Enhance your emotional resilience through yoga

Brings mind and body closer and triggers a sense of positivity

When the going gets tough, the tough needs to get going. This certainly applies to the current prevailing times, where amid a pandemic, the need to find solace and emotional resilience is at its peak. We have seen people around us trying different hobbies, coping mechanisms, and therapies to keep the lives running. However, there is an easy and proven way to strengthen your emotional resilience through Yoga.

Since the most ancient times, Yoga has been known to be a way of life, rather than a practice. Many experts and practitioners in the modern time insist that its positive impact goes far beyond the physical being.  Yoga is a powerful way for building your emotional strength and regulation. It can help you overcome overwhelming emotional state of mind. This is so because Yoga in its very nature awakens a communication between body and the soul, bringing us closer to our emotional wellbeing and spiritual sides.

In layman’s terms, yes, Yoga makes us feel calmer and is a stress buster. This is Yoga’s prime benefit, which goes far beyond physical fitness and body positivity. A regular routine of its master poses or asanas, can help us keep our minds right and sane, when we battle to see some positivity around us.

Yoga is proven to have therapeutic benefits, which constitutes a combination of physical and breath work. The idea is to choose these right poses, posture or breathing that help stir the right sensations in the body and allow you to reconnect with yourself. For instance, a person battling depression, may often feel fatigued, so less aggressive, and more mindful poses, and meditation will help them restore their emotional balance over a period of time. A constant discipline of yoga practice, will teach us to untangle our inner knots of pain, suffering, anguish, and frustration, help us deal with crises, and deal with heavy meltdowns. Whether there is fear or irritation or even disappointments, yoga practices provide an awareness, awakens compassion within us to perceive and empathise better. Apart from the poses, meditation and mindfulness are key ingredients that help our minds be more relaxed, and collected, help us to sit through boredom, mental anxiety and combat our emotional upheavals.

Some of the master poses which are key for better emotional resilience include Pranayama, along with other stress relieving exercises such as child’s pose, corpse pose, leg up the wall pose, dolphin pose, puppy pose, spine twist and standing forward bends. You could also practice and devote more time in breathing exercises, i.e., Pranayama, meditation, i.e., Dhyan and Samadhi, or Shavasana and to have a holistic impact on your emotional wellbeing.

Positive affirmations combined with mindfulness helps in strengthening the self-awareness. It is indeed proven that daily yoga practice can improve cortisol awakening tendencies in human beings, and combat stress resilience. With this, Yoga also helps in healing the mind and body and makes us healthier from within. In the process, it also reduces our mental stress and makes us feel lighter.

While it is easy to miss a day of Yoga, or meditation for a day, but habit is a beautiful thing to master. Building resilience starts with discipline and habituation, which will involve daily commitment to the routine to connect with one’s own self. Yoga’s miraculous power lies in helping us overcome emotional traumas and complexes with a simply an hour of daily practice. So next time, if your mind tells you to skip a yoga session, remember that practice makes you perfect!

Nida Zakaria.

The Health Benefits of Yoga

Yoga is an investment: the more you put in, the more you get out.

For centuries, people have turned to yoga as a route to improving health and happiness - and it’s a practice that has certainly stood the test of time. But what exactly are the benefits of the ancient practice of yoga?

Psychologists and scientific researchers have conducted thousands of studies on the many health benefits of yoga. Here at Dragonfly, our yoga teachers love to combine their expert knowledge on the science behind yoga with their own unique practice style to help our yogis to develop mind, body and soul.

Read on to find out the results of the studies we rate highly, and to find out how yoga could be the next step you take to improving your wellbeing and quality of life.

The benefits can be organised into three main areas - we like to call these The Three ‘M’s: Muscle, Movement, and Mood...

Muscle

Core strength is at the heart of great yoga practice: we like to think of it as the starting point, from which all yoga poses and transitions extend. Take a look at our beginner’s guide to yoga poses, to start building up your core strength. Core strength is built by regular practice, rather than intense but very spread out workouts. Often, the best way to really kickstart good habits with core strength is to attend classes - which allow you to explore your core strength in a guided environment, on a regular basis. Pilates is also a great way to build core strength, as well as Hatha yoga classes which really focus on using strength to keep stillness in each pose.

...But it doesn’t stop at core strength! Yoga works on the interconnectivity of the muscles, visualised as energy flowing from one area of the body to another. A yoga sequence will  allow you to isolate and work on the strength in one area of your body, before transitioning this energy to another area - giving you a full body workout.

Building muscle strength not only keeps you fit, it can also alleviate chronic back pain or poor posture, as you build muscle in the body that improves the way you naturally carry yourself. For posture fixes, take a look at our guide to improving your posture.

