A Brooklyn Girl’s Guide to Sunday: Yoga For Fall

Nature and Mindfulness seem to go hand-in-hand these days, as more and more people are turning away from technology and tuning in to healing practices like yoga and meditation. Mindfulness, ease, stress relief, and a sense of curiosity about the world are at the core of why people gravitate towards nature, which also offers a litany of health benefits on its own. Last week, GC shared a nature-focused Fall Meditation designed for us by Alexandra Liakou, so this week, we wanted to espouse the benefits of yoga and other mindfulness practices in general.

I grew up doing yoga, following along as my mom practiced on her own. She would explain all the poses to me in ways that I could understand; downward dog, happy baby, frog pose. I delved further into the practice in high school, and as my athletic interests were shifting I soon found myself looking for something that aligned with everything I needed on a whole-body level. Yoga felt more like an extension of my life, rather than an interruption from it, and it soon became something I did naturally– a practice that supplemented and improved my life on many levels. I found community, discovered my own flexibility, and developed a new need to lay in a diamond shape for hours at a time. After a few years of struggling to find a yoga community in New York that felt similar to what I experienced in high school, I finally found a group that felt like it understood my needs, and soon all other forms of exercise went out the window. For me, yoga is and always has been about healing: it clears my body and my mind and supports me from the inside out. It grounds me in myself (something that all nature lovers can surely understand). It makes me feel strong, which is basically to say: it feels pretty cool to be able to assume a beautiful pose on a sunny day, using nothing but my own body and my own mind.