Hi friends,

Yoga and meditation do many wonderful things for us and one benefit has struck a chord with many readers of The Well Daily lately: it can help us overcome fear. Read on, and then go ahead and be fearless.

xoxo,

Sukey

Fear can be an obstacle to healthy and happy living. While some fears are warranted and keep you safe—like standing far enough away from the edge of the subway platform—others are irrational and put needless stress on our bodies and minds. You know that yoga builds physical strength, increases self-awareness and expands respiratory capacity, but think about this: yoga can also help you overcome fear.

Many fears are grounded in not knowing; we don’t know and so we fear. Use your yoga practice to learn and grow out of this pattern. Start with these 3 simple actions.

Stand Firm: Establish a solid foundation of standing postures for a safe and grounded practice. Maintaining a firm connection to the ground will build mind-body awareness and strength from which your confidence can blossom. There's a reason Tadasana is called Mountain Pose: when you truly root down, you'll feel as if nothing can move you.

Play with Gravity: Inversion poses are a great space to learn about and grow away from fearfulness. Using hands, forearms and heads instead of feet as a foundation can be scary at first, but the more you explore inverting, the braver you'll be when faced with intimidating situations outside of the studio. Sign up for an inversion workshop to learn the fundamentals so you can practice going upside down with confidence.

Get to the Cushion: In addition to cultivating courage through your asana practice, use meditation to help quell any anxious roaming of the mind. By turning down the chatter in your head, you can make space for calmness to wash over your consciousness. Just a few moments a day of observing your own thought patterns might just help you recognize the source of your fears—and take them on from there. New to the cushion? Start here.

Use yoga to explore the unknown and leave the mat ready to take on anything.

The Well Wisdom: Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras tell us that there are five obstacles that we must diminish in order to realize eventual bliss, or Samadhi: ignorance, egoism, attachment, loathing and fear, and it is written that fear is experienced by even the wise. Realizing this is the first step to using your yoga practice to overcome your fears.