Surya (Post 1)

Post 1

The minute we were assigned this project, I knew exactly what I wanted to do; yoga! I have always been exposed to yoga, as I have many friends and family members that engage in this spiritual practice. I have always wanted to try yoga, but never found the time to do so. But now, with this project, it's the perfect opportunity! Yoga, in case you didn't already know, is a Hindu spiritual discipline that includes breathing exercises, meditation, and specific bodily postures. It has been linked to relieving stress and anxiety, which, if you know me really well, is something I struggle with daily. Throughout this project, I am going to focus on the specific poses and breathing techniques that are directly linked to stress and anxiety relief. In doing so, in each of my future blog posts, I am going to rate my stress/anxiety levels on a scale from 1 (being not that stress/anxious) to 10 (stressed/anxious to the max.) before and after I complete my yoga session. After, I will compare the two ratings, which hopefully will begin to decrease as I invest more and more time into yoga.

My research thus far has mainly been revolving around the mental and physical benefits yoga has to offer, as those are my main motivations for choosing this practice for this project. As I mentioned before, yoga is a major contributor to stress and anxiety relief. Along with that, research from Harvard University has shown that yoga is able to help relieve anxiety by regulating the human stress response system, meaning that trains our minds to see the big picture and act from integrity instead of freaking out in certain situations. Another major mental benefit yoga has is the fact that it calms the mind, which for a busy high-schooler, can be a very rare occurrence. On the physical benefits side, yoga is considered an exercise. When exercising, one would typically be forced to push their limits and see how long or how far they can go before giving up. In this case, yoga generally deals with leg and upper body strength, which are things that I, personally, feel as though I need to address. Yoga has also been used to help people with goal-setting techniques. By aiming to nail a certain pose by a certain class or date, we are given the chance to practice goal-setting outside of the school environment, where most of our goals revolve around grades. But with yoga, the goals are more focused on you, which I think can be a very alleviating experience.

As far as goals go, I hope that my experience with yoga allows me to better handle and relieve my stress and anxiety, as well as strengthen my mental and physical state. I also hope to boost my memory and concentration, as yoga has also been proven to improve those aspects of mental state as well. My expectation is that yoga opens me up to a more calm, cool, and collected lifestyle than the one I live today.

As you might have noticed, the title of my post is a word I'm sure none of you have seen. You might have googled it in order to enlighten yourself with it's meaning, and if not, thats okay too, because I am going to explain it right here. As I mentioned earlier, yoga is a Hindu practice, so the words and phrases mentioned in yoga classes are typically from Sanskrit. So, for each blog post, I am going to title it with a different Sanskrit word, with the definition of the word relating to where I am in the process of becoming one with the techniques of yoga. For this first post, I chose the word Surya, which means sun. I am at the beginning of my journey with yoga, as my only knowledge is a couple basic poses.  The sun rises at the beginning of each day, shedding light on the endless amount of opportunities that day has to offer. As I begin this journey with yoga, I hope that I am opened up to an endless amount of enriching opportunities yoga has to offer.

Namaste.