Back To Nature With Naked Yoga

By Bernard Matthews

The practice of yoga is not usually associated with practicing in the all-together but naked yoga is now becoming surprisingly popular. There are regular classes springing up across America although it still seems to be a fairly well-kept secret.

Those who attend are matter of fact about the whole process and essentially naked yoga probably isn’t anything new, many people may have practiced at home without wearing the usual yoga garb, but it’s the concept of a class full of naked people practicing yoga, which seems to be causing a stir.

If the thought of naked yoga is appealing and you are tempted to search for a local class, take a moment first to consider some of the benefits that you might experience:

• Feeling of freedom for those participating

• Feeling of being less inhibited.

• Being more in touch and comfortable with their own bodies

• Connecting on a more intimate level with other students

Classes can be any size and groups are often mixed. Whilst on paper this may seem to have some sexual connotations, this is not the aim of many of those who attend. Naked yoga provides a freedom of movement and increases the ability to be able to focus on the postures and the correct lines without being hampered by restrictive clothes and in addition, it enables the practitioner to be able to view their actual positions in the mirrors and so they can self-correct if the pose is not as it should be. Naked or not, yoga poses are important and it is vital that the postures are accurate.

Teachers also are able to see much more clearly if a final position is not quite right and can help the student to realign their position thus increasing the benefits of the posture.

Whilst initially there may be some embarrassment whilst removing clothes, once the practice sessions start, and the students focus on the task at hand, the embarrassment begins to fade. As yoga is non-competitive, there is little use trying to focus on others, attention is turned inward, students reconnect with their inner feelings and what their bodies are trying to tell them.

Many of those who study naked yoga feel that they are somehow reconnecting with nature, even if much of their practice is done indoors and away from scrutiny.

Practicing yoga outside whilst not wearing any clothes takes the practice a step further, but again practitioners feel that it enhances their individual session allowing them to reconnect with their body in a way that they would not be able to if wearing any sort of clothes.

Of course, naked yoga is not for everyone, and it is unlikely that the craze will see the demise of more traditional yoga groups, providing those who attend benefit and feel relaxed and comfortable in their environment, maybe there is something to be said for the back to nature theme.

Back to Nature with Naked Yoga From Bernard Matthews.

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Yoga for Stress Relief - Learn Some Simple Techniques

By Caroline Selfe

Doing yoga for stress relief doesn't have to be an involved routine. If you don't have time to do a full yoga routine, use the separate parts of yoga to relax and rejuvenate.

Deep breathing, meditation and poses can go a long way toward conquering stress. Simple yoga techniques take minutes to do and can be incorporated into your exercise routine. You can also do them whenever stress takes its toll to regain your balance.

Try doing yoga for stress relief by doing parts of a full routine. If you are pressed for time, these techniques will fit into your life well.

· Deep Breathing - If you want to instantly unwind and revive, do deep breathing. Most people most of the time breathe through the chest. This shallow breathing is caused by tension and stress. Breathing deeply through the belly oxygenates the muscles thereby relieving tension. Fill up your lower abdomen by breathing in. Contract the same area by breathing out. Do the breathing through your nose. This is the easiest part of doing yoga for stress relief.

· Meditation - Spend a few minutes a day quieting your mind. It sounds difficult with a hectic schedule. Take a few minutes to sit in a quiet place. You can close your office door at work or go in your bathroom at home and lock the door. Sit comfortably and close your eyes. Breathe deeply and focus on the area between and just above the bridge of your nose. This is the third eye (eye of the soul). When a thought comes to your mind, envision it with wings and let it fly away. Do this until you are relaxed and centered.

· Poses - Yoga poses are a sort of meditation since focus on the movements is key. Try these two simple poses to relax your body and mind.

1) Baby Pose - Sit on the floor with your knees bent. Make sure you are sitting on your heels. Hang your arms at your sides. Slowly lean forward at the waist until your forehead touches the floor. Rest your arms at your sides on the floor. Keep your neck relaxed and straight and breathe normally. Hold the pose for however long it feels comfortable - a few minutes, perhaps.

2) Butterfly Pose - Sit on the floor with your knees out and soles of the feet touching - like a butterfly. Keeping your back straight and holding your feet, slowly raise and lower your knees several times. Then, lean forward from your hips. Hold this pose for a few minutes while breathing normally.

If you don't have time for a full routine of yoga for stress relief, try deep breathing, meditation or poses instead. They are ideal for quick relaxation and regaining balance.

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Caroline Selfe has been a passionate seeker of natural and holistic stress relief methods for the past 25 years.

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Feel Great with Bikram Yoga

By Thomas T

Hot Yoga or what is also known as Bikram Yoga is getting more and more popular. So what are the benefits of this form of Yoga?

Some of the many benefits of Bikram Yoga include, body strengthening, building endurance and emotional balance as well as improving your health. Some of these benefits can be contributed to the use of heat while performing the posture series.

