5 Yoga Techniques to Balance Your Energy
Try these simple yoga techniques to balance your energy & find peace amidst the chaos…
It seems we’re all in a hurry these days, and spending so much time running from one task to another can take its toll on our mental and physical wellness. Too many of us find ourselves feeling burnt out and exhausted at the end of each week, with little energy left for activities that would help us to recharge and re-balance our systems. Even just making it to a regular yoga class can sometimes feel like a chore!
But it’s important to take time for ourselves to give our bodies and our energy fields a chance to recharge.
Yoga provides tools and techniques that can help to balance your energy and restore your body and mind to a healthier, more balanced state. Give these 5 yoga techniques from Yoga Magazine a try the next time you’re feeling frazzled, stressed, or overwhelmed, and see how much better you feel!
BREATH AWARENESS
Simply becoming more aware of your breathing dynamics, depth and rhythm, helps to support balance as the breath is a perfect barometer for how you are feeling in the moment. While the mind can be scrambling to find a word to describe how you are, bringing your awareness to the breath can tell you much more! When we are relaxed and our diaphragm is at ease, there is a lovely expansion and contraction in the abdomen caused by the movement of the diaphragm. So in a moment of conscious awareness choose to focus your attention on the breath which also immediately pulls you down out of the mind and can make you more aware of what you need. If your abdomen is held tight, and rigid, it’s a cue that you need to take an action or engage in practice in order to relax
PRANAYAMA
Pranayama generally supports balance – so most techniques will help alleviate stress. However, there are a couple of specific techniques which I find can be particularly helpful. Alternate nostril breathing (Nadi Shodhana) is incredibly effective as it balances the right and left hemispheres of the brain and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. It can be a ‘quick win’ as no matter what you are trying to achieve it can help, either by calming the ‘left brain’ conceptual part of the mind, (so excellent if you are over-busy and stuck in your thoughts) but equally, if you are feeling sluggish it can also stimulate your ‘right brain’ which can stimulate your creative faculties too…
DEEP RELAXATION
When you deeply relax, not only is it incredibly rejuvenating, it also changes the texture of the mind. You also experience streams of thought which are often more deeply embedded in the subconscious and difficult to reach when you are in your usual daily mind state. So going ‘inside’ via relaxation means you can pick up on creative ideas and thoughts you often miss, thus balancing not just your energetic body but also building wisdom for actions that can enhance your life too. Try the Yoga Nidra technique to experience the power of deep relaxation for yourself.
VISUALIZATION
Although visualization, and the application of thought can in some ways be seen as counterintuitive to the oft-sought yogic desire to empty the mind. The application of thought can, of course, have a healing impact, particularly when used in conjunction with embodied awareness. For example, when you visualize the Chakra colors from root to crown (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) with your attention anchoring the frequency of the color into the relevant part of the body it can be very healing. Essentially, whenever your awareness (Yang) meets with the density of the physical body (Yin) you create an energetic hot spot that raises your vibration, as it’s a creative fusion – when Yin and Yang come together it creates wholeness.
SOUND
Sound can often be neglected in our yoga practice, and I find one of the quickest ways to harmonize my state, and to connect with the natural environment around me is to simply sound some “OM”’s. Chanting OM can seem like one of the biggest yoga clichés, but it’s impeccably effective for supporting balance! Remember OM is the vibrational frequency that passes through all natural living matter, and it helps to retune us to this natural frequency (sometimes, just like a musical instrument we also get out of tune too). Tips to increase the efficacy can be directing the sound into different areas of the body, (which helps to free up stagnation) and also expanding your awareness to include natural life around you – trees, fields, rivers, oceans, the sun, and moon, even visualize the whole planet in your awareness if you wish!
Read More at YogaMagazine.com…
