When it comes to practicing self-care and mindfulness, you don’t need to wait until the weekend to reset your body and your mind. In fact, there are many mindfulness exercises that you can do even during a busy day at work. Here’s how to practice mindfulness in the office.
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Monday Meditation: Grow Roots Like a Tree
Visualizing and focusing on a specific image during meditation can help enhance your focus, reduce anxiety, and improve your mood levels. Certain images are especially effective in grounding the self and bringing about feelings of calm.
Take the image of a tree, for example. A tree represents grounding but growth. It is fully rooted to the earth yet continues to grow skyward. Below is a meditation to help you keep grounded and calm but feel expansive and full of possibilities.
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Monday Meditation: A Mind Like the Sky
Some days, the mind feels especially loud, restless, and volatile. This can leave us feeling upset and overwhelmed. However, meditation can help calm and quiet the thoughts, and reveal the true nature of the mind.
Here’s a meditation that you can do, to experience a mind like the sky.
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5 Yoga Steps for Better Digestion
Yoga has an entire alphabet of benefits. Not only does it help you build strength and flexibility, but it also helps aid digestion and metabolism, support healthy elimination, and boost internal organ health.
Below are 4 yoga steps for better digestion.
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Monday Meditation: A Self Forgiveness Meditation Script
Forgiving oneself can be more difficult than forgiving others. However, remember that forgiveness is a conscious decision that one must make each day. It isn’t something you simply achieve in a single moment—it requires practice and effort, as well as the willingness to let go.
To practice forgiveness, then, is a way to gradually release yourself from grief and cultivate self-love. Below is a self forgiveness meditation script that you may find helpful.
Begin seated or lying down. You may sit down comfortably on a chair or cushion. You may also lie down on your back on your bed or yoga mat. Scan the body from the tips of your toes all the way to the crown of your head. Feel the rhythm and cadence of your breath. Then when you are ready to begin your meditation, begin to observe your emotions.
Notice any emotions and emotional barriers are rooted within you, from having carried grief, pain, and all the other hurts that come with struggling with self forgiveness.
Observe the physical sensations that come with these emotions. Do you feel heavy and weighed down? Is there a knot in your chest? There is no need to judge or resist these emotions and sensations. Simply observe them, and allow them to flow through you.
As you continue to be aware of and pay attention to your emotions, make the intention to let everything go—from the sorrowful experiences that you’ve had in the past, to the pain that you carry with you now. Let your body be soft and your breath be gentle, as you tell yourself: I forgive myself for all the ways I have hurt myself and others. I invite forgiveness into my heart. I forgive myself.
Continue to repeat this phrase to yourself, for as long as you desire. Most importantly, be patient. If you still feel angry or hurt even when the meditation is over, tell yourself that forgiveness is a process as much as meditation is a practice.
When you feel that your meditation is over, come back into your body and breath. Wiggle the fingers and the toes, and allow gentle movement to ground you back to the present moment. Open the eyes, and be grateful for the time and space that you’ve given yourself.
A Quick Guide to Sun Salutations
If you’re new to your yoga practice, you might have heard your instructor call out a sun salutation and then suddenly gone through a chain of invigorating, revitalizing, and especially challenging postures. It’s completely normal for the whole sequence to feel confusing, especially if you’re a beginner—but rest assured it will get easier and more familiar with dedicated practice.
If you’re a seasoned practitioner, though, your sun salute may already feel like home. But still, you might wonder where this iconic sequence originated from and what exactly it does to your body. Below, we break down your surya namaskar for you!
What is a Sun Salutation?
A sun salutation—or surya namaskar—is a seamless chain of poses or asanas. It builds internal heat and energy in the body, and is typically practiced in synchronization with the breath. It has a meditative quality to it, and promotes focus and concentration across the sequence.
According to Yoga Journal, this sequence is argued to be at least 2,500 years old (or possibly older) and was once practiced as a ritual performed at dawn. The ancient yogis believed that “each of us replicates the world at large,” and that we each embody nature.
The sun, in particular, represents our subtle heart. This is why each sun salutation begins and ends with a hands in prayer against the heart—the heart is the seat of wisdom.
That said, a sun salutation should be performed with love, devotion, adoration, and acknowledgment of our emotions. It is a flow that attunes us to our “inner sun.”
What Makes up a Sun Salutation?
There are different variations of the sun salute. Below is Surya Namaskar A, which you can find in any Vinyasa Flow class.
1. Tadasana
Stand tall at the top of your mat. Ground down through your feet, engage the quadriceps, and squeeze the inner thighs. Draw the tailbone down and lift the lower belly up. Relax the shoulders away from your ears. Energize your fingertips down, as you lengthen the crown of the head up to the sky. Feel yourself grounded to the earth, yet connected to the sky.
2. Urdhva Hastasana
Still standing in Tadasana, inhale and lift your arms up towards the sky. Keep the ribcage hugging in and the shoulders drawing away from the ears. Spread the fingertips as you lengthen the spine and the arms up.
3. Uttanasana
As you exhale, dive down and fold forward. Bend the knees, as you take both palms down flat on the mat. Shift your weight to the balls of your feet. Keep your spine long and press the belly towards the thighs. Reach the crown of the head down to the floor.
4. Plank
Ground down onto the palms and push with the arms. Inhale, step one leg back followed by the other until you come into your high plank. Reach the heels of the feet back behind you. Squeeze the glutes and the inner thighs. Hug the belly and the ribs in. Continue to push with the arms.
5. Chaturanga Dandasana
Squeeze the inner thighs and the glutes, hug the triceps into your ribs, as you exhale and shift forward and lower all the way down with control. You may modify this by taking your knees down onto the mat.
6. Urdhva Mukha Svanasana
Inhale, press the palms onto the mat and straighten the arms. Lift your thighs off the mat, reach the heart forward and open up the chest. This backbend is also known as upward facing dog.
7. Adho Mukha Svanasana
From upward facing dog, tuck the toes underneath you. Push down with the hands and engage the arms, as you lift the hips up and exhale to come into downward facing dog.
Press the heels of your feet down to the earth. Push your hamstrings behind you and squeeze the inner thighs. Press the hips up towards the sky. Bring the chest closer to the thighs as you create an inverted V shape with your body. Hug the ribcage in. Broaden across the upper back as you mindfully push with both arms.
From downward facing dog, complete the sequence by looking forward and stepping one foot forward followed by the other. You will find yourself briefly in your uttanasana or forward fold.
Then, press down through the feet and inhale to reach the arms up towards the sky. Exhale and seal your palms together with gratitude. Release your hands back down on either side of your hips. You will find yourself in tadasana once again.