With the help of a heated room, you are able to get into your postures better, and your muscles stretch more readily. In a heated room you will also find that you will lose weight more rapidly if this is your goal. Another advantage is that your metabolism speeds up and this helps to breakdown glucose and fatty acids.

The heat also helps to move oxygen to your body tissue and organs, which promotes healing as well as aids in removing harmful toxins. Another great benefit of Bikram Yoga is unlike many other forms of Yoga; it will raise your heart rate and promote cardiovascular health. Beyond the obvious benefits of Yoga, this form has been known to actually help repair damaged tissue and ligaments as well as helping to cure those who are plagued with chronic ailments.

The health benefits alone may be a good reason to try Bikram Yoga, but this is by far not the only benefit to this form of Yoga. There are many others, including a means in which we can find balance in our lives.

Additional areas in which Bikram Yoga may be helpful include, relieving stress. This is important in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Stress can be a killer and the better we learn to manage our stress, the better our health can be.

The endurance required in Bikram Yoga helps you to learn how to focus your energies. This is undoubtedly a good trait to master. The better we can focus in our everyday lives, the more we can accomplish and the better we will feel about ourselves.

Though Bikram Yoga is not necessarily a highly spiritual form of Yoga, it can help in spiritual transformation. When we feel better about ourselves, it is easier to reach to a higher spiritual self.

Bikram Yoga is a wonderful form of Yoga, but it may not be for everyone. Essentially, the postures can be performed by most anyone of any age, though you may find it difficult at first unless you are in good shape and have a high tolerance for heat. It might be a good idea to begin with Hatha Yoga first and then move on to Bikram Yoga. Once you have mastered Hatha Yoga, you can be fairly certain you are ready for Bikram Yoga.

Once you reach the point that you feel you are ready to begin Bikram Yoga, you may be truly astounded by how good you begin to feel.

Thomas T is the owner of http://www.yoga-instruction.net/ Lots of free info about Bikram Yoga, and more about Yoga Instruction

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The Art Of Yoga Breathing

By Kenneth Koh

It is very beneficial to pay careful attention to the breath and to learn to control it in various ways. It is beneficial in the areas of physical health and in your practice of yoga. Apparently, the breath, the mind and the body are intricately link, that whatever you do to one will affect the other.

In yoga, it is vital to learn how to use the correct patterns of breath in order to get the most out of your yogic endeavours. Correct breath patterns must be practiced and observed before meditation and asanas. Correct breathing alone, can unwind your whole body, rid your body of unwanted toxins and rid your mind of anger, stress, tension and worry.

Do not risk harm by attempting to perform these exercises without consulting a trained yoga teacher or without seeking medical advice from a doctor. A yoga teacher can teach an appropriate breathing pattern to cater to your needs and your condition. To perform the pranayama and gain the most out of them, it is best to integrate it with the two of the three holistic approaches, asanas and meditation.

Helpful Notes

- Breathe in and out through your nose.

- Clear any blocked nostril. If your left nostril is blocked, lie on your right side for a few minutes and vice versa

- Never perform pranayam after asanas.

- If pranayam is to precede your asanas routine, set aside a time when you won't be interrupted.

- The idea is to lead yourself to a relaxed state so do not force your breathing and never do it in haste.

Long Deep breathing

The most basic and natural of all breathing techniques is the long and deep breathing as it relieves stress and tension. It brings down toxic buildup in the mucus linings of the alveoli of the lungs, cleanses the blood and as a result of increased oxygen flow to your brain and body, your health improves in many ways.

Technique

Do sit in a comfortable manner. Relax your shoulders and chest. Breathe in, relaxing the abdomen, pushing your belly forward, expanding it. Then, as you breathe out, allow the abdomen to shrink back in, tightening your belly muscles and pushing the air out. Do this and not straining yourself. Open up and release the breath. You may put one hand on your belly to feel the abdomen expanding and contracting as you inhale and exhale. Perform in even lengths. Exhale for the same length of time as you inhale.

When To Do This:

- Before meditation

- Before going to bed

- Before a meeting, presentation or a big decision

- Before studying, before an exam, or an interview

- And whenever you can think of --- in the car, at work, or while waiting in line
Alternate-nostril breathing

Alternate-nostril breathing encourages mind to heighten levels of discrimination, concentration and thoughts. It also boostmore energy and oxygen to the physical body and helps calm your nerves and improve circulation.

Before You Begin

For a more advanced technique, seek advice from a yoga teacher or an acarya (spiritual teacher). Your acarya will coach the pranayama technique that will be most beneficial to your mental and physical health and prepare you to complement the pranayama with mantra and meditation. No one should risk harm by practicing these techniques without seeking advice from a trained yoga teacher.

