Yoga begins from the foundation up. You work to strengthen the deepest underlying muscles, release tightness and stiffness and stretch muscles. You begin to awaken what has been dormant. You breathe life into your body and mind. You start to notice that you are thinking more clearly. . You start to feel better, make better nutritional choices, modify your habits so that they serve you rather than you serving them. You start to have control.
Yoga Postures for Weight Loss
A quick word here about “desire” and “will power” as these two words are interrelated. It is easy to think that all you need to do is have strong enough will power to resist the temptations and desire you have cultivated for food. It is easy to say that you will just stop eating x, y, or z. It is easy to “know” that you need to exercise and move more, eat less. But just how do you actually do it? How do you actually stop yourself from having 3 bites of ice cream instead of 20?
This is yoga. This is practice.
Instead of trying to stop cold turkey, you practice having less. Each time you have less, you win! Each time you choose not to have the cookie, the extra helping, the next glass of wine, you pump your will power tank with gas.
Yoga Postures for Weight Loss
Every time you exercise, move your body, tune into your breath, you fill up with will power to take down and eradicate the negative desires in your life that are currently winning the battle. This is it, it is all out war. Become your most fierce warrior self. Step onto the battle field prepared! Begin your yoga practice by strengthening your will power!
Active Inquiry-
What do you desire most, moment to moment?
What desires run your life?
Make a “will power” check list. (Even the seemingly smallest of actions count!)
This system is not about starvation. This system is about kindness, compassion, and results. This yoga system is about asking very difficult questions, facing the even more difficult answers and actually doing something about them.
One of these questions is: “What are you attached to that does not serve you?” We all get attached to people, pets, and things in our life that we think and that do, initially give us pleasure. But, what happens when the pleasure lessens, but we continue to remember the initial joy, and get addicted?
What if we fall into a bad habit? What if we find ourselves, after many months or years, coming to depend upon the empty comfort of our attachments, only to discover that they make it harder for us to live fully and vibrantly.
How do we start to let go? Do we bury our heads in the sand, stay home and continue to eat Ben and Jerrys? No! We engage our bodies, our minds, our lives. We endeavor to change.
We do our yoga.
We get on the yoga mat and breathe.
Active Inquiry-
- Write down all of your attachments.
- Ask which attachments will take time to let go of.
- Visualize your life without these attachments.