By The Statesman Staff I Posted: January 14, 2019
It’s that time of the year when we’re at it again: making resolutions for the coming year. Some of those resolutions we’re able to keep and others, not so much. According to statistics, only 8 percent of people are able to keep their resolutions. So, as well-intentioned as your New Year’s resolution to do yoga is, here are a few tips, tricks, and motivations to make it happen in 2019!
1. Back pain is why you may need yoga.
Did you try to grab the pen from the floor and pull a muscle? Or, does your back ache after sitting at your desk for 3 hours straight or even longer? All these are really strong indications that you need to get on the mat right away.
A few gentle body stretches or quick rounds of sun salutations in the morning can work wonders for your body. Or spending six minutes at your desk, doing very simple yet highly effective sukshma yoga asanas can give you encouraging results and a renewed motivation to stick to your yoga resolution.
It won’t take long for you come to know that your body has become more flexible! Picking up the pen from the floor doesn’t hurt as much anymore!
2. Check your vitamin levels.
The main obstacle to not continuing a practice that you know is beneficial for you is laziness, or perceived laziness. Laziness and tendency to procrastinate is merely a symptom and you need to find out for yourself the possible cause for it. Don’t label yourself as lazy and try to get away with it. Instead, figure out what’s causing this laziness. Sometimes it can be stress, or heavy eating, or even lower vitamins.
If you have the tendency to procrastinate, you might like to examine your vitamin levels, especially D and B 12 complex. The feeling of tiredness can emanate from lower than normal levels of vitamins and minerals in your system. Also, if your mind is stressed you will postpone tasks to another day. So you need to pump in more energy and enthusiasm. Solution? Yoga!
3. More work, less energy & even less time.
If you have a high-pressure job with tight deadlines, high stake deliverables, and resource managing to do, where you could use more alertness, sharpness, and endless sources of energy to be productive all day, and yet make calm and well-thought-out decisions, you can’t ignore yoga.
Yoga helps with honing your decision-making skills. Yoga practices help you become a wiser and calmer person. You become capable of making the right call at the right time without wasting time on re-strategizing. “Yoga helped me discover skills and capabilities I never knew I had. You almost become a channel for the most surprising things that flow through you,” says Srinivas Uppaluri, a management consultant in Bangalore, India.
When your intuition is so heightened, thanks to the regular practice of yoga, you will seldom get anything wrong. Now, isn’t that a quality worth having?
4. Love, greed or fear.
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of The Art of Living, offers a practical tool to get off your back and begin your practice: the application of love, fear and greed. He explains how to use these emotions to start a good practice or get rid of a pattern you’ve been wanting to get rid of for some time, such as smoking.
He states, “There are three things to help you start a good habit: greed, fear and love. First, if someone says they’ll give you a million dollars for not missing your practice, will you do it? You’d say ‘I’ll do yoga for five more days, just to be safe.’ If you’ve promised your loved one you won’t smoke, you’ll keep the promise for the sake of love, right? If your doctor says you’ll die if you don’t do it, then also you’ll do it out of fear.”
5. Tie it in time-bound commitments.
You can take time-specific intentions to get into a practice like yoga. “A vow should be time bound,” says Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, “Consider the time and place for vows or commitments to be taken.” He shares the example of someone trying to quit smoking cigarettes.
“Suppose someone has a habit of smoking cigarettes and says, ‘I will quit smoking,’ but cannot do it. You know why? It’s 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’s likely you’ll break it immediately.”
If you happen to break the vow after the promised time span, don’t worry. Just begin again. Slowly increase the duration until it becomes your nature.
6. A good excuse to spend time with loved ones.
Hand-held video games, social media, and birthday parties, all succeed in keeping your children busy, while your spouse may be occupied in checking out the latest designer labels in the newly opened mall. Times are only getting busier, yet yoga can become an excuse for the whole family to take time out.
Decide on a fixed time when all of you can practice yoga together. A family that does yoga together stays together! It can be a fun idea to nurture healthy values in your kids as well as a brilliant way for everyone to keep fit – elderly, spouse, or kids.
7. We all need a detox!
Yoga works best when practiced over a period of time. A seasoned yogi will affirm that a welcoming benefit of the practice is detoxification of the body. Practicing asanas with awareness of the breath, and synchronizing breath with movement, purges the body of built up toxins.
Regular yoga practice helps release stress and toxins deeply stored in the system. As a result of keeping this resolution, you can look forward to a younger-looking, healthier body, a peaceful mind, and a refreshing personality.
8. For overall health.
Blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, improper sleep, stress, osteoporosis– yoga has answers to all these. The wise ones choose prevention over cure. Yoga is that step towards choosing prevention over manifestation of disease in the body.
This article by Kamlesh Barwal, the global Director of Art of Living’s Sri Sri School of Yoga, was originally published by The Statesman.
