The Amazing Benefits I Never Expected From Yoga

And the surprising effects of a daily practice

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

I’ve been an athlete since I can remember. Growing up, I loved riding my bike, skateboarding, and swimming recreationally and competitively.

I liked gym class and took weight lifting as an elective. If there was a sport, I was even remotely decent at, I tried out for the team. I played basketball, ran track and cross country, and continued swimming into my 20s.

As an only child of a single parent, team sports provided me with a sense of community and belonging that was remiss in my home. I was drawn to the loyalty and inclusion of sports and felt accepted.

Post-college, my tastes shifted to sports that included aspects of adventure. I began hiking, rock and ice climbing, and progressed into high-altitude mountaineering.

Participating in adventure sports meant I needed to either train like hell for six to twelve months leading up to an expedition to 1. Get into shape, and 2. Be strong and conditioned for the challenge at hand. Or, I could maintain a modest baseline of fitness and train a bit harder for a few months before the trip.

I’ve naively done both throughout the years and have come to prefer the latter. The suffering is substantially less.

Practice Begins

My first experience with yoga was through a classic vinyasa flow class at a mega gym franchise near my house. I was training to climb Denali, a 20,310-foot mountain in Alaska, and wanted to add an active recovery day into my weekly regimen.

I’d heard about the mind, body, and spiritual benefits of yoga and thought, “Why not give it a shot?” Worst case, I’ll get a good stretch and can add on time in the gym after class if I feel the need.

My challenge wasn’t that the class was bad or didn’t suit my physical needs. The real challenge was that I wasn’t mentally or spiritually present or consciously awake enough to be in tune with the mindful culture and essence of yoga at that time in my life.

While my physical fitness was in high gear, my mental health, spiritual sense, and emotional awareness were desolate.

I was a perfectionist, busyness addict who sought worthiness through doing, recognition, and achievement. I thought I had to be in the driver’s seat, orchestrating the minutia of my seemingly successful path.

The lifeblood principles of yoga are presence in the now, humble spirituality, and mindful movement while following each breath.

No wonder I was terrified. It was the exact opposite of my assiduous state.

I sat distressed by the stillness and how it may affect my seemingly comfortable disguise.

The Real Healing

The Universe has a crafty way of keeping my ego in check.

Right when I was at my physical prime, I injured a disc in my lumbar spine from over-training and carrying too much weight on Denali, causing my right leg to be numb from the knee down. For two years after, if I was awake, I was in pain.

The epicenter was in the meat of my right gluteals in the piriformis. The pain pulsed down the outer edge of my leg like a live electrical wire that was freed in a storm. Forceful, raging, and creating chaos.

Living with constant pain created an incessant outpouring of irrational thoughts, feelings, and at times actions. I felt helpless, like my body was waging war against me from the inside out.

Yoga guided healing and grace for the distress that encapsulated my mind and body.

I had moved to Southern California, and it seemed there was a yoga studio on just about every corner. The classes were small and a bit expensive but overflowed with genuine personal attention and a sense of community.

It was exactly what I needed. Being in the studio nourished tiny seeds of peace in my pain-ridden body and brought back effervescent memories of acceptance and belonging from my team sports days.

Most of the instructors were real yogis. People that didn’t just teach a random class on a gym schedule. These were folks whose belief systems aligned with the ancient practice's traditions, mantras, and nuances.

I committed to showing up. “Just go,” I would tell myself. Each class, I learned a little bit more, could hold a pose and follow my breath for five seconds longer.

Those five seconds added up, and eventually feeling crept slowly down my leg until one day, it reached my toes.

The real healing was to my soul.

Around that time, I had started therapy as well as my recovery work. Yoga was a practical tool to help me quiet the incessant mind chatter and simply be on my mat connected to my breath. “Follow your breath in and out, in and out,” the instructor would encourage.

Through a handful of approaches, I started to learn how to identify feelings and where they resided in my body. I could feel the difference between pain and anxiety, disappointment or frustration, and I knew that I wouldn’t actually die if I allowed myself to feel these feelings.

Moreover, the practice nourished the mindset of being fully present in my body at that exact moment.

As a codependent coping mechanism, I tended to disassociate to escape mental or physical pain. Yoga was the exact opposite. The teaching was to invite the discomfort in, to welcome it with loving kindness. To breathe into it with radical acceptance and not to stuff, numb, or try to cunningly escape it.

I was in awe.

My yoga practice fostered safety for spiritual exploration and conjured emotional sensations I never expected.

Doubling Down and the Surprises That Arose

I’ve kept a semi-regular yoga practice over the past five years, attending classes a few times a week. With yoga being an established philosophy throughout the world, it never ceases to amaze me that I can find a class wherever my travels lead me.

Now that I possess the light, I seem to be drawn to others with similar intentions.

As quarantine began, I discovered that my favorite studio with my absolute favorite instructor was hosting online yoga and meditation classes. I was all in. Giddy with excitement.

