From Stretching to Something Deeper

Posted by holistic bodyworx on December 4th, 2019

Long before there was yoga (on the planet), there was the love of a good stretch. You know what I mean, right? Isn't it a delicious sense to wake up in the morning, yawn, and accept that closed-eyed, gold stretch, lifting your arms above your head and stretching every limb as you depart the dream world supporting? Later in the day, perhaps even instinctively, you might roll out your shoulders or twist the body, sighing deeply. If even only a little, and maybe, when you're doing, for a moment, you feel a feeling of complete relaxation, a feeling like your body has stretched and expanded so has the entire world of possibilities.yoga teachers training Mississauga

Common sense tells us that our bodies are not meant to be tight and scrunched up. Look at how infants move, how easily and fluidly, as though they are made of (cute) elastic. That is what we could be trying to recover a little bit of every time we stretch our muscles and sigh a relieved.

Even though the words “yoga" and “extending" are frequently utilized in the very same contexts, I must say I never confused yoga with “just stretching," mostly because my initial comprehension of yoga was peripheral at best. I was a prototypical head-dwelling creature who believed of yoga, if at all, because a distant, New Age form of fitness as alien to me as Jazzercise was when I was a kid in the'80s who’s major “athletic" pastime involved taking books out of the library and reading them. If pressed to think about it, though, even before I practiced yoga, I probably still would have contended that one of the major aims of yoga was to change people from other shades of two impossibly contortionists. I certainly did not see yoga as an activity meant for ordinary people wanting to enlarge the limits of their own bodies and heads or think about it as a “care tool" for one's entire well-being.

When I started practicing yoga Nevertheless, the everyday stretch took on a new dimension. Listed below are 3 facets of the dimension as my passion for extending morphed into a regular asana practice that blew open my perceptions of what yoga is and could 35, that I learned.

1. BEING FLEXIBLE DOESN'T MAKE YOU A YOGI.

I have realized my entire body, mind, and spirit are one interconnected entity as I already alluded.

When I was a fledgling yogi, I traveled to Thailand and found a little bit of heaven in a small town near the border of Laos.Pilates classes Mississauga

Since I began engaging in yoga as a normal daily practice, I learned I have a reasonable number of natural flexibility--but that yoga was about much more than just carrying my comparatively itself as “far" or “deep" to a pose as you can. Flexibility was not helping me balance not supported me poses requiring a lot of leg, stomach, or arm power and poses. To put it differently, I discovered I lacked several elements of well-rounded asana practice, and also that no one of these elements (stability, flexibility, strength) in isolation brings a practitioner to the desirable mind-body union. A yogi works to cultivate the through-line of this breath, as well as each of these abilities, to still and earth the human body, so that strategy and we may start to invite serenity of mind.

In comparison to learning present-moment breathing and awareness, I learned to move nearer to some compassionate and accepting attitude toward my own body as I faced rough postures and my habitual demand for “perfection" Flexibility started to take a backseat to self-awareness, into the discovery of these gifts my unique body offers as I surpass my limitations and increase my skills, and also to the effect, this was having in my entire life.

We can then start to postures in a profound manner, notably by being present to the adventure of being in a particular moment in time in our bodies that are unique. Through that experience, we learn about ourselves, not only about our own bodies however about how we think and feel about our bodies and about how those senses and feelings influence our self-image and our actions; in learning how to find these often unconscious factors and how they influence us, we may also gain increased acceptance of ourselves. That is what yoga is about. Yoga Mississauga

2. YOGIC STRETCHING IS A GATEWAY TO AN INNER JOURNEY.

I find that it was ideal, although I felt defeated occasionally; it was just. My limits drummed up the will to stay in these challenging poses and gave me the urge to harness my powers of will and attention because I reached into the crevices of my mind.

Before long, because of my newfound capability to listen, I could enter a place of psychological attention, and I found that, via an energetic will, I would let my body and mind to converge in a place of rest. Rest! This is a luxury I understood I allowed myself and this reality reduced me to tears more than a couple of times on and off. I was astounded by how just allowing myself to actively be in a stretch--which is, being completely present and mentally engaged in the pose with the intent of expanding my own body's strength and range of movement --allowed me to enter a meditative state like, eyes closed, I could envision my muscles extending along with my tension easing. It felt like a mini-vacation for the mind and my body.

Now continues. Afterward, my instinct took me. (Contemplating my achy back, cobra seemed out of reach) Theni listened to my body, and that I made a very small adjustment--a simple lifting up of my torso along with a tiny motion of my spine to the right, an alteration that could have been absolutely imperceptible to an outside observer--and the result was profound.

I felt a huge opening across my torso and collarbones, bringing a fullness that was new to my breath. I felt like my chest was going to burst until I understood the feeling wasn't volatile at infinite from feeling so complete: '' I felt the whole world waited for me to discover it and as though I had transcended an obstruction. It struck me how amazing the subtleties of a yoga practice are when awareness is allowed by us in and works with the body to change our inner self.

3. IT'S TRULY ABOUT LETTING IT ALL GO.

My mat turned into a place of refuge where my daily concerns slipped into the background and that I strove for a union between mind, body, and emotion that I could carry with me as my yoga practice lasted. As I did, I was shocked to learn, as I leaned into specific asanas, precisely how much pressure I was holding in my body all the time. I thought about the way my shoulder squeezes in as I type on my computer all day, how I unconsciously suck my belly in to appear thinner or the way I clench up when I feel resistance to a situation or when a negative emotion is triggered. I seemed to be living in a near-constant state of being wound as possible. Through my yoga practice, I've given myself the gift of time and distance in which to ask myself why I do this I don't gravitate naturally toward releasing and relieving tension. How can it be so a lot of people come to feel that tightness is a condition that is natural? We carry stress in our own bodies --from our busy lifestyles, our responsibilities, and obligations. Sometimes we feel it more. Even the frequent phrase “keeping it all together" appears to imply and valorize tightness, a need to bind ourselves, rather than let go.

Yoga, with its emphasis on mindfulness of body and breath, provides us the chance to stretch and breathe through the tight areas, to unlock our most secret internal hiding places where we protect and protect our pain and myriad fears, and also to let them proceed. It allows us to recover expansion and pliability as our normal way of becoming.

I have begun to view yoga as no less than a revolution which gives me the ability to direct myself where I rarely allow myself to go in daily life: into a place of freedom where I can become familiar with my limits and my pain, gently ease into them, and learn how to let go and be.