“How does yoga help… express… gratitude? Why do we practice yoga? The common answer is health and/or wellness. What detracts from wellness more than stress? What is the opposite of stress?” “Gratitude..! “Yoga and gratitude” are “like parent and child. Gratitude is a byproduct of yoga… The goal of yoga is awareness, as we become more aware we start to see how blessed we are and it” begins “to seem really silly that gratitude is not a larger player in our mind state. Especially when we understand the negative effects of stress and gratitudes” ability to “reverse those effects. Yet in the rat race… everyone is running around trying to get somewhere and trying to accumulate more somehow feeling like we are not good enough… Feeling like something is wrong or… missing… Business 101 teaches us to create a need for what we are selling. An industry called marketing blossoms. The key to marketing is creating a need and one way to create a need is to make people feel inadequate… like we are not good enough the way we are.” In ads people “see how beautiful we should be and what we should have to be cool and what we need for a good time, we see what we are missing and … even how we should act. Over time this stuff has an effect. It’s like we are being programmed.” As a result, “our mentality dwells more in lack than abundance. We become more focused on what we want than grateful for all we have. We believe our salvation will come from accumulation instead of appreciation. Accumulation has no end. Appreciation is the end, it’s the foundation of contentment and satisfaction.

Gratitude yoga is when you consciously attempt to be grateful… Within our yoga practice… remember the trillions of reasons… to be grateful. Yoga poses that inspire gratitude and yoga sequences for cultivating gratitude are simply poses and sequences where your priority is to keep gratitude in the forefront of your mind. A yoga class… dedicated to cultivating gratitude is lead by a person who values gratitude and is constantly reminding… the class… to focus on gratitude.

Gratitude is like a muscle, if you use it, it will grow and if you don’t… it will atrophy… Bringing gratitude back into one’s life means taking the time out of one’s day and developing it… The meditation of gratitude… To cultivate gratitude you need to use it.”

Bryan Kest

Home4Birth clients, pick up a free prenatal yoga pass at our office for Source Yoga’s Sunday 1:30 p.m. classes. After that first free class, Home4Birth will pay for part of the first three class bundle. You pay just $15 (reg drop in rate is $15 per class). So, it’s like getting another two classes for free! Postnatal clients are also encouraged to attend!