Prepare to Guide Your Self-Talk During Yoga Class

I found relief, released anxiety and overcame panic attacks when I started to approach each yoga class as though the beginning moves, the main part of the flow, and the final phase of the class all had a different purpose.

1) The first twenty minutes of the yoga class is to detox my emotional centers from the physical chemicals of stress, anger, grief and anxiety.

2) The main flow sequence of the workout is dedicated to breath awareness, calming your thoughts and coming to a still mind.

3) And finally, the most important posture of of each yoga class is shavasana, when we are rehearsing the feelings of gratitude, accomplishment and self-love.

Shadow-Guide Yourself In Yoga Class

I set the intention to talk myself through different parts of each yoga class for a progressive purpose. Most times the yogi guiding my yoga classes are great, yet they are more often focused on the fitness aspects and not as comfortable getting into quantum physics of yoga, epi-genetics and psychoneuroimmunology aspects of meditation…

…and I get it. I’m pretty specialized.

The first 10 minutes of the hour long yoga class is to breath deeply, warm up and detox the stress from the day. If we breath in for the count of three and exhale for the count of five, at 8 seconds per breath, we have 480 conscious breaths to focus on in this hour.

In the next 30 minutes, I focus on the slow, conscious breathing technique I created, in coordination with the movement through each move of the sequence. I talk myself through calming the thinking brain and sensing the pose while maintaining the many layered aspects of the breathing method - calming my thoughts and coming to a still mind.

The last 20 minutes of the yoga class is when I look into my eyes in the mirror and I review the emotion on my face. I’m not just putting on a mask, but I know that in these calm moments, I can rehearse emotions that I cannot feel while my brain is in high beta.

The main intent of going to a yoga class is so that we can re-train the body's emotional center by intentionally practicing the habit, the pose, the posture of feeling gratitude, accomplishment and self-love.

During every yoga class, I remind myself of how I am basking my energy centers with the healing chemicals and hormones of happiness.

From the deep and elongated breathwork during yoga, I begin to breath more naturally as the class ends, with the intention of ‘keeping’ those happy emotional chemicals in my body.

Class after class after class, I know that I am retraining that emotional center in my body just as surely as I am improving the strength and flexibility of my muscles.

When we clear our body of the toxic chemicals of stress, calm our mind and change our brain state through these breath techniques - we release traumas, we melt stress and open a path to healthier and happier living.

Yoga Is Not Enough

We can attain joy, just as surely as we can attain fitness. Yet joy will not occur as a side effect of physical yoga practice.

Cultivating the feelings of joy, gratitude and satisfaction is an intentional practice - just as you gain skill in each pose in your yoga movement sequence, you will gain skill in maintaining these higher feelings.

Science shown that our habitual thoughts can alter the neural pathways in our brain. Through intentional thought, we have the capacity to change our brain.

Knowing that we are changing our brain with the stories we tell ourselves, we can be purposeful in rehearsing the emotions in our meditations at the end of class.

In other words, we can create our own mental movie of our success, and then practice calling up the emotions of this triumph during shavasana pose!

The best meditations can starting with generic mantras of wellbeing combined with personal mental mo

vies watching your self acting with selfcare and feeling gratitude, and empathy.

Think of potential events and possible successes in the future, and feel the emotion of that achievement in the present, as you are finishing each yoga practice.