Quick and easy yoga: 108 easy micro-exercises to relieve stress in a minute or less

By John Carlos

Do you want to be in a better mood, stop feeling stressed and sleep better at night? You've probably heard about the health benefits of yoga. Maybe you've been meaning to try it, but you're too busy. What if there were quick and easy yoga exercises you could incorporate into your daily routine to feel and look better in sixty seconds or less? This book offers 108 easy exercises you can do anytime, anywhere, no matter how busy and stressful your schedule. This book will teach you how even small doses of yoga can become a healthy habit to relieve emotional stress, increase strength and flexibility, and help you lead a happier, healthier life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716138249

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Copyright © 2021 By John Carlos

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Introduction

Do you have a minute? In sixty seconds, or even less, you can practice yoga and experience tremendous and lasting benefits. This book is packed with quick and easy micro-exercises designed to help you incorporate powerful yoga teachings into your daily life. And they're available to almost anyone, regardless of age or level of fitness. If you are able to breathe, you can do these exercises.

No need for a yoga mat or special clothing. Despite the common misconception that yoga is primarily a form of physical exercise, this ancient discipline is actually an exercise in consciousness meant to calm your mind and connect with your true self. That is why each exercise in this book is focused on enhancing your awareness, bringing you into the present moment, and helping you find well-being in your body, mind, and soul.

You will find exercises that focus on four main aspects of yoga practice:

Postures: yoga postures, also called asanas;

Breathing: is also called pranayama, which means extension and control of prana, the term in yoga for breath, life energy or life force;

Meditation: process of focusing attention and calming chatter of the mind;

Principles : guidelines for ethical conduct, including honesty, contentment, and freedom from greed.

Some exercises primarily affect muscles and bones, others affect behavior and breathing, and still others focus on thoughts and attitudes. Over time, these micro-exercises can have significant effects including relieving pain and stress, stretching and strengthening your body, calming your mind, and lifting your spirits. And because they're so easy and quick, you can incorporate them into activities you already do, like showering, cooking, or driving, to help cultivate ease, joy, and well-being.

In our busy and stressful lives, these exercises can become moments of transformation. I sincerely hope you find them so useful that they will become enjoyable habits, bringing the myriad of benefits of the deeply healing discipline of yoga into your life.

Why micro-exercises?

The idea came to me through my own practice - I studied yoga for over thirty-five years - and my work with hundreds of yoga students and yoga therapy clients. A lot of times people tell me that they are intrigued by yoga or that they have even tried it, but they got discouraged because it was too difficult or took too long. Micro-exercises provide an easy and convenient way for people who want to get wet in the waters of yoga, which is sometimes useful to the point where they find time for prolonged exercise.

Likewise, many regular yoga students who rarely miss a class admit to never practicing it at home. For various reasons (most often no time, not sure what to do, or lack of discipline), they only practice yoga in the classroom. And yet, many are hungry for suggestions on how to increase their practice. Micro-exercises are simple and effective tools that help to initiate or deepen the practice of yoga at home, and to transfer the benefits of the yoga mat into everyday life.

My experience has taught me that inserting micro-exercises into my day has a transformative power that converts ordinary activities into sacred rituals and makes me aware of the precious gifts of the body and the breath. In this book, I share many of the micro-exercises that I do on a regular basis, such as taking a conscious breath before answering the phone, adopting a mountain pose when preparing dinner, and taking care to park properly indoors. lines. In addition, I have the honor to share exercises that have been taught to me by illustrious teachers, including Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Nobel Laureate, Mother Teresa, psychotherapist and yoga expert Stephen Cope , and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

The notion of integrating yoga into my daily life was not part of my first experiences with yoga. I also didn't recognize that attitudes like contentment or behaviors like sharing could be yoga exercises. Like many people, I believed yoga was a form of exercise and started taking a weekly yoga class, mostly for the physical benefits. I was in my early twenties as a reporter for the Washington Post and ran several miles each morning. Yoga brought flexibility to my stretched runner legs and gave me profound relief from chronic neck pain that I had developed from writing articles under very short deadlines.

