Yoga Feature: Happy Routine

Increasing YOUR Happiness with these poses!

Couldn’t everyone use a routine to help you boost your happiness and make you feel stronger? Well here are a few yoga moves that you can try out to help increase your emotional help and possibly help boost your happiness. Be sure to read through all the moves first, if you don’t think you would be able to achieve the move or you can’t do the move try an easier one, doing just one of these will help.  

1. In camel pose, the backbend creates a sense of fearlessness. It exposes your heart and soft underbelly, but in a safe and supported way.

• Begin by kneeling with your knees and feet hip-width apart and the tops of your feet flat on the floor.
• Keep your pelvis on your knees, your tailbone down, and your lower belly lifted.
• Bring your hands to your heart in prayer position, roll your shoulders back, and hug your elbows in.
• Curl your chest open by leaning back, but keep your hips over your knees.
• When you can't curl your chest back any farther, release your arms and grab your heels.
• Relax your head and open your throat. 

2. When you're not feeling particularly happy, try to make your yoga practice about joy, and invite it back into your life, pose by pose, breath by breath. Mild depression can be eased with rejuvenating, playful yoga postures. Backbends, like the slight one in crescent, are proven to release endorphins.

•        Begin standing with feet shoulder-width apart. Step back about one leg length with your left foot as you bend your right knee to a 90-degree angle.
•        Keep both feet hip-width apart, with your weight resting on the heel of your front foot and on the ball of your back foot.
•        Engage your lower belly to extend your lower back and raise your arms straight up over your head, keeping them shoulder-width apart.
•        Rotate your upper arms inward to broaden your upper back, and lift your gaze upward.
•        If you can keep your shoulders from flaring outward and your arms straight, bring your palms together.
• 
  
•     Repeat on the opposite side.

3. Insomnia—that evil, sleep-stealing monster that lurks under the bed! It feeds off stress, anxiety, and what we in yoga call "the constant fluctuations of the mind," or racing thoughts. Use these poses to calm your mind and relax your nervous system.

•        Start on all fours with your hips stacked over your knees and your shoulders stacked over your wrists.
•        Keep your arms straight as you inhale, drop your belly, and roll your shoulders back (Cow).
•        Exhale, press into your palms, round your back, and drop your tailbone down (Cat).

Repeat this several times, performing Cow on the inhale and Cat on the exhale.

4. We all know how hard it is to relax in a world of perpetual motion—our days are packed with meetings and phone calls and social events, not to mention the constant checking of emails, text messages, and social media sites. But we also know how critical it is to be able to tune out all this noise and clear our heads.

•        Begin on your back, with your knees bent wide and the soles of your feet together.
•        Bring your heels as close to your pelvis as you comfortably can.
•        Lift your chest and draw your shoulder blades down your back to lengthen your neck.

Take your arms wide, with your palms facing up.

[Source provided by Prevention]