Considering doing yoga but scared by all the weird yoga postures? Some of them look painful.

Don’t worry: while there are thousands of yoga postures, as a beginning yoga student, you’ll only learn a few, and these postures will improve your health, as well as relieving stress.

For example, Sukhasana, or Easy Pose, is just sitting cross legged. It helps you to focus on awareness of your breathing and your body and strengthens your  back muscles and opens your groin and hips.

Sit cross-legged with your hands on your knees, and focus on your breath. Make sure that you keep your spine straight and push the sitting bones down into the floor. Allow the knees to gently lower, and remember that if the knees rise above your hips, you need to sit on a cushion or a block.

Dog and Cat Pose is another posture you’ll be able to handle as a beginner; it increases the flexibility of the spine. It’s really two poses, one flowing into the other. You begin on your hands and knees, keeping your hands just in front of your shoulders, with your legs about hip width apart.

Then, as you inhale, tilt the tailbone and pelvis up, and let the spine curve downward, dropping the stomach low, and lift your head up. Stretch gently, and as you exhale, move into the cat position by reversing the spinal bend, tilting the pelvis downward, and drawing the spine up and the stomach in.

[tags]yoga postures, poses, asanas, Easy Pose, Dog and Cat Pose[/tags]

Kriya yoga has been called the yoga of action. It helps  the practitioner’s spiritual development and as well to help bring about a profound state of tranquility and God-communion.

From Wikipedia:

Kriya Yoga is a very specific system of Yoga that was revived in modern times by Lahiri Mahasaya, c 1861. Paramahansa Yogananda brought it into widespread public awareness through his book Autobiography of a Yogi. The system consists of a number of yogic techniques that hasten the practitioner’s spiritual development and help to bring about a profound state of tranquility and God-communion.
Yogananda writes that, “The Kriya Yogi mentally directs his life energy to revolve, upward and downward, around the six spinal centers (medullary, cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral, and coccygeal plexuses) which correspond to the twelve astral signs of the zodiac, the symbolic Cosmic Man. One-half minute of revolution of energy around the sensitive spinal cord of man effects subtle progress in his evolution; that half-minute of Kriya equals one year of natural spiritual unfoldment.”

If you’re interested in Kriya yoga, it’s taught in many areas around the world, so you should be able to find a teacher in your locality.

You can also learn it from the above book.

[tags]yoga, kriya yoga, action[/tags]

Wouldn’t you like to get away from it all, and take a break – yoga break? Yoga retreats are popular, and you can take a retreat for a day, or for weeks.

Yoga retreats are basically places that you can go to get away and to practice yoga while you do so. There are numerous different benefits that you receive from yoga. Yoga is an exercise which uses poses that work your body and increase flexibility in your muscles and limbs, and this includes joints that are never really on the ‘radar screen’ let alone exercised.

Yoga stretches muscles and joints as well as massaging the various organs, yoga thus is able to ensure the most optimum blood supply to various parts of the body, and this helps incredibly in the flushing out of toxins from every nook and cranny of your body.

Yoga retreats are great because they are basically just like a yoga class in a gym or studio, only they are typically located in more rural areas, or beside the ocean, so that there is silence and no business or other typical city issues.

Yoga retreats are so fantastic because they help the yoga process overall; it is one which helps to relax and soothe the mind, body and soul, and so being out in the middle of nowhere helps this incredibly. The freedom and solitude that you experience in one of these retreats is going to be able to help you while you do your yoga, and you will immediately notice differences in yourself.

If you are interested in going on a yoga retreat, check with your travel agent, or ask your yoga instructor.

[tags]yoga retreat, yoga, break, holiday, relax[/tags]