Over time, however, I realized that yoga offered much more than stress reduction and physical flexibility. I found it to be a journey of self-discovery and found that the lessons learned from tackling difficult postures on my yoga mat helped me navigate complex situations at work more skillfully and at home. In addition to relieving my neck and stretching my tendons, yoga helped me become happier, healthier, and able to accommodate whatever came into my life.

50s - my practice has also changed. A serious hyponatremic attack, after drinking too much water during a marathon in Jamaica in 2003, sent me into a four-day coma and gave me a new appreciation for more in-depth yoga practices. Waking up in intensive neurological care at Duke University Medical Center, without a clue of what brought me there, was a humbling experience. I couldn't do the vigorous postures of my regular yoga practice. But I could do breathing, meditation, relaxation, and simple movement exercises, and found it to be deeply healing. My experience of being close to death taught me something that I knew intellectually but never really understood:

Then, in 2008, I had open heart surgery to replace a valve with a birth defect and repair a resulting aortic aneurysm. My yoga practice has been extremely effective in preparing for and recovering from the operation, and I have adapted it to meet my needs. Some days it was vibrant and energetic, other days it was calming and restorative. I discovered that I could practice yoga even in intensive care, although the only accessible posture was Savasana, the corpse pose: to lie still and completely surrender. Meditating, praying, listening to chants on my iPod, and seeing a positive result were all helpful yoga exercises that helped me through this difficult experience and restored me to full health.

I have also had the privilege of developing yoga exercises for others with a wide range of health conditions, from cancer and chronic pain to heart failure, osteoporosis, post-traumatic stress disorder and blindness. This work has inspired me with a deep respect for individual differences and has helped me discover safe and effective ways to guide people to cultivate self-awareness and to use the versatile tools of yoga to relieve physical and emotional suffering. .

Yoga 101

Yoga is a powerful form of medicine for the mind and body that approaches health in a holistic way, recognizing that physical ailments have emotional and spiritual components as well. At the heart of yoga is a complete system of self-development and transformation.

In Western cultures, however, the word yoga is often used to refer to posture, and progress is mistakenly measured by the ability to perform complex postures. It just goes to show that people misunderstand the purpose of yoga, a vision that illustrious Indian master yogi TKV Desikachar shared with me in 2006, in an interview he gave me for a Yoga Journal article on the healing power of meditation. He explained, Yoga is definitely not just posture. Many people perform the poses, but are they happy? They can achieve a fabulous posture, but their life is an overwhelming problem. Mastery of yoga is really measured, he added, by how it influences our day-to-day life, how it improves our relationships,

Despite the explosive popularity of yoga, or perhaps because of it, misconceptions are growing about this ancient practice that originated over five thousand years ago in India. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit word yuj, which means to mate or to unite, and the practice is intended to unify many things. Basically, yoga helps to unite the body and the mind. More deeply, it unites the individual with the universal.

When Westerners say yoga, they commonly mean hatha yoga, a branch of this ancient discipline that emphasizes physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation. There are six other main branches of yoga, all of which have the same goal, enlightenment, but take different paths. For example, karma yoga, the yoga of action, suggests doing good deeds without selfishness or attachment, and jnana yoga, the yoga of wisdom, advocates using the mind to reach levels of higher consciousness.

Hatha yoga, the yoga of physical discipline, views the body as a precious vessel that must be healthy and strong enough to support its essential nature, which is a state of consciousness.

unfazed, what some might call an immortal spirit or soul. Almost all of the western yoga classes and exercises in this book are based on hatha yoga.

Hatha yoga was designed to improve health because the ancient yogis believed that illness hinders the path to enlightenment. After all, it's hard to be still in meditation and unite with the divine when you have a throbbing headache or a sore back. Likewise, if illness or sedentary habits have caused you to be too weak or inflexible to sit comfortably, yoga postures and breathing exercises can help you regain enough health and strength to sit quietly and comfortably. meditate. Yoga helps you de-stress and nourish the vehicle that is your body, like leaving your car in the garage for maintenance or currying your horse after a good gallop. You learn to relax and release tension,

In recent years, an increasing number of scientific studies