No matter what you’re struggling with, pursuing rehabilitation means you’re trying to create a better life for yourself. You are seeking to return to the life you once had — or you’re trying to build the life you’ve always dreamed of.
Whatever your reason, you’re gearing up to fight for the tomorrow you want. Rehab will get you there. It won’t be easy, but there are things you can do to smooth the path and make it more successful. And there’s probably no tool more powerful in supporting your rehabilitation than yoga. Read on to learn more about how you can use yoga to aid in your healing and achieve the peace and stability you need as you recover.
One of the most significant benefits of yoga is its capacity to help manage pain. Whether your pain is acute or chronic, whether it is due to illness or injury, yoga can help to calm both the mind and the body. This is essential when you are experiencing pain because stress only exacerbates the body’s pain responses, making your body more reactive and more sensitive to discomfort. Yoga’s combined focus on breathing, meditation, and slow, gentle movement is not only calming, but it’s also mood-enhancing, triggering the release of endorphins, which also helps to reduce pain.
Not only this, but yoga also helps to enhance your flexibility and strength, both of which you can quickly lose when pain makes you still and sedentary. Maintaining muscular strength and flexibility can help you reduce spasticity and hold your bones, joints, and spine in a healthier and more comfortable alignment while reducing the risk of re-injury.
Perhaps one of the most difficult battles we can face in life is the one against addiction. Your drug of choice doesn’t have to be opioids, alcohol, or narcotics. It can be food, gambling, shopping, or social media. An addiction can be anything that you find it difficult to break away from, even though it detracts from your life rather than contributing to it.
Yoga can help you conquer your addiction by changing not only your behavioral patterns but also, especially, by changing your thought patterns. Yoga can help you develop a more positive and productive outlook on life while also providing you with the tools you need to manage stress, anxiety, and negative thoughts. Yoga can give you strategies for coping with the personal challenges that gave rise to the addiction in the first place, allowing you to redirect those self-destructive impulses in a positive direction.
You don’t have to be a soldier to have PTSD. Any severe trauma can lead to the disorder, including the trauma of the addiction, illness, or injury that led you to rehabilitation in the first place. As the name suggests, PTSD refers to a disordered, pathological, chronic stress response to a past traumatic event.
Central to yoga, as we’ve already seen, is the reduction of stress and the calming of the mind, body, and spirit. The uplifting, stress-relieving neurochemicals produced through yogic meditation, breathing, and exercise act as an antagonist to cortisol and other stress-related hormones that are overproduced in PTSD, soothing the body at both the psychological and neurological levels.
It’s easy to discount the health effects of work-related stress, but too much of it can cause harm to your body and mind. It can raise your blood pressure, cause headaches, and worsen your sleep, which is bad enough for your physical health. However, it can also cause anxiety, depression, and mood swings, which are all detrimental to your mental health.
Yoga provides a healthy outlet for stress. Peace is a rare thing, and the serenity yoga provides can be a lifesaver after a long day at work.
There’s no such thing as a bad yoga session, but there are some things you can do to make the most of your yoga experience. First, when you practice meditation as a part of your yoga regimen, you need to do it mindfully. That means establishing a fixed daily schedule (ideally twice a day) for your sessions and entering each session with focus, intention, and respect. Your sessions should be treated as a priority in your daily routine, a sacred period of self-care.
You should also reserve a particular space for your daily yoga sessions, whether you are practicing meditation or both meditation and exercise in your yoga routine. Your space should be calming and uncluttered. Ideally, it should be a roomy space with lots of natural light. No matter what, it should be a space you feel comfortable and peaceful in.
Whether you’re battling addiction, illness, stress, or injury, the road to recovery is often long and difficult. You may find yourself discouraged, angry, or even afraid at times. However, yoga can be a potent weapon in your fight for a new and better life, helping you to calm your mind, body, and spirit, even as you rediscover your physical, emotional, and mental strength.