Mediation as healing

Before starting my journey in the yoga world, I understood yoga was used for healing purposes. In previous journal entries I communictaed yoga has a form of healing for both the body and the mind. Yoga is good for the body because it pushes the muscles to stretch further than they would during regular activities. It is also goo for hte mind because it forces relaxation. Yoga takes on the form of a hollistic approach of medicine to many problems, both mental and physical. In some of my health classes we discuss other, non- medical, hollistic approaches to medicine and among those is yoga, specifically when meditation takes place at the end.

I feel as though yoga is not expressed as a healing form until typically the last 20 or so minutes of the practice. This is usually when the instructor has the group sit still and think about the past and present but in a whole way. They typically do it in such a way that it does no make otu anxious for what is to come, rather to reflect and guide you to make the best desicicons you can, in a calm way. The reason I see this as healing is because often when someone, like myself, have many responsibilities at once it can become overwhelming to think about how to do them. The end of my yoga sessions has taught me to be present in the moment because one can only do what is happening now in the present. 

This carries over into this week where I focused more on stretching and mindfulness than trying to execute more complicated positions. This helped this week because one, my back has not been a fan of me as the weather has gotten colder and two, I have had more school work this week than I have seemed to have all semester combined. It was nice to sit and focus on each individual muscle. My teacher was a man with a very calming voice and the class lasted 90 minutes, which I loved every minute of. It was nice this was the question for the week because I focused on calmness specifically this week because I used yoga as a healing method to my immense stress. Overall, I see yoga as the best approach to non medical tretament of physicla and mental problems solely because of the meditation aspect in each class.