How can your Yoga practice led you to a higher understanding of the mind and body relationship?
In asanas, we try and connect the mind to the body. We try increasing the awareness of body parts, focusing on stressed joints and muscles, while maintaining awareness of our breathing. We need a lot of skill in trying to relax the muscles and different body parts under stress during our practice. This is strengthening of Body- Mind relationship.
Our yoga practice is to process, direct and activate our energy in a particular direction. Why I am stressing on this is because generally with exercise, the attitude is, “the harder I do it, the better it is.” Yoga should not be practiced in this way of the old school of “no pain, no gain.” It is important that we do our practice of yoga with full awareness.
As our bodies are subjected to different stretches, bends, twists, and inversions, we try to maintain the posture in a relaxed manner. This builds strength and stamina. It is here that various muscles are strengthened, which is the support for all other systems. Functioning and efficiency of our internal organs also improve as well as the systems of our bodies in our practice of yoga. As an example, the respiratory system becomes more efficient in our practice promoting abdominal and relaxed breathing, which leads to a state of calmness and helps to maintains our focus.
A healthy and peaceful body is the starting point for advance practices. This is one of the purposes of our asana practice.