5 Ways to Improve Your Emotional Health with Yoga
Do Your Emotions Exhaust You?
Our emotions are like a pinball machine, bouncing from one extreme to the other. This can play havoc with your mental and emotional well-being and is exhausting, right?
In my teens and twenties, I thought that being balanced equals being boring and that the intensity of the highs and lows meant that I was living an exciting life.
Thank God I was able to let go of this belief.
Our emotions will always be there. Nature’s flow is up and down, and we can’t change that.
What we can change, and both Yoga & Ayurveda advocate strongly, is our approach or response to situations out of our control.
Yoga is often seen as a physical discipline and disregarded for its impact on the mind and mental/emotional health. However, Yoga is a discipline for the mind. The asanas (Yoga postures) keep our body healthy, for sure, but they are equally means to reach the mind and calm it.
The rollercoaster nature of our mind stems from its innate tendency to like and dislike, which leaves us forever concerned with getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t like. We bounce around like a pinball.
As mentioned in earlier posts, the likes and dislikes are fuelled by our senses. We are unable and also don’t want to, switch the senses off as they are vital to us. Therefore, we need to find another way to stay centred between the pull to the like and the recoil from the dislike.
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What does Yoga recommend, then?
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali recommends starting with our attitude. We must start with ourselves because we can’t control the world around us with its temptations and nuisances. One piece of advice for staying balanced is:
01. Our attitude
By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind retains its undisturbed calmness.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras 1.33
My teacher regarded this Sutra as the most important one to practise. Cultivating the above attitude helps us work with our feelings of envy, jealousy, or schadenfreude. If we feel smug, superior, or unable to mind our own business, our minds will not be at rest. Think about how frequently you react to people’s remarks; notice your feelings when you see that your neighbour/friend has and you always wanted, your feelings when you know the misfortune of someone who has mistreated you in the past, etc.
As mentioned above, it is not in our power to control what others say to us, how they behave towards us, they buy or get the job that we secretly want. Only our attitude towards these events can bring calm to our minds.
02. Yoga Postures
Do you love the way you feel after a Yoga session? All relaxed and clear, all stress, frustration, and irritation from before has washed off, and you are back to your old lovely self. This is the most single feedback I receive from my students, “I am so relaxed after the session” and “I feel so much better than before the session”. Why is that?
During the Yoga session, the mind stays in the body, in the here and now. It is busy with keeping the body in a particular position. For example, when you practise Triangle pose, your body needs to keep the legs engaged, bent to the side, rotate the spine, spread the arms out the side and look up. At the same time, you might direct the breath into the open side, have a strong foundation in the legs and pelvis and ease in the upper body. Lots going on, right? In fact, too much to think about shopping lists or morning getting-ready-stress.
For an hour or so, you keep your mind actively concerned with the body by focusing on coordinating breathing and holding everything together. You are in the present tense. There is no time to hop forth and back. And this relaxes your nervous system, mind and, consequently, you.
Try it out. I'm sharing here a 15-minute floor-based practice; please let me know how you feel afterwards if you can experience the above
03. The Breath
Yoga has always been aware of the power of the breath. Directed breath or pranayama has been an integral part of Yoga to gain clarity.
Then, the breath transcends the level of consciousness. YSII.51?
In the 50ies, an Austrian-born endocrinologist discovered the stress response. The connection between deep abdominal breathing and its effect on your nervous system, taking it from stress to rest and digest mode, from the sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system.
Deep breathing during the Yoga practice keeps the circulation going and takes you naturally into rest and digest mode; hence, you feel relaxed at the end of the session.
The Yoga Sutras tell us in I.30, amongst others, that disturbance in the breath is a sign of a distracted mind and recommends controlled exhalation or retention to retain calm.
Try this 10-minute, 3-part breathing practice to see the power of the breath.
04. Food
Eating has two aspects to it.
Life’s turbulences often result in emotional eating or no eating at all. When we get stressed, our eating patterns change. In Ayurveda, this is a sign that Vata is going to change too, which leads on the emotional side to anxiety, worries, and overwhelm. To stay emotionally balanced, eating regular meals is essential. That way, the body knows it gets nourished, doesn’t get stressed, and doesn’t build up nervous energy. Ongoing stress within the body leads to inflammation.
Ayurveda recommends not to eat when we are upset or angry and not to have an argument while eating. And not to eat alone if possible.
The second aspect is the three universal qualities, the Gunas: balance, activity and inertia or sattva, rajas and tamas.
These qualities are present in the food as well.
All fresh and wholesome food is sattvic; it doesn’t irritate the body or the mind but nourishes and brings clarity.
Rajasic food activities are chillies, for example, tomatoes, onions, garlic, bell peppers, yoghurt, and fermented food. It irritates both the body and the mind. Eating predominantly rajasic food makes you feel irritable, and anger comes up faster.
Tamasic food is old and stale, as are any processed food, mushrooms, and all nightshades, unripe and overripe foods. Tamasic food makes the mind dull.
Eating predominantly sattvic food keeps us mentally clear and uplifted; we make sound decisions.
05. Staying connected
This is not a specific Yoga recommendation.
This is my behaviour pattern. In times of turbulence, I tend to draw inward and isolate myself. It can be helpful to figure problems out and gain clarity. But after a while, we need to connect and talk to others again.
When we are on our own figuring things out, our minds can go down all sorts of unhealthy avenues and turn in circles.
Connecting and talking to others helps us to realise that the mountain building up in front of us is lower than it seems. New ideas surface. We feel stronger when we are together.
Final Thoughts
Incorporating yoga into our daily routine can be a gentle yet powerful way to navigate the ups and downs of our emotional landscape.
By focusing on our breath and movements, we create a space of calm and clarity amidst life's inevitable storms. This isn't about silencing our emotions but learning to flow with them more gracefully.
Yoga teaches us that peace isn't found in stillness alone but in the ability to remain centred, even when life spins around us. Let's embrace these practices not just as exercises for the body but as nourishment for our emotional well-being, finding balance one breath at a time.
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Have you learned something new? Can you relate to it? Let me know. You can leave a message below, on Instagram, Facebook or even good old email.
I love hearing from you!
Katja x
P.S. Remember the importance of healthy eating habits.
