Daily Yoga Pose
Pose Name: Garland
Sanskrit Pose Name: Malasana
Chakra: Root Chakra and Sacral Chakra
Level of Pose: Beginner
Health Benefits: This is a great prenatal pose. It helps your lower back, hips and pelvis. It stimulates the metabolism and stretches your groin. This is great for the digestive system.
Emotional Benefits: Can help increase energy, regulate sexual energy. Can help with mental clarity because of the removal of toxins in the blood.
Instructions: Bring your feet slightly wider than your hips and turn your toes slightly out. Lower your hips below your knees so you're just above the ground. Bring your elbows inside your knees, placing your palms together in prayer pose and pushing your knees apart to stretch the groin. Lift your chest and straighten your spine as you breathe.
Pose Name: Warrior Three
Sanskrit Pose Name: Virabhadrasana III
Chakra: Root Chakra
Level of Pose: Beginner
Health Benefits: Tones arms, core, back legs, shoulders and ankles. Increases balance and helps align the spine. Improve shoulder and ankle mobility as well as posture.
Emotional Benefits: Brings focus and the ability to have one pointed focus. Brings energy to the body and helps you feel calm and assured. Helps you get grounded and feel strong.
Instructions: Come to the push-up position known as plank pose. Step your right foot forward and press into your right foot as you reach your hands forward. Straighten the right leg and lift the left leg back so your body creates a T with your arms and legs. Flex your back foot and turn your arms so your palms face each other. Keep your hips level with the ground and don't let the left hip pop up. Take three deep ujayyi breaths as you reach your arms forward and your heel behind you. Slowly come back to your beginning position and repeat the same thing on the left side.
Pose Name: Lotus
Sanskrit Pose Name: Padmasana
Chakra: Root Chakra
Level of Pose: Advanced
Health Benefits: Good for relieving sciatica, menstrual problems and improving posture. Stretches the hips, thighs and ankles. Stimulates the lymphatic system to cleanse viruses from the body. Strengthens the spine and helps get rid of disease, according to ancient yogis.
Emotional Benefits: Calms the mind and helps increase awareness while providing a sense of grounding. Induces a meditative state or allows one to meditate easier. Helps release emotions stored in hips like anger, fear and resentment.
Instructions: This position requires open hips. You can begin with half lotus to prepare yourself for full lotus. With both legs out in front of you, bend one leg and bring the heel towards the opposite hip. Never force and to protect the knee, rotate your thigh externally in its socket to turn your foot up, letting it rest in the hip crease. Once the knee easily rests on the ground, lean forward gently. Add the other other leg by doing the same on the other side and crossing it over the first one.
Pose Name: Cat
Sanskrit Pose Name: Marjaryasana
Chakra: Heart Chakra, Solar Plexus Chakra and Sacral Chakra
Level of Pose: Beginner
Health Benefits: Improves posture and spinal alignment while strengthening the core. The kidneys and internal organs are stimulated to improve function and digestion.
Emotional Benefits: Helps you feel energized by releasing tension in the muscles and energy stored in the mind. Can help reduce stress, especially done with deep, slow breathing through the nose.
Instructions: Start on all fours with your hands shoulder distance apart and fingers spread wide. The knees are hip distance apart and the toes are untucked. As you exhale, bring your chin to your chest and push you spine towards the ceiling, knitting your front ribs in towards each other as you pull your belly button to the spine. The arch in your back will stretch your back muscles. This position is often paired with cow pose. It's a great warm up.
Pose Name: Warrior One
Sanskrit Pose Name: Virabhadrasana I
Chakra: Root Chakra
Level of Pose: Beginner
Health Benefits: Strengthens legs, ankles, core and arms. Stetches shoulders, hips, calves, thighs and ankles.
Emotional Benefits: Helps you feel grounded, stable and capable.
Instructions: Start in plank pose. Step your right foot forward between your hands. Pull your back foot in a few inches and as you inhale, reach your arms up towards the sky lifting your chest. Bring your arms in line with your ears with your palms facing each other. Spin your back heel down and point your left toes at a slight angle. Pull your left hip forward and your right hip back so they are in one line. Point your tailbone down. Pull your lower belly in. Firm the thigh muscles. Spread the toes. Knit your front ribs together and slide your shoulder blades down your back. Take three deep ujayyi breaths. Return to plank position and repeat teh same thing on the left side.
Searching for more Inspiration? Go feed your Soul >>
What is Yoga?
