By Paul Jerard, E-RYT 500

How can Hatha Yoga practice improve your emotional health? How important is emotional health? How could a physical practice of posture sequencing create changes in emotional growth within children and adults? Let’s investigate Hatha Yoga beyond the surface layer to realize how it affects emotional health.

Hatha Yoga for Positive Emotional Health

Upon ending each Yoga session, students often remark how they feel refreshed, happy, inspired, and balanced. Each of us reacts differently at the close of each Yoga class. Happiness is a result of focusing on something that is not a problem. A typical Yoga practitioner uses mind, body, emotion, and spirit throughout the class.

Feeling refreshed is primarily a mental state, but your body is also relaxed and restored. The feeling of being inspired during, and after, a Yoga class is a mental and emotional sensation. It can also be said that the sensation of feeling balanced, encompasses all planes of our existence.

The Importance of Emotional Health

Without positive emotional growth and health, we have no stability in life. As an example of emotional instability, observe a misguided or troubled child. In such cases, a child will cry for no reason, but to gain attention. This child may learn how to manipulate parents, and some family members, but will be frustrated when using the same techniques on the public.

Hopefully, the child may grow out of this need to draw attention to him or herself. On the other hand, each of us has met an adult who wants attention. As adults, we tend to refine our techniques, but a few adults never manage to grow emotionally. This emotional instability tends to make us appear mentally unstable.

Yoga Creates Emotional Growth

Good emotional health is to some degree a form of happiness. Each of us is happy when we begin to understand our true purpose in life. Hatha Yoga enthusiasts learn many methods of practice. When you consider meditation, pranayama, kriyas, mantras, bandhas, asanas, and relaxation techniques; Hatha Yoga is much more than a physical exercise or a sequence of postures.

The objectives of various practitioners are different, but steady Yoga practice will ultimately train and calm the mind. To have complete control of your mind is not easy, and it takes practice, but to have no control over your mind is mental agony. To practice Yoga is an easy choice to make, but the true benefits take time to notice.

Many people practice Yoga for the physical benefits, but begin to feel better in all aspects of life as a result of continued practice. There is nothing wrong with this approach. People believe in what they see, but feeling better in all aspects of life takes a little more time to notice.

© Copyright 2010 – Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

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