Yoga for Immunity
We recommend you take your “flu shot” everyday with yoga practice! Here in the winter months there is no better time to strengthen your immunity than through movement and breath work. Practicing yoga postures serves to increase the circulation of lymph through your lungs, connective tissues, organs and skin. By brushing, pumping and squeezing the tissues of the body you help your body fend off infection. This is important especially around your throat, jaw, and tongue.
Heart/Mind Immunity
A healthy immune system requires not only movement of the body but clarity of heart and mind. Thus positive thinking and attitudes of kindness, care and acceptance go a long way toward physical health. Yoga is training to ward off that which is unwanted, both psychologically and physically, that is to ward off any infection that penetrates the body/mind. A radiant immunity includes reducing negative emotion. This is done by accumulating positive states of mind. Positive states of mind and an attitude of loving kindness build resistance to negativity (including fear, depression, and suspicion) that wear down your immunity.
Yoga postures, chanting, loving kindness meditations, prayer and devotional reflection serve to boost one’s health, creating a glow or radiance. Radiant immunity appears as a glow in the skin. In the original yoga teachings this is known as the body of light.
Yoga Practices for Immunity
- lightly pump your skin
- lightly squeeze and release your joint spaces
- practice smooth open breathing to move the lymph in your lungs and gut
- rinse lymph into your shoulders, neck and jaw
- practice meditation for kindness and generosity
- reduce negative thinking
- visualize your “body of light”
