During my week in Devon, I have to say, I’ve been pretty lazy! My days have consisted of yoga, eating, reading and lazing in the hotub, which has been bliss.
Some good has come out of this though.
I gained a lot of clarity over the week and a lot of that has come from my yoga practice. I’m moving things forward in one area of my business and re-jigging the website to make it more user-friendly. From a personal perspective, I feel more able to connect with people and allowing myself to be more open.
I know a lot of people think yoga is one of two things – fashionable stretches for ‘hip’ people, or hippy crap.
I suppose depending on which class you go to it could be that, but if you take a little time to delve in to yoga’s 5000 year old history, and look in to some of the current scientific research, you realise that actually there’s a lot in yoga that could benefit the modern stressed out human.
Due to my being super -inflexible at the moment, I’ve been doing some gentle yoga but focusing more on Yoga Nidra and meditation, which focuses the mind on complete relaxation and awareness. For the hypnotherapists out there, it’s like a very focused PMR.
This awareness focuses internally rather than externally so you get a really weird calm, peaceful feeling, which tends to bring along various insights and clarity as the mind is focused on what is true to you instead of being distracted by what’s going on outside and around you.
I’m going to carry on doing yoga nidra for 15 minutes a day for a month and see how it goes. I’ll continue to post on here about my experiences and if it’s useful, maybe I’ll make it a habit!
This experiment does have a bigger use though. Having been ‘doing’ yoga for around nine years now, and having completed my hypnotherapy training (and continuing to study for my psychotherapy qualifications) I am keen to look at how yoga can be integrated in to modern therapy.
There’s lots of info out there and yoga therapy is now registered by the CNHC (although this seems to focus more on the physical therapy side of yoga rather than the psychological side I am thinking of) so I know more people are seeing the benefits of it, but there’s a whole lot more out there.
By integrating yogic techniques in to my life and posting about the results from a therapist’s viewpoint, I can look at how best to integrate these techniques in to my work.
In the meantime, if this is something that interests you, leave a comment or send me a message and share your experiences / ask me your questions. I’m no expert but I could probably point you in the right direction.