Believe it or not, just about 8% people in the world who take resolutions are able to keep them till the end of the year. But this does not mean you cannot be one of them. If practicing Yoga and staying fighting fit is on your resolution list this year, we are here to share a few tips and tricks, some like to call it motivation, to get you through it in 2019! The result is not just a stunningly fit body, calm and healthy mind but also heightened confidence and self-belief.
1. Pulled a muscle while picking up a pen?
Trying to grab the pen from the floor and pull a muscle? Left with a heavy aching back after long hours of desk squats? These are just indicators that you need to roll out the yoga mat right now. If you manage to do nothing else, a few gentle stretches or a couple of rounds of Surya Namaskar in the morning can do wonders for your body. Spend 6 minutes in the afternoon doing extremely simple Sukshma Yoga asanas, to loosen up the tightened shoulder and calf muscles, flex up the fingers and wrists, relax the eyes that have been strained from looking at the screen for too long. This will give you encouraging results and motivate you to stick to your Yoga resolution. And soon enough, you will feel the difference in your flexibility and range of motion and picking up the pen from the floor won’t hurt as much.
2. Check for the vitamins
A major obstacle that people complain about is laziness or lethargy. So if you can get rid of lethargy, you will be 90% there in meeting your resolution. For this you should know, laziness is NOT your nature. It is simply a symptom and you need to find out the cause for it. The easiest escape out of keeping your resolution is just labeling yourself as a lazy person and getting away with it. Instead, figure out what makes you lazy. Is it the over indulgence, stress or inadequate and sometimes dangerously low vitamin levels. If you often feel lethargic and get tired easy, it may be a good idea to examine vitamin D and B12 complex. Also, if you are stressed, you may want to push things off to the following day and then you may never end up doing it. So you need to find the energy to overcome this lethargy. What better tool than Yoga?
3. More work, less energy and less time to do it?
If you are a decision maker, stiff nonnegotiable deadlines, high stake deliverables and resources to manage, you could always use alertness, sharpness and unbounded energy to be productive for most part of the day. In that case, you cannot afford to ignore Yoga. Yoga heightens your decision making abilities, makes you creative, alert, calmer and so opens up a world of possibilities in front of you. When intuition improves, thanks to regular practice of Yoga, you will seldom get it wrong. Now, isn’t that a quality worth having!
4. Love, greed or fear
Global spiritual leader and humanitarian, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of The International Association For Human Values, gives a practical tool to begin a new practice and stay on course with it or you can use the same tool to get rid of a habit that is bothering you, like say smoking-the application of love, fear and greed. “There are three things to start a good habit: greed, fear or love. First, if someone says they will give you a million dollars for not missing your practice, will you do it? You would say “I will do for five more days, just to be safe.” If you have promised your loved one you will not smoke, you will keep the promise, right? If your doctor says you will die if you don’t do it, then also you will do it out of fear.”
5. Tie it in time bound commitment
You can take time specific sankalpa or intention to get into a practice like Yoga. “A vow should be time bound,” says Sri Sri, “Consider the time and place for vows or commitments to be taken.” He shares the example of someone trying to quit the cigarette. “Suppose someone has a habit of smoking cigarettes and says, “I will quit smoking,” but cannot do it. You know why? It is because the commitment is not time bound. You can take a vow for three months or 90 days. Don’t take a vow to start something new or get rid of a bad habit for a lifetime; it is likely you will break it immediately.” If you happen to break it in between, don’t worry. Just begin again. Slowly increase the duration until it becomes your nature.
6. Detox!
Seasoned practitioners of Yoga will vouch for a welcoming benefit of the practice-detoxification of the body. Practice of asanas with awareness of the breath and synchronizing breath with the movement, purges the body of built up toxins or aama as referred in Ayurveda. Regular yoga practice helps release stress and deep seated toxins in the system.
7. For overall health
Yoga has the answer to most of the modern lifestyle diseases, as is now scientifically documented-blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, insomnia, stress, osteoporosis, among others. The wise choose prevention over cure. Yoga is that step towards choosing prevention over manifestation of disease in the body.
