How Can Yoga Help with Personal Growth?

“Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives.” ~Mary Ann Brussat

Spring is a time of dawning light, new life, new birth, and new hope — a time of warmth, exuberance, dancing, and blossoming. Spring is a season of renewal and rebirth. It’s a time when buds become leaves and flowers.

As outside, so inside! Watching the leaves fluttering to the ground in the fall, we are reminded that nature’s cycles are mirrored in our lives. Autumn is a time for letting go and releasing things that have been a burden. All the religious traditions pay tribute to such acts of relinquishment. After the cleaning and letting go, here comes the spring, making way for fresh possibilities and new commitments. It’s a time to revive our senses and expand our horizons. It’s time to begin again.

Windows are open wide in the spring, carpets hang outside on the line, and the breeze is gentle and warm. It is the best time to rid yourself of unwanted accumulations, vacuum the dust, and take down cobwebs. To make way for new growth, it helps to clear our mental landscape of any destructive thoughts or feelings.

Challenge your fears. Anytime new insight replaces an old assumption or a fossilized perception is a spring. New understandings sprout, new tolerances appear, and new curiosity draws you to previously dark places. Just as the sun shines earlier and longer in the spring, changes that seemed impossible appear to be possible with each new insight into your own health.

The Cycle of Life

All forms of life are designed to adapt to their environment, becoming dormant in the autumn and reactivated in the spring. We humans are no exception. Spring is the perfect time to effect a positive change in our lives because the ever-lengthening days of warmth and light — and all of nature’s responses to them — are powerful cues for new growth.

It’s time to stimulate the growth cycle by syncing yourself with nature. The sun is the ultimate source of energy, light, and warmth for all of life on Earth. Simply witnessing the solar ascent is enough to lift our spirits, but bright sunlight also stimulates serotonin production, gifting us with a sustained elevation in mood and vitamin D production, providing us with an essential prohormone with many rejuvenating properties.

The spring wakes us, nurtures us, and revitalizes us. So, if spring is in our minds, we do not have to check the calendar and be restricted by it. We can bring our own spring more than once a year.

Yoga practices open up the “spring state” of mind. By practicing asana, pranayama, meditation, or OM chanting, we nurture and revitalize our inner self.

We evolve!

Creating the fertile ground of the peaceful mind is what we need to do and then just observe silently the inner world blossom, spreading its fragrance outside.

The Power of Asanas: A Path to Psychological and Spiritual Growth

Amongst the yoga practices, the most practiced one is asana. The health benefits of asanas are very well known, be it flexibility, strength, or the soothing effects on the mind. If we learn to look beyond… asanas release trapped energy improving our sense of well-being. Asanas give a firm foundation to psychological and spiritual growth. The movement to get into an asana is the journey towards stillness. We learn to accept. The breath awareness during asana elevates asana… the physical posture to a higher level of experience.

Pranayama: Breathing Awareness and Inner Peace

Engaging the mind with breath awareness starts a positive creative process toward meaningful progress. Pranayama takes us from gross to subtle. The mind calms down. Fine-tunes our awareness on the journey inward. Peace becomes the natural state of mind.

It’s astounding how quickly your creativity unleashes itself in the fertile ground of a peaceful mind. The creative impulse seems to be activated as soon as there’s a little breathing space in your mind. Spring season strikes. Seemingly from out of nowhere, a spark of creativity is ignited and you have a vision, plus the optimism and enthusiasm, and even a sense of urgency, to bring it into being. Suddenly, you find yourself doing things that were found to be difficult earlier.

Finding Yourself Through Yoga: Rediscover Life’s Joys and Foster Your Creativity

To tap into our potential, we simply need to make space for it. Too often the creative aspect of the Self gets hidden or pushed aside in the hustle and stress of everyday life. Whoever you are, whatever you are seeking, you rely on creativity to meet everyday challenges. And you thrive on its ability to fill your life with beauty, purpose, and meaning.

If we are in sync with nature we may realize that our creativity as humans, our creative impulse is related to the evolutionary impulse of the universe. There is vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action.

Creating authentic power is continual spring-cleaning. That power can be created by adopting yoga as the way of life. Awareness built by practicing asana, and pranayama will bring forth what’s to be discarded… the “unwanted” emotions, the destructive habits, and behavior within us. All those unwanted things …waiting to be uprooted and thrown out. Giving way to the emergence of a new self. The self that is ready to create the life that is calling you–a life of more joy and less pain, more freedom and less limitation, more love and less fear!

So, your spring is here…. Right on your yoga mat!