How To Reinvigorate Your Yoga Practice
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by There are days when yoga practice seems more like a chore than a passion. When this happens, many people don’t know how to refocus themselves spiritually and physically to accommodate this shift. If you’re facing yoga sessions that don’t energize your mind, body, and soul, read on to discover tips on how to help reinvigorate your yoga practice.
Redirect Your Energy
Energy is an essential tenet of yoga. The life force energy, prana, is inherent in every action and motion of the body. Prana can be enhanced, cultivated, and redirected through specific movements and breath control.
Mudras are a great tool that can be used to refocus your energy in a positive way. These symbolic hand movements guide your energy through new pathways and enhance the healing of yoga practice. You can use mudras in your practice or any time your hands are free—whether you’re sitting, walking, or talking.
While breathing is usually something that many focus on during yoga practice, it can also be useful before and after a session. Using pranayama, you can access your inner power to achieve better results. Before class, take several minutes to practice:
- Breath of Fire: vigorously inhaling and exhaling through the nose while pumping the navel.
- Kapalabhati: focusing on the exhale while pumping the navel with the arms in the air
- Bhastrika: warrior breathing that involves pumping your arms in the air and striking the elbows to ribs while exhaling from the stomach.
Balance Your Chakras
The centers of spiritual power along the center of your body are responsible for energy flow. Each of the seven chakras has a specific focus and purpose, and misalignment of just one can cause emotional and physical distress. The root chakra, sacral chakra, solar plexus chakra, heart chakra, throat chakra, third eye chakra, and crown chakra are all equally important parts in the balance of your physical and mental energy. Though yoga can balance chakras, sometimes you need a more powerful method of rebalancing.
Meditating on each chakra for a few minutes every day and creating appropriate mantras for each one is a supplementary method of balancing that will enhance the effects of yoga on your chakras and allow you to focus on more positive aspects of your life. If you feel too inexperienced to work on your own chakras, visiting a reiki practitioner or energy healer is another option.
Use Aromatherapy
Aromatherapy has been used for centuries to heal the mind, body, and soul. Use its power to help yourself focus on your yoga practice.
To center yourself and anchor your spirit, choose a blend of bergamot, neroli, and sage. Spray the scent on your body and mat to dissolve distractions and focus on the present.
You can also transform your energy with a blend of geranium, bergamot, sage, and green tea to help you reconnect with relaxation and uplift your mood.
Essential oils can be mixed with water, lotion, or oil to create perfumes and diffusion liquids to enhance your practice. Experiment with creating your own blends of essential oils or exploring aroma therapy from online stores like YUNI Beauty.
Make Some Noise
Many times, yoga practitioners choose to practice in silence or with the minimal sounds of nature. This may be creating a pattern in your sessions, contributing to a lackluster performance. Change your routine and pace by incorporating different sounds into your space.
Listen to music that fits your mood, chant self-created mantras, or chat with your friends as you work through your next yoga session. When you allow experimentation in yoga, you’ll find that the variation is invigorating and challenging.
Take a Break
Taking a break from yoga is not a bad thing—sometimes your body and mind need something new to challenge them. Take a few days off and try a different form of exercise. If you’re dealing with some internal frustration, vent in a kickboxing class. Want to release some creativity? Take a ballet barre class or an improv workshop.
Taking a break also gives your muscles a chance to heal and recover. You can enhance that recovery time with muscle gels made of green tea extract and arnica to relieve post-workout soreness and inflammation.
Constant Evolution
Finding new ways to practice yoga is all part of the evolution of your spirituality and energy. When you feel that you’ve gotten stuck, this is a sign that it’s time for some change. Explore something new every time you practice for an energizing yoga reboot.
