Yoga as Healing (medicine)

Yoga is seen as a healing practice in my practice space through many ways. First, it all depends all on whether or not you are practicing as a group or individually. Additionally, I feel as yoga can be seen as a healing practice for me both mentally and physically. Personally, yoga provides me with these physical healing abilities by being able to push myself in poses and holding them for some period of time. By doing this continuously week after week, my body is able to adapt to these positions which therefore allows me to improve my flexibility and work on any limitations that I have previously had. For example, although I practice at once a week with a teacher who is certified I also try to do yoga every morning as a part of my daily routine because I noticed a couple a different things. After exercising vigorously the day before, yoga helps me cool down my muscles and helps them stretch out more so that way I am not as sore afterwards. For someone like me who always has a racing mind and is always stressed about the next step, yoga provides me with a mentally healing ability by allowing me to become in tune with my mind, body, and soul all at once in order to help me forget about any worldly problems for about an hour. Yoga allows me to take every racing thought I have, and slow it down so that way I can analyze each problem out. It is hard to explain, but I believe yoga has a calming reaction on the brain. I am able to tune into each pose while tuning out everything around me which gives me a sense of healing in the mind. To add onto the physically aspects of healing that yoga has an impact on, I have actually noticed a drastic difference in muscle tension over the course of the weeks since I have been practicing. I am on my computer for about eight to nine hours a day doing homework. You could imagine what this does to the upper back; putting a great strain on the muscles between your shoulder blades. I have also had problems with this. My muscles would hurt so bad that I would often ask people to jab their elbow into my back. However, after practicing yoga I noticed that this pain had vanished. Not even a slight pain. And the more I do yoga (every day versus once a week) the more relaxed my back muscles feel.

Because I rarely do yoga at an actually studio, but rather on Stockton’s campus I do not feel that  this is communicated in a class session, but rather it is something that you the individual must try to find and analyze yourself. I believe that I am able to understand that yoga can be used as a medicine by the way my mindset is before entering class. For example, if my intention is to try to revitalize energy throughout my entire body while clearing my mind of all that is negative, I can do this because I, as an individual, have the power to do this. I believe yoga is what you make it out to be. According to Novotney (2009) article on Yoga as a practice tool she explained that yoga can improve not only your overall physical fitness, but your lung capacity as well. For  someone who used to smoke, after reading this I always try to go into practice with a positive mindset that yoga can and will help me over come addiction to nicotine. So far it has had a great impact. When I am practicing, I mostly try to concentrate on my lungs and see how much capacity and control I have over them. After weeks of practicing, I can say that I have seen an improvement on how much more air my lungs can hold and the duration of how long I can hold it for as well.

Nine out of ten times, yoga almost always makes my well-being feel so much better. I have become so interested in what yoga has to over that I typically go outside each morning (depending if it's warm or cold outside) and practice what I have learned from class. Throughout the day, I generally feel a decrease in  stress, worry, tightness, anxiety, irritability, and an increase in positivity, flexibility, creativity, relaxation, and surprisingly an increase in concentration.