Are you more right-brained or left-brained while you practice yoga?

Right-brain? Left-brain?

Do you associate more with the right side of your brain while you practice yoga or the left side of your brain?

The two hemispheres of the brain have fascinating connections (Photo credits: Simeon Schatz)

Creative vs. logical

The right-brain/left-brain theory grew out of the work of Roger W. Sperry in the late 1960s, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981. The cerebral cortex controls rational functions and is made up of two halves, connected by masses of nerve fibers which pass messages between each other. These halves, or hemispheres, are commonly referred to as right-brain and left-brain.

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The medicine of yoga and herbs

Energy or emotional boost

While hatha yoga stretches out your body, lubricates the joints, pumps blood and healthy fluids through your body while also reducing inflammation, what can you do—outside of yoga—to aid the process? When you could use an energy or emotional boost, a cool-down, or even stress management, how can you gain some holistic assistance?

Herbs.

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Find the right work-life balance: The key to happiness, health, well-being

Do you balance your life?

Are you a workaholic? Do you work extra hours because you really need the money, or do you believe your job really needs you, and that it's ok to take care of your job more than yourself? Or do you, for one reason or another, find yourself addicted to your computer whether it's work or personal?

Staying busy all the time does not help you

You do know that if you are working too much, you are acting like you are not very important.

Maybe, without knowing it, you are covering up something basic in your existence and doing it through your work. Staying busy all the time with a task that does not cultivate your soul can be like a drug that you continually allow to drive you. But you can beat it if you recognize who you truly are.

Nurture yourself

If you need rationale outside of yourself in order to ease up on workaholism, remember that no one really gets the best of you if you don't nurture yourself first.

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Coming into wholeness

coming into wholeness

Coming into wholeness. Feel your peace. Be in love with your path in life.

Find it inside you. Let go of all that makes you worry. Be free.

Access this freedom any time! The truest side of you coexists with the emotional mind...

an advaita vedanta metaphor

Imagine 3 buckets of water. 

The sun is shining in all three, and they each enjoy the sun equally. One is muddy, one is stirred up, one is still and clear.

Reflection in bucket #1 is dim and dull, in bucket #2 is agitated, and in bucket #3 is peaceful. 

Sun is the Self, water is the Mind, reflection is the Ego (mis-identification)

Some conclusions...

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Can you find stillness and not stiffness?

stillness

Can you find stillness and not stiffness?

Yoga is, no doubt, a great place to work on this. Some yoga classes are all about moving fluidly with your watery nature, as you, like a dance, find your way to balance. This can help with flow in life, moving with the body we are dealt in life and becoming one with it.

life and chaos

Life brings chaos and challenge sometimes. A challenging yoga class can help you mimic this challenge and give you the chance to relax into it. You can come out ahead of the game with your head on your shoulders.

Ashtanga yoga, invigorating and fast-paced, can be a place to find stillness and calm. A serious voice that instructs while also inviting you to find softness in the strength is important, especially in your neck and trapezius muscles that support your neck—a common place to hold tension. 

expansion and contraction

Can you find the perfect balance between expansion and contraction of your muscles so that the end result is soft and still? If you cannot, your yoga could be harming you. Better yet, can you find it in your mind and spirit? It takes patience to traverse your oceans of time...

Other activities such as surfing require focus and strength. Learning how to ride nature's gem—the ocean—allows you to give yourself to it. It is pure fluid so you have no choice but to move with it. Can you find the strength in your muscles to protect you, fuel you, and help you get the most enjoyment possible, while still remaining soft and fluid, especially in the back of your neck?

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Life is a journey: Don't forget to be inspired

Life is a journey. I intend to make it worthwhile.

Be inspired

With regards to this journey it is not important what the venue, physical activity, or endeavor, or even the goal. What we make of our experience is what counts. What matters is the lessons that remain with us after we have completed whatever it is we do and how we integrate this knowledge in our hearts back into the society in which we live. It is a true life meditation to keep lessons we learn inside us and never let the magic die.

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Spiritual escape, spiritual bypass

Overwhelmed?

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed that you dropped everything and turned to your spirituality? I know I have. In fact, I have done it for days on end, which led to months and then years.

I added yoga to the mix as well as dream interpretation and psychology. Although it is all good to dig deep into yourself and find all of your secrets, it can be a double-edged sword. Is it part of the path to enlightenment, or it is a danger to avoid?

Yoga addiction

From the start what got me into yoga was the feeling of loneliness and a special group of people to practice with to stir it all up inside me. I think we were all there for the same reason. It was an escape while I was doing it, but it led to my freedom and happiness.

I was feeling bliss as if flying, yet I was also genuinely lost and ungrounded while I was not practicing yoga. I escaped my life and reality and lived in my yoga, always moving, isolating myself more and more from friends and family into my inner world. I was obsessed to meet some end, knowing on some level that the only way to open the door to peace was through this uneasiness and drama that I created.

Stop escaping

With much strength and years I was able to get a hold of the escapist manner in which I was dealing with my life. I realized I mimicked my life in my yoga! I was able to get out of the endless loop

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How to find your true power through injury

Without yoga ability, I learned

It is through an injury which brought me over my physical edge and left me unable to do my yoga practice and function in my life, that I was able to see my true power and find my true courage!

It was as if I quickly was shown what life would be like without the blessings I currently take for granted: my capable and amazing body. Through a significant injury I questioned, in a desperate way (as if the injury could be permanent), how can it be possible for me to maintain even a basic means of living? I learned how.

Our path teaches us lessons

I knew it was my path. Our path always teaches us lessons. So I tried to see this injury was a gift and I surrendered to it...

With my neck and twist intensive yoga practice I've come to rely on periodical chiropractic neck adjustments from an amazing man—a yogi, in fact—so that I could continue to do the yoga poses which brought me to the most spiritual places that were unheard of before I learned how. They truly are the key to me.

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