Technique

Sit in either Padmasana or Siddhasana. Close your eyes. Press and close the right nostril with your right hand thumb. Inhale a deep breath through the left nostril. After taking a full breath, close the left nostril with the middle, taking the thumb away from the right nostril and slowly releasing the air out, expelling the breath fully and inhale through your right nostril. After a full inhalation, close your right nostril with the thumb and release the fingers from your left nostril and exhale through your left nostril. This finishes one round. Start off with three rounds each time and gradually step up the rounds as you progress through the weeks.

When To Do This

- Do this in a well-ventilated, clean, smoke-free, dust-free, odor-free room.

- Do not perform this technique after asanas (yoga exercises).

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The Benefits of Yoga

By Conrad Raw

Yoga is a discipline for self-development that is more than 5000 years old. There are many types of Yoga, but most include physical postures, breathing control and meditation. Stress reduction techniques include mental imagery, stretching, controlled breathing and physical movement in the form of postures. The goal of any Yoga discipline is to improve flexibility and obtain peacefulness in the body and the mind. This will have the over all effect of leaving you with the ability to deal with everyday stress in a more productive way.

Understand that Yoga is not a cure-all. It can help with certain medical problems such as depression and combined with a healthful diet, aerobic exercises and medication, has benefits in a reduction in some cardiovascular disease and blood pressure levels. Yoga is an important part of the Hindu religion and is a way of life for them, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you would need to change your life style in order to reap the benefits of Yoga.

One of the most popular Yoga discipline in the U.S. is Hatha Yoga. Hatha Yoga is designed to increase flexibility and to calm the mind. It focuses on poses or postures along with controlled breathing. In a Hatha Yoga class, you will probably learn a number of poses that induce stretching and twisting. Some poses are meant for calming the mind as well as increasing flexibility like the Viparita Karani pose or the legs up the wall pose. The Cat Cow stretch will have you on all fours on the floor with your wrists underneath your shoulders with the knees underneath the hips. This pose will increase spinal flexibility and strengthen the stomach muscles.

Hatha Yoga is called the Yoga of postures and includes relaxation exercises designed to open the nadis or energy channels which will allow the energy to flow freely through the body. Other poses are designed to relax internal organs, which can prevent diseases such as hypertension or high blood pressure and diabetes. Hatha Yoga requires concentration on postures, called asanas and pranayama or controlling the breath.

In Hatha Yoga, mastering a comfortable pose where you will be able to keep that pose for a certain length of time is important in the practice of real meditation. The more poses you can master, the better you are able to develop inner meditation techniques. Also mastering the breath is important because controlled breathing will eventually allow the balancing of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

Conrad Raw is an expert in practical techniques for personal and spiritual development. He is the author of "Forbidden Secrets Of Personal And Energetic Development." He travels the world to learn and teach and is the founder of Greater Human Potential, a website devoted to bringing you easy to learn techniques to increase your human evolution. Visit his website for a free newsletter filled with tons of great tips and advice.

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Yoga tips for irregular shift workers

By Arun Goel

Several professionals have a very demanding routine in terms of night shifts. Due to the altered 'body clocks' they end up suffering from several health disorders.

Such kinds of jobs are on the rise with a continuous emphasis on increasing productivity and lowering costs. Most common examples are call center workers, specially those that are serving clients half-way across the globe.

The two most common disorders related to this are Sleeplessness and Constipation

Sleeplessness or Insomnia

This is one of the most common complaints and not surprisingly so. Sleeping during the day is difficult and the general noise and distraction level is high.
It is well known that continuous use of sleeping pills may be detrimental to health. Also, the body develops a progressive resistance to them. Therefore, they should be avoided.

A yoga technique that can be of very great use is the technique of 'Yoga Nidra' or psychic sleep. When practiced correctly, this method produces such deep relaxation that one hour of yoga nidra is equivalent to 4 hours of deep sleep.
This technique can be learned from a yoga teacher or even from a book or tape. To read more on yoga nidra, click here.

Constipation

Although this is a universal problem, it is more common among shift workers.
After midnight, the automatic regulation of metabolic processes has an effect of slowing down the heart rate and the blood circulation. In a person on night-shift, as he sits upright, the blood accumulates around the pelvis, lower abdomen and legs. This causes the blood vessels around the colon to dilate, thereby constricting the passage and resulting in constipation. Prolonged effect of this condition can result in piles.

The yoga solution for this problem is a position called 'Sarvangasana'. This is an inverted position in which the legs are slowly raised up while lying down. In the final position, only the head and neck rests on the floor while the entire torso and legs lie vertical to the ground in the inverted position.

This position helps the accumulated blood in the lower abdomen and legs to move towards the lungs. This helps in the oxygenation of impure blood and the normalization of the colon.

Five minutes of Sarvangasana should be sufficient to counteract the problem of blood stagnation in the lower part o the body.

This is an example of how yoga, as a therapeutic system, can help in relieving several health disorders. If you feel inspired by this article, feel free to publish it in your Newsletter or on your Website. Our humble request is to please include the Resource Box as follows:

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