Ten Reasons to Make Practicing Yoga Your New Years’ Resolution

Opening up to the possibilities that a regular yoga practice can call into being. Photo Credit: Pete Longworth

by Kara-Leah Grant

It’s that time of year again when we list out all the things we want to do to make our lives better.

Here’s a suggestion.

Just make one resolution – to do more yoga.

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One resolution is all you need, because doing more yoga has a flow on effect into every other aspect of your life.

When you regularly practice yoga- whether it’s bhakti yoga, karma yoga, hatha yoga, jnana yoga, raja yoga, mantra yoga, tantra yoga, laya yoga, or any combination of the eight main types of yoga – your life automatically aligns itself from the inside out with what is best for you.

Day by day, yoga teaches us how to be present in each moment. It teaches us how to be conscious of who we truly are, and how we typically react to the situations in our lives. Just knowing this gives us the power to make different choices, and respond differently, and so create different, more authentic and loving lives.

Practicing yoga makes us more sensitive to life, and we are no longer able to live in denial of what is true for us – we begin to face up to ourselves and our lives.

So no matter what it is that you want to transform for the New Year, you can do it with yoga.

Yoga will help you to:

1. Eat better
2. Move more
3. Open up to other people and experience more love in your life
4. Connect with your heart’s desire
5. Sharpen your senses
6. Improve your health
7. Increase mental acuity
8. Discover more joy in the small moments of life
9. Reverse the ageing process
10. And most of all – love life for the great gift that it is

Because in the end, no matter what it is we resolve to do, we are all attempting to attain the same thing – more love.

Love for ourselves.

Love for others.

Love for our world,

Love for our life.

Even our desire to attain material wealth is because we want to love what we experience more, and we mistakenly believe that the key to loving what we experience is to control that which we experience. We forget that it is not what is outside of us that we control, but what is inside of us. We can choose more love in every single moment simply by opening up to the bottomless well that lies within us.

It is an achingly simple truth. We are the Source of Love. Yet knowing this intellectually and being able to experience it are two very different things. Wanting to get there doesn’t help at all. If anything, it is the wanting that creates a wall between us and the Source of Love. It is paradoxically in the releasing of all wants, all desires that we melt those borders and boundaries and connect with All that Is, finding a Source of Unending Love.

And in those small moments of surrendering, of opening, of giving to another we experience Love – in either the sweetness or the agony, for both sides must be experienced to truly know Love.

So this year, with yoga as your guiding light, discover the depths of love that reside within you, and know that no other resolution is necessary.