How does yoga affect your mental health?

Anyone familiar with yoga knows it's the perfect physical stress reliever, but what is it about yoga that calms the spirit? Yoga is like therapy, and can bring about a great release of emotional burdens. 

Yoga focuses on balance, the key to overall health. While many of us tend to equate balance with posture and being able to stand on one leg, it's actually much deeper. Yoga helps you find balance that is physical, emotional and spiritual.

We tend to hold emotional stress in certain regions of our bodies. Those who suffer may find the relief they need in a good yoga class – specific poses can provide emotional releases, as the physical aspects are connected to the chakras, points of energy in the body. Possible benefits of yoga can include:

• Lowered heart rate, blood pressure and respiration
• Reduced anxiety 
• Relief from muscle tension and stress
• Mental and physical relaxation
• Increased mindfulness and mental awareness
• Alleviation of mild depression
• Lessening of fatigue and insomnia

Along with physical practices, at The Floating Lotus we encourage students to meditate and make other small changes needed for healing. Connecting with a group of encouraging and supportive people through yoga can be the perfect mental and spiritual boost. After class, we often hear students say, “That was just what I needed.”

How Yoga Teacher Training Deepens Your Practice

So, you’ve been thinking about taking your yoga practice to the next level – have you ever considered teaching? Embarking on a certified teacher training course can help you really delve deeper into your practice.

In typical yoga classes, you learn about the physical aspects of yoga -- but there is so much more to it than that. Through teacher training classes, you learn even more about the importance of proper alignment, the significance of certain poses and the value of the spiritual aspects of yoga. 

Yoga, since its origins in India, has been a spiritual practice. But this aspect has been lost in some studios. In modern, mainstream yoga culture, much of the focus is on purely physical aspects. 

The Floating Lotus’s teacher training takes us back to our roots. Learning more about the spiritual facet of yoga can help us learn more about ourselves. 

As you discover what yoga truly is, you begin to see it as not only a physical journey but as a self-awakening journey. Teachers-in-training will cultivate a lifestyle of self-mastery, empowerment and service to others. 

If you are ready to take this journey, visit http://floatinglotusyogastudio.com/training.html.

The Key to Healthy Skin: Organic Skin Care

So many products promise "flawless skin,” but don’t you really want products that promote healthy skin? Finding skin care that leaves skin glowing while also supporting its health could be as easy as visiting the right spa!

First, choose a spa that uses organic ingredients. This is key, and here's why:

• