Why yoga can make you a better parent

     Have you ever felt disconnected from your children? Feel wrapped up in your own emotions?  Have difficulty understanding what your child’s behavior is telling you?  Whether you have a child who challenges your patience occasionally or challenges you up a wall on a regular basis, there is no doubt that parenting is hard work.  It takes a clear mind and a strong mental discipline to respond to your child in an appropriate way as they go about their business of becoming who they are. 

     Good parenting is rooted in awareness and consistent reactions to the behaviors that you want to shape. Sometimes we are simply unaware of our child because of our own emotions and mental clutter. Sometimes we are inappropriate or inconsistent in our reactions, and so we create confusion for them. Since our goal is to show love and bring out the positive qualities of our children, we must be mindful of our own behaviors and emotional reactions when we are with them.  

     Yoga, which means “to yoke” or “to unite” the body, mind, and spirit, is excellent practice for emotional and mental awareness.  Sharing the practice of yoga with an experienced teacher in a small class is a supportive system of healthfulness and mental calm that can be transferred easily into the home.  A consistent yoga practice is a training ground for diffusing and processing the negative emotional and mental clutter that prevents good parenting. It then it becomes so much easier to see when heavy emotions arise in your daily life and can determine how to best deal with them without negatively impacting yourself or your family.  

Getting better connected with yourself and your mental processes through yoga and mindfulness will result in better parenting. When your emotional and mental climate is easily observed from the inside, the results will be seen and felt from the outside.  Children, being natural absorbers of our emotional climate, will feel more secure with their boundaries when we can more easily observe our own. 

What yoga can do for your MEMORY

     Forgetting something lately but you can’t remember what it is?  This is a common symptom of overstressed, overworked brains.  Information overload from the endless distraction of computers, television, advertisements, magazines, and video games can actually make you more likely to forget simple things.

      When absorbed regularly and without limit, these types of distractions are like a mental junk food: we eat it to feel satisfied but it doesn’t do anything to truly nourish us AND it leaves us feeling tired, with a lesser mood.  Mental junk food, just like its edible counterpart, creates stress on the brain because it can’t digest it properly.  The effects of prolonged mental stress strain our lives, our relationships, our peace of mind, and our adrenal glands leaving us with mental clutter, stirring negative thoughts, and a feeling of being quite unsatisfied. 

     The keys to memory are the amount of attention we pay to doing something, the positive feelings derived from the action or the outcome, and the importance of the thing or event.  Yoga is effective for the three keys to memory since the first order of business in a yoga class is to notice the present moment by paying attention to our breathing.  Once our breath is steady and deep, we begin the physical stretches and poses, called asanas (ah-SA-nas), that bring us to how we feel in our bodies.  As we move deeper into attention to our own bodies, our minds relax and we notice more positive feelings arise with little or no commentary from our brains, just good feelings of spaciousness, lightness, and energy.  Getting used to noticing good feelings on the mat can hook us into the state of mindfulness that is needed toward things of importance in our daily lives. 

     Lastly, yoga is a form of gentle mental discipline to draw attention to one thing at a time. We can best learn and remember what we give proper attention to, what we derive positive feelings from and feel is important.  We think you are important, too. Come visit us.