The Benefits of Yoga Therapy

Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning union. It is the union of senses, mind, body, soul and environment. Yoga is calming of the mind using total silence to regain balance. Yoga enhances flexibility while releasing stress.

Yoga helps to unlock the calm feelings of life such as, peace, harmony, joy and love. Yoga therapy seeks to stabilize the mind and purify the body. It recognizes the nature of a human being as mind, body, and spirit.

Through asanas, or postures, yoga provides flexibility and strength in the muscles and skeleton while releasing toxins that have built up in the body. Special breathing techniques, called pranayam, combined with asanas helps the lungs to breathe without restriction, which provides oxygen to the blood and increases circulation, allowing the body, mind and spirit to return to balance. Yoga philosophy therapy uses the ayurvedic of health to determine an individual’s metabolic rate and body type to ensure the foods you eat are not only nutritious but naturally balanced for your specific system and activity level. If a person has a broad build, slow moving, sluggish metabolism, called kapha, they would have a completely different dietary need than someone who is thin, active and has a high metabolism, called vada.

Yoga therapy can address painful areas, called Dukh, in the body and mind. Yoga therapy can enhance our balance and well-being by removing harmful thoughts and allowing the body and spirit to reconnect, providing us with the peace and serenity deep within us. Therapeutic techniques known as yoga sootra, or sutra or aphorism, helps to gain mental power over negative thinking of the things that have happened to us in the past, while recognizing the need for forgiveness and prayer. Through yoga therapy, we can learn to replace undesirable thoughts with desirable thoughts and return to a peaceful state. Yoga therapy is an empowering medicine which gives each of us control over our bodies to bring about well-being and balance. When you practice yoga techniques, you free your mind of negative thoughts, strengthen your body, provide you with flexibility and promote energy. If you practice sitting or standing straight, while deep breathing, your body is naturally calm and your body organs can function better because they are not cramped as they would be if you were slumping. Senior citizens are benefiting greatly by doing yoga therapy. There is nothing strenuous about yoga. It is a series of slow controlled movements or positions that are held for inner strengthening of the body’s core muscles. When senior citizens practice controlled movements, they also gain confidence in their ability to maintain their own well-being and balance. They free themselves of fear of not being able to walk after hip replacement, confidence of being able to take care of them selves.

The gift of life also provided our bodies with the ability to heal itself. Yoga therapy can provides us with the necessary abilities to heal itself by reducing stress, practicing meditation or prayer, deep breathing exercise, holding poses, freeing our mind of negative thoughts which causes our bodies to react with pain, anxiety, abusing food, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, headaches, hypertension, thyroid disease, heart disease. Yoga therapy, when practiced daily, can give back peace, harmony, joy and love.