What is Mindful Yoga

Yoga means uniting the body and the mind. Mindful yoga is an excellent means of acquiring relaxation at the same time achieving healing from many physical complications. Although there is a deeper purpose, it can also be described as a way of looking more attractive. Physical yoga practices were initially developed to help people prepare for meditation, and if practiced with complete awareness, they are then a form of meditation.

Incorporating mindfulness practice in our daily activities can contribute to rejuvenating our brain thus improving the quality of life. Mindfulness is quite easy to incorporate into our everyday lives and can be enhanced with mindful yoga practice. Mindfulness is when a person knows what they are experiencing when they are experiencing it. Being mindful is having control over one’s attention, and this attention can be placed anyplace you want, and it usually stays there until that time you want to change your attention to something else.

Importance of Practicing Mindful Yoga

Mindful yoga helps one to tune into your body and be kind to yourself. It is a path or a journey not intended to get to somewhere else but to be right where we are, as we are at this precise moment, with this same breath, without being bothered if the experience is neutral, pleasant or unpleasant. Mindful yoga is a bit different than other traditional yoga practices since mindful yoga focuses more on body and mind awareness and less on the exact posture achieved.

In mindful yoga people tend to dive into thoughts, and into memories or apprehensions about the future. People also tend to evaluate and compare their present-day experience with what they have learned. They could have learnt this from magazines, books, social media, and television or from any other source. People are usually anxious about the future and fixate on the past. In mindful yoga, people practice both postures and openness to deeper awareness.

The whole point of practicing a mindful yoga is to let go of anxiety, preoccupations, and tension and to be present. At the end of the yoga class, it is wise to practice relaxation and inner awareness. Physical exercises assist one to go deeper within themselves and become aware of and let go of unconscious conditioning. It is a way of liberating ourselves. Our deeper self usually shines when we relax both our body and mind. Though it takes repeated practice, eventually we become established in that authentic being.

When we harmonize movement with our breath and keenly paying attention to the feelings in the body as we move, totally feeling the experience in that very moment without any expectations or judgment, with self-compassion and kindness, mindful yoga becomes a meditative practice and also a mindful exercise in itself.