Because Yoga integrates your mind, body and spirit, it is so much more than just exercise. A healthy lifestyle and strong workout begins within the strength of your mind. Your mind, like your body is there to be utilized to its fullest and yoga helps you achieve your fullest potential because it addresses one of the most often neglected aspects of fitness – flexibility.

Muscle connective tissues have a natural tendency to shorten with aging, as often evidenced in the stiffness of people age thirty and over. Muscles must be regularly stretched to minimize the effect of natural muscle shortening. Flexibility, one of the three primary components of physical fitness, keeps muscle supple and responsive to the demands of daily life activities. Because no matter how strong your muscles are, if your muscles are tight: bending and reaching will become painful.

Yoga helps combat the negative effects of stiffness, pain, disability and stress through relaxation both mentally and physically. The intrinsic rewards of practicing yoga are immense. Yoga offers gentle stretch, strengthening and physical/mental conditioning of the mind, body and spirit that significantly improves lives.

When you have positive thoughts you become the optimist who sees the world in a glowing light that illuminates your whole mind/body/spirit and makes you so much stronger and more capable of overcoming obstacles. You are what you believe to be at this moment in time. Believe in your inner strength. Know that you can make the changes you want to see happen. By consciously changing your thinking, you can change your life because thoughts are the director of the play called life. When yoga movements are incorporated with meditation, yoga becomes a healthy lifestyle, reaping positive rewards for your mind, body and spirit.

About the Author: Suzanne Andrews of Healthwise Exercise is the Star of Functional Fitness on PBS TV and Beginners Dynamic Yoga for Stress Release and Weight Loss DVD – available online at Walmart.

Photo Credit:  MeditationMusic.net