Daily Resilience: Yoga

Yoga & Resilience

I have loved practicing yoga and it has been a huge part of my journey of learning how to build internal resilience. For me yoga has a similar effect as grounding exercises. I wanted to share specifically how this has worked for me and maybe some of these ideas will be helpful to add into your routines. Talk to your doctor or a local yoga instructor for how these practices could look for you and be beneficial for your health and well-being.

Yoga & Resilience

Yoga is such a great way to tune into your body and strengthen. I have gone to yoga classes but it was really during the beginning of the pandemic that my love for yoga sparked. I was home and had time to create a routine for myself. I knew the goals I wanted to accomplish and looked up exercises and poses for those goals. I had no idea that it was also helping me in a mental and emotional way as well. There are a few key ways that yoga has contributed to my resilience:

• Breath-work: deep breathing and coordinated breathing with yoga poses is a core concept in yoga. Deep breathing is actually a quick way to access our parasympathetic nervous system. This part of the nervous system is also called the “rest and digest” system and is what facilities how we experience calm and relaxation. This in it self allows me to be in my resilient zone and to really practice calmness and release stress in my body.
• Tuning into the body: I go through a lot of my day often without tuning into the body and just busy living life. When practicing yoga you are kind of forced to tune into how your body is reacting and feeling during the poses. This tuning in is something that I’ve learned to carry with me throughout other activities as well. When I am having a stressful or busy day, I will often take a few minutes to just do some deep breathing and yoga poses to tune in and calm. This is a great way to build resilience.
• Learning to Reset and Pause: something about yoga that has been huge for me is that it calls you to be present. One of my favorite things about going to yoga class was that the instructor would begin by saying take a deep breath in and breath out all the stresses of the day. When practicing yoga you can let go of all the other things going on around you and allow your mind to just be present in the yoga practice.