I’m in quarantine. Why not do yoga every day?

My holistic presence and awareness are vastly different now than when I first came to my mat. And yet I was curious how I would feel in my emotional core from a consistent daily practice.

I wondered how my body would respond and if I would experience any significant or subtle changes. What other benefits would arise that I wasn’t even aware of?

The results are fascinating.

Mind

Currently, most of humanity is experiencing waves of fear related to the vastness of global uncertainty around the pandemic. I was no exception.

A week into my new yoga endeavor I could sense my mind settling into a consistent state of calm acceptance. I was reminded that everything occurring outside of myself is completely out of my control.

Yoga prompted the softening of my compulsive thinking about the novel coronavirus, and a new level of peaceful presence was granted.

The feeling of surrender enveloped me.

Body

What may seem like the most obvious benefit of daily yoga, is possibly the area where I was most naive and continue to be astonished.

Being an athlete since I was young and working in the industry, my belief system was shaped through the lenses of high-intensity sports and fitness activities. For me, strength, muscle mass, and aerobic conditioning came from lifting weights, swimming laps, and doing plyometric exercises.

I was under the impression that yoga would increase my flexibility. Still, I foolishly never expected it to produce the amount of lean muscle and toned definition I am experiencing in my body today.

All these muscles in my abs, back, shoulders, and arms from yoga?

I still giggle in wonder when I look in the mirror. Grateful, yet not quite believing what I see.

Digestion

For a gal who’s struggled with lifelong digestion challenges, two weeks into my new daily yoga practice, I forgot this was even a thing.

A yogi friend recently shared the benefits yoga asanas have on the digestive system. I believed her in theory. However, at the time, I wasn’t practicing consistently enough to reap the rewards.

Claire Grieve, mindbodygreen.com yoga specialist and health coach, shared insights on the gut health benefits of yoga. A synopsis of her counsel states that:

Yoga alleviates stress and anxiety that can be the root cause of digestive challenges. It increases blood circulation and stimulates energy flow to internal organs. Yoga twists are massages for digestive organs — relieving gas, bloating, and constipation. Inversions help loosen blockages by shifting the gravitation pull on our organs. Overall yoga calms the nervous system and helps restore digestive flow.

In the past, I’ve typically had digestion challenges two to three times every week. I’m now five weeks into my daily yoga practice, and I’ve had one or maybe two episodes of digestion discomfort or pain.

The benefits of yoga on my gut health have been remarkable and continue to strengthen my commitment to a daily practice. For me, a happy gut is a strong indicator of a holistically happy life.

Connectedness

Community is foundational to me. Being involved with a tribe of like-minded seekers provides inspiration and helps me feel connected even in the time of separateness through quarantine.

The yoga community I’ve become a part of promotes a sense of inclusion and belonging. I love that no matter what your skill level, strength, age, or scale of flexibility, your presence compliments the session and you are welcome.

If I’m tired or sore or distracted by life, the community encourages me to just show up and do what I can.

Be on my mat, follow my breath, hold a pose for as long as I am able, respecting where I’m at in that particular moment.

Judgments to be left elsewhere, off my mat.

What I Know Now to be True

When I first came to the practice, it was for exercise purposes. I was doing yoga, but I still wanted to check the box of a workout. Under my critical judgment, yoga was an activity that mildly qualified.

The equation in my mind was Sweat + Physical Exhaustion x Generation of Soreness = Real Workout.

Yoga wasn’t exactly that. However, it fit some of my rigid qualifications, and I could justify it as close enough for a once-a-week training session.

As I continued to commit time to my practice, the mindful, spiritual presence coupled with my therapy and recovery work began to slowly seep into my being. Yoga wasn’t even close to being about physical fitness.

While the practice helped to restore the feeling in my right leg and provided pain relief in my back, the real healing has been in my mind and my soul.

The traditions of yoga call upon us to be present with our breath, to allow our bodies to calmly flow in rhythm with the life force that is our inhale and exhale.

Yoga has been a tremendous tool to help me slow down, quiet my mind, and be open to what arises from within, whether it be feelings, sensations, inspirations, or a-ha’s.

When I walked into my first yoga studio, I couldn’t have predicted how deeply the practice would impact my life.

Now, after practicing daily for over twelve weeks, I can’t imagine my life without the nourishing presence and connectivity that has become part of me.

I feel nurtured, honored, and holistically healthy. Like I came home to myself. Mind, body, digestion, and spirit.

I can’t unsee what I know now to be true.

. . .

Rebecca Murauskas is a Life Coach for professionals. She helps people be free of stress and overwhelm, reclaim their purpose, and feel fulfilled. Rebecca and her husband, Adam, abandoned their careers and moved to Panamá in 2019 to pursue passions for helping people heal. Take the free Time Saver Quiz and find additional content at RebeccaMurauskas.com.