In last week’s classes, we focused on balance. Yoga is a great tool to increase your balance and restore your balance it if it’s gotten away from you.

When I first started taking yoga classes, my balance was way off. I had always had really good balance. Anytime I’d go through a parking lot, I’d turn the sidewalk edges and cement parking stop thingies into my personal “balance beams” and boogie on across them with a big grin and no problem. However, it got to where I could not balance! Ugh! How frustrating! After taking yoga classes for a while, I noticed that my balance was back and I could have fun on my parking lot “balance beams” again! Whoohoo!

One of the cool things about yoga is that what you do in class translates to your life. So, as I was learning balancing poses in class, it was building balance back into my body, mind and life!! Yeeeehaaaaw y’all!!

I now use balancing poses as a barometer for my life. If I’m all wobbly, it tells me my life is a bit (or a lot) out of balance, so I need to practice my yoga more to bring all of me back into balance. And you know what? It works every time!

Yoga builds balance in so many ways – here are just a few:

• The standing poses create balance between the grounding you get through your feet, legs and hips… and the lengthening upward of the spine, head  and arms.
• The one-legged balancing poses create stability and strength to keep you stable and aware as you walk, stand, run, etc.
• Doing poses on both sides of your body brings balance to the right and left sides of your body, since one side tends to be more dominant and sometimes one side is tighter than the other.
• Yoga also helps balance the two hemispheres of your brain – yeah, this is your brain on yoga!
• Your nervous system is balanced between the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight mode) and parasympathetic nervous system (relax response) which is great since in our stressed out lives, we can easily get stuck in the fight-or-flight mode.

I could go on and on about the balancing benefits of yoga, but for now, just begin or continue your practice of poses, breathing and meditation and increase or restore balance in your body, mind and spirit – your whole life!!

Copyright 2012, Cheri Harvey, Yoga For Real, LLC., www.yogaforreal.com.