🧘♀️Yoga is recognized as a form of mind-body medicine. The relaxation induced by meditation helps to stabilize the autonomic nervous system with a tendency towards either sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance. Because yoga decreases the amount of catecholamines (a neurotransmitter) produced by the adrenal glands during stress, it offers a host of psychological benefits. By lowering hormone levels of the neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and epinephrine, yoga produces an increased feeling of calm and well-being. Additionally, yoga is likely to reduce anxiety and depression, by boosting oxygen levels to the brain.
I literally can not speak high enough about yoga, the transformation and healing it has brought me for the past 25 plus years. It goes way beyond being flexible, it’s a take you as you are and works from the inside out kinda thing. The physical, flexibility benefits are just an added bonus. The mental, emotional and spiritual rewards and the feeling yoga gives me are the reason why I come back to my mat day after day, year after year, my body craves it. My soul craves it. Yoga is the best and most loyal therapy I’ve ever had.
We are meant to feel, and yoga brings you into your body which is why I think so many give up, they can’t sit with themselves, and we have to if we want our lives to improve, to heal is to feel. If you don’t want to feel, your never going to heal. It takes time and patience. Perseverance. To sit with the uncomfortable. And that’s where the magic happens.
“An essential aspect of recovering from trauma is learning ways to calm down, or self regulate. For thousands of years, yoga has been offered as a practice to help one calm the mind and body. More recently, research has shown that yoga practices, including meditation, relaxation and physical postures, can reduce autonomic sympathetic activation, muscle tension, and blood pressure, improve neuroendocrine and hormonal activity, decrease physical symptoms, and emotional distress, and increase quality of life. For those reasons, yoga is a promising treatment or adjunctive therapy for addressing the cognitive, emotional, and physiological symptoms associated with trauma, and PTSD specifically.”
-Excerpted from the International Journal of Yoga Therapy
