Now that you’ve got the Salt-N-Pepa song running through your head like a fun little retro ear-worm, let’s rephrase that:
Push YOU.
Do you need a little nudge this season? A bit of encouragement to get up, get moving, and take your health to the next level? At times, we all slide a bit in our motivation and movement.
Yoga is the perfect motivator because A) it rewards you in numerous ways and B) it’s all about growth, stretching, pushing the limit. There is nothing in yoga designed to make you suffer, and everything to make you stretch yourself in joyful ways.
How can yoga help you push your limits? Let’s start with the fundamentals of just doing it (yeah, another catchy slogan). Can you get on your mat every day, even for just 15 minutes? A daily yoga routine is a commitment to your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self.
Yoga also pushes you by trying new things. Maybe you’re really comfortable with that 60-minute yin yoga practice. It feels safe and right but you know the flip side of YIN is YANG. Can you heat things up – head to a heated yoga class and eventually, take that to 90 minutes?
Additionally, yoga encourages flexibility – inner and outer. As you stretch those hip flexors, so too you open your sacral chakra, encouraging spiritual and emotional healing from past physical traumas within the body. And as you move from Warrior I to Warrior II, feel that inner warrior begin to grow more empowered.
Another way that yoga encourages you to push your limits is by making this much more than a physical fitness routine. Yoga is a holistic experience: body-mind-spirit. How do you find yourself growing as a member of your community just by being a devotee of yoga? Are you kinder, wiser, warmer, less stressed, more curious, more invested in the world around you? It’s hard to imagine anyone who does yoga daily who isn’t all those things.
Yoga also encourages you to push your limit by expanding your consciousness. You aren’t just a person living on a planet. You are a soul who is meant to engage with everything and everyone around you. Yoga encourages that, by creating connections and community - first within the body and self - and then with everyone in class around you and eventually with all that you meet in the larger world.
So if you feel stuck right now in any aspect of your life, we say PUSH IT! Get up, roll out that mat, and go spend fifteen minutes getting unstuck in the most loving, creative, compassionate and super stretchy way!