What Benefits Yoga Has Brought Me

Let’s discover annie’s story about what yoga has brought her.

You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure: yoga changed my life, yoga made me a better person, yoga elevated me to a higher spiritual plane where only goddesses live, etc. Perhaps you’ve listened to people say things like this, nodded and then thought ‘yeah, right’.

Well I’m here to tell you that it’s… well, not that it’s ALL true, but I’m certainly here to tell you that yoga is something that is hugely worth doing (even if the benefits don’t include a gorgeous, bendy yogi other half – sadly not the case with me).

So what’s yoga brought to my life?

Strength

It’s not just a line; yoga really does make you stronger. When I first started practising yoga, I was like Bambi on ice every time I tried to hold a downward dog for more than 5 seconds (picture legs and arms slipping from under me and going splat on the mat).

My chaturanga would just be a face-plant. Every balancing pose involved hanging onto the wall for dear life.

I stuck at it (with as few witnesses as possible) and after about six months I noticed something strange about my arms. Could it be… muscle? It was indeed and I spent the next few days asking everyone I saw to feel my new arm muscles.

Unsurprisingly, no one was very keen.

But for me it was an absolute first. At last, gratifyingly, a friend said ‘well that’s new – where did they come from?’ This allowed me to do one of my favourite things – talk about yoga.

A party trick

Yoga has given me this new party trick: I can touch my toes. More than that, I can put my hands under my toes. That’s always a fun one to whip out when conversation starts to dry up!

This advantage goes hand-in-hand with strength, really, and is the other key word you hear associated with yoga practice: flexibility. The old ‘yoga = strength + flexibility’ equation is used so much that people get bored of it, but it is used so much for a reason.

I began going to yoga classes at a nearby centre which just happened to cater to a lot of retired people, so I was the youngest in my class. It used to be very dispiriting to be among a group of over-60s casually bending themselves into Uttanasana while my hands stayed firmly no further than my knees.

But time and practice and breathing a LOT during poses worked their magic and finally my body started to loosen up, to stretch and to flex.

While I won’t be doing pretzels any time soon, yoga’s meant I’m less embarrassingly like the Tin Man.

A gateway drug

One of the biggest things yoga has brought me is actually not yoga, it’s running. You might have gathered by now that I wasn’t exactly the fittest human being in the world; exercise always escaped me somehow and I never would have thought that I’d be able to run further than 10 metres.

So far this year I’ve run two half-marathons. Well, I say ‘run’: it’s kind of a combination of staggering, panting and plodding, but still more than seemed possible 3 years ago. Thank you, yoga!

Yoga acted as my gateway drug to more exercise. It got my sluggish body moving and got me wanting more. It is still my first and truest love, of course, and now it complements a new running addiction.  

Time-filler

Remember the old days, when you’d come home, sit on the sofa until it was time to make dinner, then eat, then sit on the sofa some more?

No longer, because now I have yoga! It’s the perfect thing to do to fill a spare 30 minutes here, a free hour there. And it’s cheaper and healthier than going to the pub.

It’s not just about filling time, though, it’s about carving out time to myself. The nature of my job means I am talking all the time, running around like a headless chicken and constantly solving problems (I suppose it’s the nature of most jobs, to be fair). But with yoga, all of that just… stops. I have time to breathe and to empty my mind; it makes me calmer and less stressed and therefore better at everything else I do.

Ah ha, I knew I’d manage to sneak in the ‘yoga makes me a better person’ spiel somewhere! It’s no spiel, though – it’s a fact.

An excuse to wear activewear a lot

No explanation needed – who doesn’t want to wear a succession of fun leggings and soft, loose tops?

So that’s me – what’s yoga brought you?