There are many systems to keep toxic waste out of your car.
It’s time for the annual check up for your car. There are many things to check including the many systems that remove waste before it reaches your engine.
- oil filter
- air filter
- fuel filter
You need to have good filters to keep your car healthy. Clogged filters will result in poor circulation and a poorly performing engine.
Just like in your car, you are also concerned about removing the waste from your body. Unlike a car there are no filters that we can replace when they get clogged. There are other things that we can do.
What are we trying to clean up
There are three circulation systems in the body.
- Blood circulation system brings blood and oxygen to the cells of the body and it carries away carbon dioxide and other waste.
- Digestive system processes food and drink. It separates what we eat and drink into nutrients and waste.
- Lymphatic system collects intracellular fluid and moves it to the lymph nodes where the waste is removed.
All of these systems bring in nutrients and remove waste. However depending on your lifestyle, activity level and the food you eat, you could be making things worse for your body rather than better.
Why do you want to get the waste out of your body
In order to help your body to keep up with the heavy demands our stressful lives and nutrient-poor modern diet place on these systems, you need to give your body and assist so it can perform its natural waste removal functions. Yoga is an ideal solution.
A frequent and regular vigorous yoga practise will go a long way toward removing waste from your body
How does yoga remove waste
Yoga focuses on systematically stretching, compressing and twisting every part of the body. This stretching, compressing and twisting is well-suited to keeping the waste removal systems of the body functioning at peak efficiency.
There are three aspects of a yoga practise that gives the waste removal systems a boost:
- the Ujjayi breath;
- the yoga poses and
- a hot body.
Let’s look at these in a little more detail.
1. Ujjayi breath
The Ujjayi breath brings lots of oxygen into the body. This abundance of fuel for the body increases the heat in the body.
The Ujjayi breath in combination with the Yoga poses increase your heart rate and your bodies metabolism. The more that you get the blood moving, the more toxins it can carry to the waste removal organs and the cleaner the body will become.
The Ujjayi breath brings in lots of oxygen to fuel the body and the yoga poses work to consume that fuel.
2. Yoga Poses
A well rounded yoga practise will push, pull, twist, turn, and upend every part of the body. All of this action helps in the removal of carbon dioxide, lactic acid and lymphatic fluid from the deep tissues and extremities of the body. Most other forms of exercise do not get into the deep tissues and extremities to the same extent that yoga does.
Bending forward. Twisting from side to side. Bending backward. Yoga poses take your body to the limits of its range of motion in all directions.
For example twisting your torso fully to the left and then fully to the right produces a wringing action, much like wringing out a dish cloth. This wringing action stimulates the organs and gets the intracellular fluids moving from deep within the body.
By pressing on various parts of the body, many of the yoga poses directly stimulate the digestive system. The more it is stimulated the more it is able to do its job of removing toxins from the body.
The Ujjayi breath brings in lots of fuel to heat the body up and the yoga poses do the wringing to get the fluids moving, but it is the hot body that takes all this even further.
3. Hot body
The Ujjayi breath in combination with the yoga poses results in an increase in the heart rate and an increase in metabolism. Both of these lead to the body getting hotter and hotter. As the body heats up from the inside out, the muscles get more flexible and you are able to move further into the yoga poses than you could when your muscles were cold.
Being able to go further into yoga poses means that you are compressing and stretching the organs of the body even more than when your body was cool.
This greater stretching and compressing due to the hot flexible muscles means that you are digging further into the intracellular spaces and encouraging the fluid that is holding the toxins to move out and toward the waste removal organs.
All three of these components work together at the same time to remove toxins from your body.
An example – Multiple Chemical Sensitivities
Charlie is one of the people that are very sensitive to their environment. Sick buildings that have mold and poor air circulation can cause him to get very sick and lethargic.
Before he started doing yoga it would take days and weeks for him to recover from these exposures.
Even after Charlie had recovered his normal life was less than ideal, with puffy skin, sore joints and shortness of breath.
Once Charlie established a regular vigorous yoga practise, his symptoms started to go away. His puffy face returned to normal. His joints stopped aching and his shortness of breath cleared up as well.
Charlie is still affected by sick buildings. He does get sick as a result of the exposure. But he is able to recover quicker due to his yoga practise. The yoga practise is keeping his waste removal systems (blood, digestive, and lymph) working at peak efficiency.
But I run everyday
My body gets hot, My heart rate is up. I am breathing deep. Isn’t that enough?
This is all well and good. But running, much like many other activities like swimming, biking, basketball and hockey all get the body hot and the blood pumping but they do not compress the organs of the body in the same way that yoga does.
The twisting and turning, pulling and compressing, bending forward and backward that yoga poses provide is the missing element from these activities.
The yoga poses dig deep into the organs and muscles, stimulating them and causing the intracellular fluid to start moving toward the waste removal organs.
The yoga poses also stimulates the digestive organs and help to keep them regular.
Summary
A regular vigorous yoga practise keeps the waste removal systems of the body: blood, digestive and lymph working at peak efficiency.
The Ujjayi breath, the various yoga poses and the heat that the yoga practise produces in the body all contribute to getting the waste removal job done.
You keep your car’s engine healthy by replacing the many filters on a regular basis. Keep your body healthy by keeping its many waste removal systems at peak efficiency.
Next steps
If you want your waste removal systems working at peak efficiency adopt a regular and vigorous yoga practise today.
