Healing Through Yoga and Meditation
Yoga and meditation
Yoga is developing as a part of life. It is a way that you can integrate body poses and breathing exercises with added meditation to give a peace of mind to have peace with the world.
Meditation comes from intense concentration, where the individual focuses so thoroughly on a single object that he or she thinks of nothing besides his or her awareness of that object (Some religions may find that their idea of prayer could fall under this definition). Yoga will take things a little bit further by making meditation the highest point of the Eight Limbs of Yoga.
These "eight limbs" define Yoga as a lifestyle: your attitude to the world around you is followed by your attitudes towards yourself, physical posturing, breathing exercises, withdrawing the senses, concentrating, contemplating, and finally enlightenment. You will go into an state of bliss that will result in the use and development of the other seven. Meditation combines withdrawing the senses, concentrating, and contemplating to be the final state that can be accomplished before bliss.
At any rate, meditation calms the mind and offers a number of health benefits even before enlightenment. With regular mediation will help reduce all the stress and anxiety. It will also lower your blood pressure and it will decrease your risk of a heart attack. It can improve concentration, clarity of thought, and release your creative side.
With some research, mediation with yoga will increase the matter of the brain’s cortex, and it will help with cognitive, emotional, and sensory date of the brain. Meditation may also slow natural shrinkage of the frontal cortex due to aging. The 20 participants on average meditated for 40 minutes a day. Actually, most change happens in the brain’s right half.
Meditation really isn’t easy though. Clearing the mind of extraneous thought is difficult, and all thought even more so. Learning how to do meditation will take some time and hard work.
You will want to sit somewhere with your back and head straight, to start out. You will find that you will want to learn some basic breathing exercises first to help you. You will then want to close your eyes, breathe in through your noses and exhale through your mouth. You will want to focus on your breath. You will be able to get cool air to enter through and the warm air leaves. You will want to make sure that you focus on the way that you breath. You will want to redirect all of your wondering thoughts and then just focus on the warm air leaving. You should start off with some short meditations that last a few minutes. Most beginners will start off counting their breaths so that they can focus on the breathing, but you will only want to count to four and then start over again.
The Health Benefits of Yoga
For long years, yoga is considered as one of the hottest fitness and holistic trends that have swept the continent by storm. It is practiced by thousands of people from all walks of life and of all ages. Now, yoga is studied by experts for the possible health benefits that it can give.
Several claims have emerged highlighting the health benefits of yoga. Yes, according to several resources, yoga is not only capable of making you feel strong and flexible, but it can also help cure whatever ailments you may be suffering from, even the most serious health conditions. It is interesting to know then that many of the early research results have revealed that a regular practice of yoga exercises which involve deep breathing, a myriad of postures, and meditation can significantly offer a sense of relief from people suffering from asthma, mental health problems, and cardiovascular disease, to mention but a few.
Let’s take a closer look at these health benefits of yoga.
#1: Relief for Asthma
Of the health benefits of yoga known to man, its power to heal asthma is the most well-known. Well, this is simply for the reason that with the ever growing number of people suffering from the condition, many of the yoga researches was conducted focusing on how to help these people recover from the situation. Fortunately, many of the studies yield positive results, but they did not reveal at all that yoga can ultimately cure asthma. Instead, they results revealed that yoga can help alleviate the symptoms of asthma.
#2: Mental Health Problem
Several claims have it that yoga has the potential to treat mental health disorders. By these claims, a number of medical experts were intrigued as to how potent yoga really is. They then started to conduct studies involving adults and children suffering from the so-called “obsessive-compulsive disorder”. From the months of study, the yoga group found out the yoga truly works. About 40% improvements were found out and it was noted that those who will continue receiving a yoga treatment is more likely to recover from the disorder.
#3: Cardiovascular Disease
Another notable health benefit of yoga has something to do with the cardiovascular disease. Well, this belief actually stemmed from the findings that the yoga exercises can help relieve stress, and improve the person’s cardiovascular endurance. It can also lower the blood pressure and even heart rate.
Note that those above mentioned health benefits of yoga are what triggered more and more people to involve in the practice.