Maintaining Good Yoga Posture

Maintaining Good Yoga Posture

Your practice of Yoga will help you carry yourself with a confident and healthy, self-assured bearing. Yoga helps you accomplish this good bearing by increasing, elongating, and improving the alignment of your spine and the surrounding muscles. Yoga also strengthens your abdominal muscles, which guards your back from injury.

Each part of your body is strengthened to bear its own weight, thereby helping avoid one area trying to overcompensate for a weaker area, which can lead to unhappy results.

Practice your postures everywhere you can. For instance, do your Mountain Pose while waiting in line, or preparing dinner. The more consistent and regularly you practice your yoga moves, the more benefits you will reap -- and the faster.

The Mountain pose is one of the easiest to learn. You gain strength and strong, upright presence -- like a majestic mountain. Practice and learn this pose correctly and well...and you are on your way to understanding how to maintain good posture in other yoga poses as well.

Here's how:

The Mountain Pose

Stand with your feet apart, in a straight line, hip-distance apart.

Point your feet equally straight and forward. Push the balls and heels of your feet into the floor and spread your toes.

With moving your feet and toes, turn the insides of your thighs frontward. Make sure that you do not lock your knees. This is important..

Shift your hipbones back one inch and draw your navel toward your spine. Lower your tailbone in the direction of the floor and raise your torso up away from your hips.

Picture a light glowing from your heart and your spine moving in the direction of the front of your body. Point your fingers in the direction of the floor as you roll your shoulders toward the back and glide them down into your back. Raise the crown of your head in the direction of the ceiling and tilt your chin in slightly toward your neck.

Imagine that your body is a tree, and sense your roots--your pelvis, legs, and feet--growing deeply into the soil. Imagine your torso as twigs reaching up toward the sun.

Hold this position for 10 to 30 breaths. Picture yourself drawing energy up from the earth as you breathe in, and then transport it back downward into the earth as you breathe out.

In this stressful day and age, relaxation and self- healing are priceless. Every step of your yoga postures is a step closer to enlightenment of your soul, body and mind...and an avenue to relaxation that will be with you for a lifetime.