Complete Step-By-Step Guide to Start Practicing Yoga at Home
You don’t need to join yoga classes or hire a yoga instructor to begin practicing yoga on your own. With the right knowledge and tools, anyone can learn to do yoga at home. Here’s a step-by-step guide to start a yoga home practice:
The philosophy of yoga describes yogic practice as a unitive discipline, the kind that results in harmony, joy, and inner and outer union. Yoga is the art of complete conscious living, and tapping into one’s inner potential to achieve a state of Ananda, or happiness.
2. Set a Goal for Your Yoga Practice
Although setting goals in yoga might not seem logical, goals are motivating, and helps deepen one’s practice. Setting intentions helps maximize one’s time practicing asanas along with focusing and calming the body, unifying the mind and body, and helping the yoga practitioner in being a true yogi by mastering the 8-fold path of enlightenment.
A part of Raja Yoga, or Royal Yoga, the 8-fold path laid out by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras are designed to enlighten, liberate and unify the mind, body and soul. If you’ve joined yoga classes, you’ll surely hear students talking about the ‘8-limbed yoga’. If your quest is to follow the path to becoming a yogi and achieving spiritual enlightenment, this is the way to go.
Practicing yoga postures improves the ability to concentrate and develops discipline. To start the practice of asanas, choose easy beginner yoga poses that you are able to attain without any difficulty instead of trying advanced yoga poses.
Pranayama are a set of breath control exercises one performs that is preliminary to concentration, and helps increase focus through breath control. Only once we have mastered the art of concentration, can we start meditating with better focus and determination for the best results.
Setting a consistent yoga routine and practicing yoga daily has shown to improve the quality of life for practitioners. Not only does it help keep oneself calm, avoid mood swings, increase energy levels, and decrease mental stress by lowering cortisol levels, practicing yoga daily is the secret to living a longer, happier life.
7. Master the Art of Mindfulness through Mindful Living
Mindfulness simply means being aware of the present and living ‘in-the-moment’ without judgment. Practicing mindfulness can reduce the feeling of anxiety, boost confidence and self-acceptance. It increases the feeling of passion in life, lowers high blood pressure and increases oxygen in the brain.
During the meditative state of deep concentration, the purpose is to gain full control over the mind in order to allow the conscious to enter into the sub-conscious, unconscious and super-conscious state. With practice, the process of meditation awakens self-awareness inside one’s soul
9. Observe and Feel the Improvement
As you practice yoga regularly, you’ll start to feel relaxed, calm, peaceful, energized, and focused. Not only that, you’ll feel flexible along with increased strength in your body. It is described as a kind of ‘yoga high’, in which we consistently feel good throughout the day. This has, in fact, been proven by scientific research.