The Five Principles of Yoga
The five principles of yoga are essential in maintaining a balance and harmony in our body and mind. Following these 5 principles will help you to restore and improve your health. The five principles of yoga are as follows:
- Pranayama or proper breathing pattern to purify your mind – The various breathing techniques and exercises in pranayama teach you how to use your lungs to their best capacity. This optimizes the function of the lungs and boosts its capacity. It also teaches you how to control your breath. When you learn to control your breath you automatically learn to control your mind along with it and that helps to get rid of all the unwanted thoughts and actions. Thus it prevents stress and tension, helps you to think clearly and sensibly and helps to boost your memory as well.
- Proper yoga asanas or postures to improve your physical health – Your body needs to move to be flexible and to ensure optimum function of your system to flush out toxins and help the blood to circulate freely. These asanas or postures must be done correctly and in a slow controlled manner for them to have the desired effect on the body. Excessive practice or incorrect way of practice may result in overheating of the body and may have adverse effects.
- Proper Relaxation for calming and rejuvenating the body and mind – After practicing yoga asanas or postures the body gets stretched and heated and it is necessary to cool the body for relaxing it. There are several techniques in yoga that helps to do this. One of them is the Shava asana or the corpse pose that is done after the yoga practice to completely relax the body.
- Meditation and Positive thinking – Practicing both these will greatly help in your daily life as it will get rid of all negative thoughts and will keep you calm, peaceful and happy. It will also improve the way you look at life and will greatly lower the stress.
- Proper Diet – This is extremely important as what you eat directly affects your body. Hence you should make it a point to eat fresh and healthy foods. Your daily diet should be well balanced with adequate nutrients to fully nourish your body. You must eat the right amount that your body requires and should avoid overeating. Also void eating highly refined and processed junk foods as they cause more harm to your body.
