3 Meaningful Mindfulness & Yoga Stories

This week in wellness news, whether you need to recover from a stressful day, a strenuous workout or even an injury or surgery, restorative yoga may be just the thing for you. In fact, if you’re recovering from surgery, it may be one of the only forms of exercise that’s safe and effective.

Read that and these other great stories yoga, health & wellness stories from around the web.

• Recovering from Surgery or Stress? Yoga can help! “Although some forms of yoga, such as power and vinyasa, can be quite strenuous, restorative yoga is much gentler, encouraging the use of props like pillows and blankets to facilitate relaxation. It’s all about initiating our parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and restore” aspect of our autonomic nervous system that stimulates the body’s processes for restoration and recovery, such as digestion, sleep and tissue repair.
  In fact, because of its physiological benefits, research suggests that the use of restorative yoga-based practices can actually decrease healing time.”
• Mindfulness Meditation Helps Quell Negative Thoughts, ‘Monkey Mind’: “And other studies, like this one from Harvard, have confirmed that meditation not only reduces activity but also affects the volume of the brain in certain regions—for instance, reducing volume in the amygdala, the seat of anxiety, fear and emotion. And more recent work from the same team has found that increases in volume in other areas—those associated with mood and arousal—are linked with more subjective well-being in the participants. That is, they report feeling better and being happier after taking a meditation course.”
• Meaningful mindfulness: How it could help you be happier, healthier and more successful: “Paying attention to the matters at hand may sound simple, but most Americans aren’t doing it, studies show. Though the experts say there’s a lot more research to be done, the number of scientific studies has grown exponentially over the past decade. They show that mindfulness is more than a passing fad; there’s early evidence it can help your health.”