In Sanskrit, yoga literally refers to a connection or uniting, or the act of discipline. A practice that dates back thousands of years, yoga involves a combination of meditation, movement, and spirituality to bring us into connection with the Universal energy that allows us to connect with our soul. Yoga guides us to enlightenment, not just through the flows and poses themselves, but through a retraining of the mind that harnesses the energy of the body to expand one’s consciousness. Yoga has many forms and the benefits reach far beyond the physical body. Like meditation, yoga is a personal practice that will look different from person to person.
Yoga Articles
What are the Different Types of Yoga?
In the west, there are 22 main different types of yoga. The poses in traditional yoga are called asanas. The traditional branches of yoga include Hatha, Vinyasa, Iyengar, Anusara, and Ashtanga. Traditional yoga almost always includes mantras, breathwork, and meditation. Kriya yoga, kundalini yoga, and yoga nidra focus more on the emotions, mind, and soul through a development of the mind and energetic body. Recently, more westernized versions have evolved, giving us Bikram, Restorative, Yin, hot yoga, and many other variations.
It’s important to realize that every type of yoga will have an entirely different feeling, depending on the style, speed, environment, and the teacher (if there is one) - so don’t let one bad experience throw you off. Yoga takes study, persistence and personal dedication. Keep experimenting until you find the style that works best for you and your unique needs.
How to Decide Which Type of Yoga is Best For You
If you are looking to lose weight, a regular vinyasa or heated vinyasa class can help speed up your metabolism. The emotions can best be aided in slower, more traditional forms of yoga where meditation and breathwork are prioritized. Hatha yoga is a great way to prepare the body to sit in meditation. Ultimately, reading about the types of yoga will allow you to intuitively pick a type that will help you grow the most.
If you’re dealing with substance abuse, depression, anxiety, or abusive relationships, just getting to class can be difficult. Not everyone has access to a yoga studio either. At Daily Life, we want to assist you in developing your yoga practice by meeting you exactly where you’re at. Check this page every day for a new daily yoga pose that you can experiment with in the comfort of your own home.
Meditation Articles
_370_247_c1.jpg "Breathwork to Bring Back & Recharge Your Motivation")
How Does Yoga Affect Mental Health?
Yoga is continually prescribed to help people with depression, PTSD, anxiety, and other mental health issues. While yoga is not a substitute for serious mental health condition treatments, it can be incredibly impactful as a supplement in the healing process. Yoga helps regulate the chemical balance and hormones in the body, bringing the mind, body, and soul into harmony. Because yoga teaches us how to manage our mind while strengthening the physical vessel we take through the world every day, yoga can be a crucial catalyst of growth and healing.
How Does Yoga Improve the Mind?
Yoga works by making you more conscious of your mind, allowing you more control over what you keep inside it. For many people, yoga is actually much more about the mind than the body. A lot of people don’t realize the myriad mental benefits of yoga that they keep going back because they start to feel a little better each time. The gentle coaxing of the teacher, the fluidity and flow of movement, and the calmness of the yogic mind all contribute to the health of the mind.
How Does Yoga Affect the Soul?
Yoga’s purpose is to connect you with your soul. The Ego, the sense of one’s self as a physical being in the world, often obstructs our ability to communicate with the soul, which is where the true self is housed. Yoga allows us to raise our health and emotional state to be able to perceive the higher frequency through which our soul communicates with us. Once we establish a clear channel through which to access our soul, we can align our thoughts, motivations, words, and actions to be in harmony with ourselves and the life force that we are all a part of on this planet.
How Does Yoga Improve the Body?
Yoga improves the 10 main systems of your body: skeletal, muscular, circulatory, digestive, urinary, reproductive, lymphatic, nervous, endocrine, and respiratory systems. As if that’s not enough, yoga is designed to bring harmony and balance to the mind, body, and soul. If the mind and soul are not in balance, the body will feel the effects. Adopting a regular yoga practice into your daily life will allow your brain function to improve and your body to detox as well as strengthen itself to defend against illness naturally. Yoga is the science of optimization.
Can Yoga Assist in Weight Loss?
Yes! Yoga stimulates the metabolism and internal organs, regulating digestion. With consistent practice, yoga builds momentum that aids in weight loss in various ways. As your muscles grow and strengthen, your body burns more fat since the fat cells store the energy that is used to feed the muscles. Even breathwork can improve the metabolism because it creates heat in the body, causing the metabolism to speed up. Of course, yoga is not an overnight fix (but what is?) and the results will be greater with more frequent practice.