Yoga and Healing

For most people, yoga is a great means to exercise and obtain peace of mind. But who would've thought that 20 minutes of yoga sessions each day can be beneficial to our health? Studies done on the health effects of yoga have shown that practicing yoga on a daily basis promotes inner healing.

A certain study showed that doing transcendental meditation gave practitioners a 40% – 50% drop in the thalamus and prefrontal cortex's pain response. This will prove helpful for people suffering from painful conditions like arthritis.

Aside from changing the way the brain reacts to pain, setting aside a minimum of 20 minutes for meditation and gentle yoga also proves helpful in decreasing stress symptoms like a drop in systolic blood pressure and heart rate.

Moreover, yoga has been observed to normalize insulin levels and our heart rate. This effect helps give us a protection against two of the most common chronic diseases that have claimed a lot of lives over the past years – diabetes and cardiovascular diseases like stroke and heart attacks.

A daily 20-minute meditation session has been proven effective in lowering LDL or bad cholesterol levels, again proving itself helpful in lowering a person's risks of developing cardiovascular conditions. It also helps fight cirrhosis, or liver scarring, and ward off the negative effects of autoimmune conditions.

These are only a few of the well-documented effects of doing yoga on a daily basis. If these aren't enough to convince you to give it a try, maybe this will work. We all know how medications and a trip to the doctor can be quite costly. Yoga needs no prescription to be allowed to do it, or a doctor to tell you to do it, neither does it require a room full of exercise equipment to perform. All you need is a basic grasp of the basic yoga techniques and 20 spare minutes every day to meditate your way into better health.