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Incorporating yoga into my life has easily been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s led to a dramatic improvement in my day to day happiness, alertness, and posture (amongst other things). My goal here is to try and persuade you to either have a go for the first time or get back into the habit if you’ve gotten out of it, giving you a chance to experience the benefits of yoga.
If you’re already practising yoga on the regular, this should give you a chance to smile and nod in agreement for 5 minutes or so as you read this…
Instant Satisfaction
One of the things I love most about yoga is that the benefits are immediately obvious. Usually about five minutes into a yoga session, I have a moment where I feel very wholesome, and like I’m doing something distinctly good for myself.
Try It For Yourself
Hello and welcome to the first (and last) edition of…
Give this a go:
Stand up as straight as you can, and try and keep a straight line from the top of your head to the base of your feet. Now as you breathe in a nice long powerful breath, stretch your arms as high above your head as you can, breathing all the way in and stretching all the way up. Now, hold that pose for as long as feels comfortable, then as you let your breath out, let your hands fall to your sides, relaxing your whole body as you do so.
If all went well, you should feel just a little bit nicer than you did before your 20-second yoga session™. A longer yoga session is basically the same concept as that, but with consideration given to the entire body (and also as it happens, your mind).
Meditation
Funny you should mention the mind because another fantastic element of yoga is the meditative aspect – a large part of the ritual is focusing on your breath and being aware of sensations in your body, which happen to be the main points of mindfulness meditation.
Another big plus of yoga surfaces here. Starting out with meditation can feel frustrating and unrewarding at first, but yoga has the advantage of teaching and practising these skills, with a much lower level of frustration.
This means that the two practices can feed into each other in helpful ways. Practising yoga can help you get better at understanding a mindful meditative state, and practising mindfulness meditation can help improve your approach to yoga.
Productivity
Although it can feel like it isn’t worth taking the time to do yoga each day, I have found that if I practise in the morning I tend to have a more fulfilled and productive day that I would have otherwise had.
I have noticed this not only at the daily short-term level but also in the longer term. If I have a strong habit of practising yoga, I just generally feel more aligned with my life and goals and relationships and all of that good stuff.
I understand that it can seem a little unrealistic that spending half an hour doing yoga each day could really make that much of a difference in your life, but I urge you to try for a fortnight and then compare how you feel between the start and the finish – the results are usually pretty significant in my experience.
Posture
For years I’ve had this vague plan of “sorting out my posture”, managing to make it as far as reading a couple of articles then never doing anything more than that. I used to constantly sit slumped in any chair, and stand with my stomach out, and my back curved in. I knew that all of this was bad for me, but couldn’t seem to break the habit for more than moments at a time.
The funny thing was that when I started practising yoga, I had no real intention of dealing with my posture problem; it just sort of happened. A big part of the practice is developing an awareness of how you hold yourself, and over time I began to realise that these good practices were spilling over into my normal life.
Now, I do not and probably never will have perfect posture (if there is such a thing), but the difference I’ve noticed has been astounding. Just a few weeks of yoga made a much larger improvement then than years of worrying about my posture ever did.
Long-Term Benefits
There are also many long-term benefits in both mind and body. yoga has been scientifically proven to reduce stress levels, reduce weight gain and has been widely accepted as a technique for dealing with anxiety and depression. This quote is from a Harvard Medical School article:
“…for many patients dealing with depression, anxiety, or stress, yoga may be a very appealing way to better manage symptoms. Indeed, the scientific study of yoga demonstrates that mental and physical health are not just closely allied, but are essentially equivalent.”
Again, the amazing thing here is that rather than having to trust that eventually in many years time this work will pay off, you can literally feel and appreciate it in every moment you’re on the mat – I like to view the long-term benefits as simply a free bonus down the road.
Men can do Yoga too!
Something I wanted to address while I’m here, is that I feel like there is still a stigma about men taking part in yoga. There seems to be this false notion that yoga is a girly thing to do and not an activity for men to take part in.
Funnily enough, in the super early days of yoga in the East, it was actually only a male-only practice. It’s only since the tradition has come over to the West that it’s picked up this connotation of being an activity that’s only for women.
Having said that, the amount of men practising yoga is increasing. A study found that nearly a third of American yoga practitioners are now men, which is a good sign, but I see no reason whatsoever that those numbers shouldn’t be equal. (To be totally clear here, I don’t want fewer women taking part, just more men!)
I know that before I started I felt similarly to a lot of other men, but here on the other side, I’m extremely glad that I managed to get past those thoughts and give it a try.
If you’re not sure, just give it half an hour of your time – odds are you won’t regret it! Men can reap all of the same benefits, and it seems counter-intuitive to let an unfounded social label stop that from happening.
Getting Started
The best way to dip your toe in the warm shimmering waters of yoga is to try following a simple YouTube video. I would highly recommend having a look at the unstoppable Adriene’s free yoga videos. She’s a fantastic teacher, and her YouTube channel has daily challenges, explanations of different yoga poses, and loads of one-off videos for all sorts of different things. If you’re looking for a 30 challenge to follow along with, I would wholly recommend this one. At the time of writing this, I’ve just finished day 16.
On a slight digression from the topic at hand, isn’t wholly a weird looking word… wholly wholly wholly.
Anyway…
To begin your yoga practice, you don’t need anything other than a small section of carpet or a rug, so the barriers to getting started are nice and low.
If you do decide that you want to commit to the practice, the best thing to do is get yourself a yoga mat. It’s a nice metaphor for space away from the busyness of life, it helps with balancing postures and feels nicer when your face is pressing against the floor in some of the postures.
It is no exaggeration for me to say that practising yoga has caused improvement in pretty much all aspects of my life. I’ve never been a fan of exercising for exercising’s sake, but this feels more like taking some time out from the hustle and bustle of life for yourself, and then that rewarding activity also happens to be super healthy exercise. I really couldn’t tell you of any downsides to giving it a go.
Are you new to the yoga practice, or have you been doing it every day since you were 5? Either way, leave a comment, I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts.
If you enjoyed this, you might also get some useful information from my article on journaling – I believe it’s also a very important & useful habit.
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