Do you take vitamins each day to keep yourself healthy?
A daily yoga practice can also serve to keep you in tip top shape. Think of it as your Daily Yoga Vitamin – a group of components essential to maintaining your body, mind and spirit. The dosage doesn’t need to be a large one but to be effective it should consist of these six essential ingredients.
Prescription for a Daily Yoga Vitamin
- Centering or Breath Awareness: to tune inward
- Opening Poses: to warm-up and cultivate movement
- Standing Poses: for strength and balance
- Focus Poses: for flexibility and alignment
- Inversions: to improve overall function and vitality
- Restorative Pose: to seal your practice
In addition, there are ways to supplement your Daily Yoga Vitamin. I would suggest, if appropriate, you try to incorporate mantras, mudras, props, essential oils or music into your daily practice.
Mantra – Mantras or chants can be short or lengthy, recited aloud or repeated silently. In Sanskrit, a mantra means “a thought behind speech or action.” Therefore, the word or set of words you choose should be meaningful to you or represent a feeling or attitude you wish to incorporate into your life.
Mudra – Like mantras, mudras can be simple or more complex and represent a state of being you would like to adopt.
A mudra is defined as a “sign” and can be linked to any movement in yoga but is usually represented by hand gestures.
Yoga Props – These are tools for assisting the body to assume the postures – the ones commonly used are mats, blankets, straps and blocks. 
They should be employed to create awareness for the body and to support your balance, flexibility and strength building.
Essential Oils – If you are receptive, this add-on is a wonderful boost for your Daily Yoga Vitamin. There are oils for energizing, relaxing, balancing, centering and a myriad of other conditions you may need to support.
Music – Just like essential oils, this supplement is mood dependent. Some people like to practice yoga in silence while others enjoy the presence of sound to aid relaxation. Maybe you want to integrate music into the centering portion of your practice to set a vibe or end with a soothing piece to keep you relaxed and grounded in Savasana.
Starting next time, I will provide some specific Daily Yoga Vitamin sequences that will cater to individual areas of the body such as the skeletal, musculature, digestive, circulatory and nervous systems. And, I’ll even add some of my favorite supplements for you to experiment with as well.
Until then… Happy Practicing! 🕉