Wake up to an exhilarating morning cup of yoga! The morning time is one of the most important parts of the day. When we wake up, the day is fresh and new. Yesterday’s problems and troubles are yesterday’s news. That is the beauty of the morning. We get to start all over again each and every morning.
Perhaps that sounds a bit exhausting, maybe even intimidating, but do not think of it in terms that you have been working hard on a project and you have to start from scratch each day. Think about starting the morning fresh in the sense of leaving or letting go of the stuff that does not serve your bliss anymore and keeping the stuff that does serve your bliss.
Whatever nourishes us to be joyful is important fuel to keep weaving into our biology and neurophysiology. That is the stuff we fall back on when we have had a really rough day. The stuff that makes us feel powerless, unbalanced, and negative is draining on our minds and bodies and morning time is the most opportune time to let go of that heavy baggage.
When we commit to a morning yoga practice, our joyful nourishment fuels us, the kind of joyful nourishment that you can feel on the inside. This joyful nourishment is what we breathe in our yoga practice. When we focus on breathing out the dull baggage, we create more space within to take in even more joyful nourishment. It is that stuff on the inside that feels good, and you know it just feels really good.
Morning yoga offers us the opportunity to fill our morning cup up with intention, but, not just any intention, life-changing proactive intention. When we practice breathing in the joyful nourishment and breathing out the dull baggage, we create space to center ourselves in proactive intention. This is an important tool to have to meet each day with success.
Think of proactive intention as your wellness to-do list. To-do lists are great tools. We use to-do lists to keep us on track with work projects, household items, family chores, and life goals. This is the list to make before all other to-do lists. In order to create our proactive intention, we must ask when we center ourselves on the mat, “How will I tune into my ultimate joy today?”
Perhaps you have had a week of a lot of resistance in your actions, and it is making you feel heavy, dull, and un-empowered. Your pro-active intention might be to invoke more acceptance with love and to ease that action into your daily life.
When we step on the mat each morning and center ourselves in proactive intention, over time we let go of resistance with more ease and we become the very acceptance we were seeking. Wow – how is that for a morning cup of awesomeness!
Our bodies are made to move. If we have a desk job, then all the more priority we should give to practicing yoga on our mat in the morning. Most of our brain cells are coded for movement. When we get up and practice yoga, we get the body moving, get our hearts pumping with more rigorous practice via vinyasa or ashtanga based practices, and we cleanse and renew our bodies with oxygen. After we move our bodies in healthy ways, we feel energized and exhilarated to take on the day.
Mounting research in yoga’s favor shows that with morning movement, particularly morning yoga, we are more likely to be proactive, productive, centered, and enthusiastic in meeting the day’s challenges. And, our bodies will thank us for keeping the machine running clean.
If you came to yoga for weight loss and weight management, morning yoga helps boost our metabolism. Slow metabolism is the big culprit in weight gain, especially for those of us headed into our mid-life changes and facing hormonal shifts in our life. With morning yoga practice our metabolism increases and we burn more calories all day long. It is a win/win.
Generally speaking, evening time can easily be taken up with stuff we did not anticipate being on our calendar and exercise is quickly get pushed off the list. This is especially true if you have a family as evenings are filled with homework, extracurricular activities, dinner, bedtime prep, and by the time the kids are in bed, we are too exhausted to do anything else.
Evenings are a time when our bodies and brains tend to slow down from the busy day. We are more likely to let evening practice commitments go due to exhaustion from the business of the day, whether we are parents or not. When we wake up, we are rested with prime time energy levels to get on the mat and move and start our day off on the right breath.
Start waking up to an exhilarating morning cup of yoga. Stay committed to the practice and keep the joy of greater balance to take the good with the bad, more proactivity and productivity, greater enthusiasm, and keeping the body tuned up to be the most well and healthiest version of you that you can be.
Drink up the stillness. Drink up the centeredness. Drink up the proactive intention to dance through your day instead of wrestle with it. Morning yoga is the most important to-do on the many to-do lists you can gift yourself.
Om Shanti Om ~ Athea
