Good Belly Yoga

This is one the biggest and most beautiful secrets about yoga for both beginners and devotees.

Yoga helps you slow down from everyday life. It is a form of reset and rest which gives us a chance refresh our brains from overload.

Practicing difficult postures and learning to breathe while in them gives us mental tools to help us feel more thoughtful and in touch with our needs at the end of the day.

If you are very stressed, you will need a dependable way to let go of all the busy thoughts you have all day and just switch gears be with yourself.

This is uncomfortable at first, you get in touch with your body and feelings, but a simple pose like downward facing dog gives a sense of stability and strength.

Originally yoga was a way for farmers to come out of their fields from a day of hard labor and use the pain from physical strain in their bodies to know where they need to relax and breathe before they came home and ate dinner with their families.

If you don’t have family to come home to, there are other stresses. Feeling alone is one the most common one that plagues our modern technological society.

If you have family and kids, coming home to a house full of noise and stressful demands is another.

For me yoga has always been more important than doing perfect poses.

Initially for me it was connection, finding a community, a sense of belonging, finding a way to relax, connect, and build strength during the evening pause from work.

Most of us do not do hard physical labor; we use our minds. However, one principle stays the same: if you want to be free of troubling thoughts once a day, yoga if practiced regularly gives your minds a rest.

The brain needs a reset to be there for the people we love: our family, our children, and our loved ones and to prepare for sleep and rejuvenation.

It sounds simple-minded, but our modern realities and the brains we have and use daily need help every day to refresh.

I often use drink a glass of wine and making a calming herbal tea as a first step. Then I felt I might have the strength and calm to listen to demands, look at my bills, and answer my phone calls. It didn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes I would lose my temper, but I am lucky to have had a lot of education in how the body works to heal the disconnect that keeps me separated from what I really care about, which is to live as peacefully as I can in the life I am living.

What we often forget is the brain is part of a much larger system. We focus too much on the brain and too little on the body.

Inside your body, there are neural pathways that make all your thoughts, moods, and movements possible. There are cellular pathways guided by signals from hormones and immune responses, that end up in your nervous system and like a battery, they need to be recharged.

Glands, organs, hormones, and immune responses are all guided by this system. The nerves (and the hormones) tell the body where to send relief to parts of the body that need healing.

You react to pretty much everything that comes back to your brain, except for digestion, that is a separate system (sort of) and move in the way we are motivated.