Use yoga to reduce the affects of stress on your body.
Stress!
Just reading the word and your body starts to get tense. Stress is a big problem in everyone’s life. The shallow breathing, the rapidly beating heart, the sweaty palms, the whirling mind. Stress causes havoc to your body.
Yoga can help you to manage stress. The heightened awareness of your body that a regular and frequent yoga practice helps you to develop will enable you better deal with stress.
There are three elements of stress that yoga can help with:
- tense muscles
- shallow breath
- frantic mind
Lets look at each of these and how yoga will help you to manage them.
1 tense muscles
With the heightened awareness that you develop with a regular yoga practice you will become aware of tense muscles that result for a stressful situation. Once you recognize that you have tensed up you can start to do something about.
The best way to combat your tense muscles is to do some Ujjayi breathing from you yoga practice. Ujjayi breath will force you to bring lots of breath into your body. Breathing in and out at a deliberate pace will help to remove the tension from your muscles.
2 shallow breath
At the same time that you realize that your muscles are tense you will also realize that you are breathing really shallow. Once again doing some Ujjayi breathing will help to combat this shallow breathing. The deep Ujjayi breath will destroy the shallow breathing almost immediately.
Bringing lots of air into the body with the Ujjayi breath will go a long way to reducing the tension in your body and there is no way you can continue to the stressful shallow breathing that you were doing moments ago.
3 your mind
Your mind is whirling with many concerns as a result of the stress you are under. This whirling mind is contributing to your stress and the stress is contributing to your whirling mind.
The way to break this cycle is to once again focus on the breath. The Ujjayi breath is a deliberate breath that you must focus your mind on it in order to do it properly.
Lips closed, teeth slightly apart, face relaxed, a slight restriction at the back of the throat and you breath at a moderate rate with deep full breaths. To do this breath successfully you have to stay focused on the breath and not think of anything else.
Summary
Yoga practice can help you combat the symptoms of stress. The Ujjayi breath is particular effective at helping you to manage the stress and remove its effects from your body.
Next Steps
Work with your teacher and learn how to do the Ujjayi breath properly. After a lot of practice you will be able to the Ujjayi breath for extended periods of time.
