It’s Mental Health Awareness Week from 18 to 24 May. This initiative, by the Mental Health Foundation, helps to put mental health in the spotlight and encourage people to consider their own wellbeing. Yoga and mindfulness have been proven to help with stress, anxiety and even ease depression.
It might seem a bit odd for a teacher to be encouraging you to practice on your own so that, ultimately, you might no longer need a teacher. But yoga self-practice is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself… and, ultimately, yoga is all about self-empowerment.
If you have feelings of sudden panic, your heart rate increases for no apparent reason or you feel like a knot appears in your stomach, you could be suffering from anxiety. These days, especially in big cities like London, we have got used to the feelings of being stressed and under pressure. Demanding jobs, long commutes,…
Yoga is a fun and creative way for your kids to stay healthy, get to know their bodies and interact with other children their age. Some yoga poses for kids will even be recognised by them from their natural play.
There are the many well-known health benefits of yoga. These include improving flexibility and balance, building strength and endurance, developing focus and concentration, de-stressing and helping with sleep. Yoga can also help you maintain a strong, healthy spine through a better posture.
Many women are hesitant to join pregnancy yoga classes, mainly because their energy levels are already depleted just from being pregnant. Trying to commit to an exercise routine can therefore be difficult.
It could be said that children these days can benefit from yoga more than ever before. With stimulation and distractions from the moment they wake until the moment they close their eyes at night, children are becoming more stressed and pressured by the environment we live in. In many cases, little is being done to…
Bikram yoga has received a lot of interest in the last few decades as yogis take their practice to the sauna-style yoga studio. Bikram Choudhury first experimented using heaters in his studios whilst teaching in Japan in the 1970’s but it was a decade later that hot yoga really boomed, starting in Hollywood. What is…
Whilst hot yoga has become somewhat of a craze in London and the rest of the western world in recent years, with hot yoga classes popping up everywhere, the practice of yoga in hot conditions is not modern. Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga, created this “heated” style of practice, in efforts to meet the climate in India, where yoga originated around 5,000 years ago.
Breathing is a key part of yoga practice. Whilst we all breathe tens of thousands of times every day without thinking about it, yoga breathing brings this day-to-day normality and life function into consciousness. From there, we can become aware of our own breathing techniques, and most of the time we realise that we aren’t…