My Yoga and Ayurveda Journey

Welcome to my final blog for my class Social Media Marketing. I’ve really enjoyed being able to share my health experiences.

This blog is all about my yoga and ayurveda journey. I hope it’s helpful to learn about how I started and where I ended up.

The Beginnings

I began yoga in high school, going to one or two classes with friends. During Covid I started taking online yoga classes with a teacher who I still enjoy learning from, Kristina Matskevich. She taught me that the key to being healthy is establishing a mind, body connection. In other workouts, they call this mind muscle activation. In yoga it’s often referred to as energy lines.

The mind-body connection will allow you to activate little muscles that wouldn’t be fully activated if you weren’t thinking about the workout.

Once this clicked, I realized working out is more about mental discipline than physical discipline. I started pushing myself harder by going to hot yoga once a day.

I received my 200-hour yoga alliance certificate from a local hot yoga studio in Nashville.

Pivot

Though I love doing hot yoga, I decided to pivot. I realized it wasn’t healthy or sustainable for me because I was raising my cortisol significantly during each hot yoga practice in an attempt to be healthier. I soon realized this was less healthy than doing slower workouts that kept my stress down. It’s different for everyone, but for me it’s more important that my stress is down because stress leads to weight gain. Hot yoga was too intense for me to keep my adrenals and cortisol in check.

Soon after deciding to do less hot yoga, I took a three-month marketing internship in New Zealand. At this point I was actively practicing lightly heated vinyasa yoga. In New Zealand the level of workout intensity is significantly less than in the U.S. I found yoga there to be significantly better for my body. I became more fit by doing less intense workouts than by doing more intense workouts. In New Zealand, I was introduced to ayurveda. I went to yoga classes that implemented ayurveda into yoga and noticed a difference. The mind-body connection in ayurvedic yoga helped reawaken my body’s natural ability to heal itself. Ayurveda uses yoga poses to activate muscles that are often stagnant.

Ayurveda and Yoga

When I moved back to Nashville, I was interested in ayurveda but wasn’t entirely sure what it was. That’s when I enrolled in a 300-hour ayurveda course. Throughout the course, I learned what I was missing in my health practice.

In ayurveda, the most important principle I learned is that your body naturally wants to heal itself, it just needs help. Foods and spices are the key to awakening your body’s natural healing process.

Just like in any fitness practice, I wanted to ensure that I was doing everything to get results. I began seeing tremendous results in pilates and yoga. I was doing less workouts, not eating as much, but was working out only four times a week. Again, once I realized how important it is to focus on my work out by tuning in to my mind-body connection, the workouts were much more efficient.

I’ll finish with this, every disease stems from stagnant life flow. Reawakening my body through digestive spices, foods, and exercise is the key to ensuring no one part of my body is not working how it should.

Everyone’s body is different, so make sure you’re tuning in with your specific needs. Remember working out and health is a journey and neither of them require perfection, just consistency.

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If you haven’t already please follow my Instagram– as I will be using this platform solely for updates and yoga instructional videos.

Feel free to check out my previous blogs here.

Appreciate you all 😊

Love,

Fin