The Benefits of Yoga and Meditation in Daily Life

Okay I’ve just pulled up at Yoga and I was starting to think about why I love yoga so much. I don’t know how many of you do yoga. Or some of you go the gym or cross fit or run or walk. Yoga for me since I retired has just been amazing. Competing every day of my life for 20 years at Olympic level, just I sort of burnt out the competitive flame a little bit and yoga is non competitive. There’s no one to compare yourself against, there’ no competition. It’s just you in your own body getting leaner and longer and stronger every single time you come. And more flexible of course.

And often in yoga practice we do a lot of meditation and a lot of mindfulness and breathing. And people you know when we talk about that topic, often people say I don’t know how to meditate or when I try to meditate I can’t stop my thoughts, so I’m not very good at it. So they don’t do it. Well meditation is not really about stopping your thoughts. It’s about just being aware of them it’s about noticing them passing through. It’s about going back to your breath and trying to really just calm yourself down. So I once heard that meditation is not going to sit on top of a hill in a quiet space and really being at one with yourself there because anyone can do that over time.

THE BENEFITS OF MEDITATION

But meditation is being able to slow your mind down and your heart beat down in the middle of Times Square in New York. So if you can meditate in the middle of Times Square and it doesn’t mean you have to sit and close your eyes. It means that you can just be at peace. And really if things are going wrong, if there’s problems in your life, if you have thoughts of speeding up, just slowing them down. So there’s no way that if you’ve got hundreds of thousands of thoughts going through your head and there’s big things going at work or in your relationship that you can just grind them to a halt. So it’s about learning how to just slow them down, reverse the speed cycle and just a little bit helps you be calmer during the day.

HOW MEDITATION HELPS

So when I played and the opposition was getting on top of us, when I played volleyball. And all the thought of oh my god what do I have to do for my technique, what I have to do for the scoreboard, what I have to do the opposition, how can we win! All of those thoughts go through your head! Meditation really helped between points. So we had 12 seconds between points and really used two or three of those seconds to calm my mind. So just have a think about whether that would be good for you. Meditation is just taking time out for you. So I encourage you this week to take some time out for you and it doesn’t need to be in a practice or going somewhere specific but just sit lie stand take some time out for you. Have a good week.