The ability to be aware of your surroundings is an amazing feeling but how often do you get that chance to just sit and “be aware”?? I know that part of life is the hustle and bustle of constant movement from one place to another where things around you become a blur. Understanding that you need to become more aware of your body, your posture, and what is happening around you can help improve your daily living.
Do you know the purpose behind your yoga practice ? The core functions of yoga is about increasing awareness throughout the body with a particularly important focus around the central axis of the body, between the spine and the organs. From here, a fundamental aspect of yoga practice can start with the awakening of our ability for the spine to undulate backwards and forwards, undulate side-to-side and to twist, awakening each individual vertabrae. The foundation of yoga may be about waking up sensitivity to feel each individual vertebrae independently, but it also extends to building increased sensitivity to all parts of the body, both internally and externally. What science is discovering is that through our increased ability to feel our own bodies, we increase our ability to empathically feel the world around us. To understand how this works, we need to first get our head around bodymaps and mirror neurons.
What is a bodymap ?? Bodymapping is a term used to describe the process of understanding the anatomy of the body and how to improve it as we move.As you practice a particular posture, the repetition creates more neural connections from the brain’s associated parts of your bodymaps. More nerve fibers are also created along the connection through the nervous system to that part of the body. As we do something more, our ability to receive more information about the subtlety of what we are doing increases.
Think about your daily life. How long are you sitting in a chair for? How often are you slouched over a computer and doing endless amounts of work for long periods of time before you realize your hunched over and now less flexible than before. When you sit in a chair at school or in an office all day, every day, you lose awareness in your spine as well as the majority of our body. However, if you practice yoga or incorporate stretching, you now increase the amount of neurological detail in our body maps and our nervous system. You can feel more subtle detail within ourselves. Because there is a larger volume of wiring that has been built up in your nervous system, so can feel more information. This also means that there is an increase the volume of neuronal detail in our bodymaps.
Don’t forget that YOU are an animal too and you were built upon years of modifications to make your life easier to function. We participate in practices that relate us to the animal kingdom, the more we were able to understand our environment through our internal mirror neuron response, feeding us vital information about food, hunting and the natural world.
If you want to read the FULL article on the Neuroscience and Yoga please visit..
http://upliftconnect.com/true-purpose-of-yoga/