Recovery is a key element of muscle health, and recent studies have shown that yoga practice such as Yin yoga helps reduce muscle inflammation, by breaking down the lactic acid in the muscles which is built up after exercise. We recommend doing a Yin class to help the muscles fully recover and improve flexibility, straight after a high intensity yoga practice like Vinyasa Flow or Hatha Flow - why not try this with us on Wednesday evenings?

Movement

Yoga practice is underpinned by the belief that the body’s energy must be balanced equally, and that we sometimes experience energy blocks: parts of the body where energy cannot flow freely through the body. To tackle these energy blocks, yoga works to keep energy moving through the body - or in other words, yoga helps to keep the blood circulating through all parts of the body and the breath even and consistent. 

The physical benefits that can be achieved through this balance of energy flow are better circulation, leading to a healthier heart, and open breathing, leading to healthier lungs. Flow classes, such as Ashtanga or Vinyasa, are best for cardiovascular conditioning, since these classes up the heart rate which over time, studies have shown improve your endurance, expand your intake of oxygen during exercise, and lower your resting heart rate. This is a great combat against high cholesterol and when practised regularly, can maintain a healthy heart. Those with high blood pressure have also found that yoga is proven to lower systolic blood pressure: in fact, the Savasana pose was associated with a 26-point drop in pressure, compared with simply lying on the sofa. 

It’s not only movement of blood and oxygen through the body which yoga improves, though - it also improves control, movement and flexibility of the joints and muscles. The strength which yoga builds in the muscles (as mentioned earlier), combined with the balance and spatial awareness developed by frequent practice does wonders to improve your range of movement and flexibility. This can prevent falls and accidents, particularly later on in life, when without regular exercise and balance practice we can often experience a loss in range of movement or the control over our bodies.

Mood

The physical benefits gained from yoga through the muscles and movement are mirrored in the positive impact on our mood. Yoga is based on the core principle of marrying the body with the mind, so it’s no surprise that studies have shown the benefits of yoga to extend beyond the physical, to our mental wellbeing.

The main hormone in the body that is responsible for feelings of stress is cortisol. Through exercising the whole body and investing in breathing and meditation practice, yoga is known to decrease levels of cortisol in the body - making our stress more manageable. Not only this, but even when we are experiencing high levels of cortisol due to inevitable tough times in our lives which are out of our control, yoga practitioners are significantly better prepared to deal with their stress - their good habits with meditation and exercise kicking in, allowing yogis to regain perspective on the situation much more quickly than those without meditation in their habits. 

On top of decreasing cortisol and stress, yoga can also increase ‘happy hormones’ in the body such as dopamine and endorphins. Flexibility is closely linked with decreasing stress, since stretching is known to release endorphins - giving you a happiness boost. Don’t believe us? Try including a morning stretch in child’s pose and monitor how it impacts your mood for the rest of the day.

Nothing has a greater impact on mood than good quality sleep. The benefits of making sure you get enough rest at the end of each day have been studied by psychologists for many years. Sleep is the body and mind’s vital time to recharge its resources, make repairs, and allow the brain to work through the information of the day - and without consistent, quality sleep, we can fall into patterns of depression, as well as negative impacts on our physical health.

There are many ways to improve your sleep - such as avoiding screen time (especially harmful blue light) less than one hour before you plan to sleep, turning down lights in the house in the evenings to start your body’s natural closing-down process as part of your circadian rhythm, and making sure you go to bed and wake up at similar times each day.  Restorative Yin Yoga encourages the body and mind to wind down before sleep, and also is a great way to practice breathing techniques, which allow you to develop the skill of relaxing your body and slowing your heart rate before bed. Having trouble getting to sleep or feeling constantly drained? Try going to our Yin yoga classes in the evenings, to improve sleep quality and boost your energy throughout the day.

Be it for muscle, movement or mind, there are so many benefits to taking time and space for ourselves during our busy working days to practise. It’s important to read up on the types of yoga out there, so you can select classes which will have the most positive impact. We recommend reading through the teacher bios - as these bios are insights from the experts into what they will most likely focus on in their classes. 

Definitely have a chat with your yoga teacher too, as they can use their expertise to offer bespoke advice on how yoga might specifically benefit your unique health needs. We love our individuality as human beings here at Dragonfly, so we like to make sure our advice is tailored to our yogis!

...Begin your journey to better health and wellbeing today, by taking a look at our online and in-studio classes on our timetable. We’re here to help - so if you’ve got questions about how yoga might be able to improve your personal health needs, whether for a specific area or for all-round health, then we’d love to hear from you and give you some guidance