVD or through a video game, offers the benefit of human interaction, relationship and community. I have personally benefitted a great deal from the creativity, generosity of spirit, excellent advice, support and honesty of the Yoga Matrika community. Have these benefits been directly because of my yoga practice? Well, no, not exactly. But, I can honestly say that practicing yoga regularly has brought the most beautiful people into my life and they have encouraged me to knit, create, write, be a better mother, take intelligent risks and to see magic in the everyday. It’s truly priceless!
