Yoga is a mind-body activity involving muscular activity and a mindful focus on the awareness of self, the breath, and energy. 

 

Yoga is recognized as a whole mind-body medicine that integrates an individual's physical, mental, and spiritual components to improve aspects of health, particularly stress-related illnesses. Data shows that stress contributes to the etiology of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other chronic conditions, and diseases. Therefore stress management and reduction of negative emotional states can reduce the burden of illness. Yoga is a holistic stress management technique that produces a physiological sequence of events in the body, reducing the stress response.

 

The main goal of yoga is to achieve tranquility of the mind and create a sense of well-being, and relaxation, improve self-confidence, improve efficiency, increase attentiveness, lower irritability, and create an optimistic outlook on life. Yoga generates balanced energy, which is significant to the function of the immune system. Yoga inhibits the posterior or sympathetic area of the hypothalamus, optimizing the body's sympathetic responses to stressful stimuli, and restoring autonomic regulatory reflex mechanisms associated with stress. Yoga deters the sites responsible for fear, aggressiveness, and rage and stimulates the rewarding pleasure centers in the median forebrain, leading to a state of bliss and pleasure. This inhibition results in lower anxiety, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and cardiac output in yoga and meditation students.

 

Stress negatively impacts the immune system, and extended exposure increases vulnerability to disease, leading to physical and mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Practicing yoga and meditation to manage and relieve acute and chronic stress enables individuals to overcome other co-morbidities associated with diseases and improves their quality of life. 

 

At SyRocCBM, we welcome all bodies, experience levels, ages, and walks of life to join us on the mat!