21/02/10 21:26
Why Practice Yoga
Why You Would Choose Yoga – ‘Yoga is not just useful, it can be inspiring’.
Modern life is chaotic, fast and insecure - often leading to physical and mental ill health. Yoga can provide a tool-box of techniques that can help you to cope with life on all levels; physical, mental and emotional. “Yoga is not about bending the body into ridiculous positions - It is about stretching and exercising the physical body so that it remains balanced and healthy.”
For many of us the way we live gives us materialistic and short-term happiness but longer term contentment and a sense of wellbeing are often lacking. We are constantly striving for something that we cannot determine.
Not only are employment opportunities decreasing, finances becoming more of a worry and long term contentment and happiness seeming further away than ever, but our physical health is also suffering – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, depression, insomnia are all on the increase. Life can be more manageable and our general sense of wellbeing can be improved.
How Yoga Can Help
Yoga has the answers. Yoga is an ancient, scientific, holistic approach to life that maximises all levels of our being – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. The tools that yoga gives us can be learned quickly and applied anywhere and at any time. Yoga provides a framework that is accessible to everyone, whether you want to improve sleep patterns, reduce anxiety, help with breathing or other specific health problems, or just ‘feel better’ about yourself. “I really enjoyed the class, particularly the strong meditative element it was just what I wanted and needed!’.
Yoga today is practiced by many people around the world for reasons as diverse as maintaining good health and wellbeing, improving focus and concentration, learning the art of relaxation and as a way of stilling the busy mind and so gaining inner peace and tranquillity.
In a recent Australian survey one in five respondents reported practicing yoga to assist with a specific health concern, most commonly, stress, anxiety and depression, sleep and anxiety disorders or back, neck and knee problems (e.g. chronic lower back pain, disc injuries and arthritis). Women’s health, respiratory problems and cardiovascular problems were also reported as being helped by yoga. In fact 96% of people reported that yoga improved their problem.
The survey found that the reasons most commonly given for starting yoga were ‘health/fitness’ and ‘flexibility/muscle tone’ (76%) and that only 18% initially saw yoga as a spiritual practice. However the survey went on to find that this more than doubled to 41% once practicing, showing that people come to yoga for the physical and stay for the spiritual.