Can Beginner Yoga Enhance Your Health?

Whether you are caring for a physically frail parent, a handicapped or chronically ill child, a relative suffering from Alzheimer’s, or a family member with a debilitating illness, you are tapping deeply into your emotional and physical reserves.

Most of us are aware that we actually “wear” out stress on our bodies. Practicing yoga puts us back in touch with our bodies and helps relieve those tensions. Yoga also helps replenish the physical and mental energy we are constantly expending; it can be practiced by everyone, even those don’t exercise regularly. Beginner Yoga provides a very gentle start to get into this practice both easily and gradually.

How Can Yoga Help the Caregiver?

Pranayama

Caregivers are often placed in heavy stress situations. This causes the physiological response of too much cortisol and adrenalin to be released. Too much of these stress hormones is detrimental to our physical and mental states. It is not a secret that stress is bad for our health.

Pranayama, which is the voluntary control of inhalation, exhalation and breath retention, has been scientifically proven to reduce and often completely remove many stress related disorders. The practice of pranayama helps us to control the release of the hormones by balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. This is just one way that pranayama helps us.

Asanas

Often, as a caregiver, we are required to lift, move, and generally be physically very “hands on”. This puts a lot of physical stress on the body, particularly the back. Asanas will help to create and maintain a strong and flexible spine, elongate large muscles, especially the quads and hamstrings (tight hamstrings equal lower back problems). Shoulders and necks are common areas where we hold tension, but our hips are also large reservoirs for stress and tension. (Tight hips equal knee problems).

As caregivers, we are so consumed with the well being and comfort of those for whom we are caring, that we forget about our own temples. We are walking around oblivious to what is actually taking place in our bodies, and then are surprised when we are hit by sudden fatigue, or illness, or our back goes out. So not only do the physical postures of yoga give us physical strength, body tone and flexibility, but they also tune us into our physical selves, externally and internally.

Meditation

For the full benefits of yoga to be really enjoyed, one needs to include the very important limb of meditation. There have been so many scientific tests and studies conducted on the subject is the past 2 decades, that is now undisputed that mediation is just so good for us! The benefits are many. The main one is general peace of mind. For it is from a happy, calm and peaceful mind that we derive all the other benefits.

Meditation develops coping strategies that affect the way we relate and respond to the events and relationships in our lives, in a positive way. It improves feelings of negativity and helps to combat depression. It helps you to recognize stress and its triggers.
As a caregiver, practicing meditation, if only for 15 minutes a day, will give you time to focus and take your mind off of many things out of your control. It forces you to become present and be in the “here and the now” which is the best place to be.

Author Mandy Grant is a yoga instructor, a caring daughter and mother, and owner of Juluka Yoga Studio in Hillsdale, New Jersey. The author’s welcoming Studio offers a free yoga class for caregivers who want to try yoga and meditation. Contact Mandy by calling the studio at 201-638-6828 or emailing to: info@julukayoga.com.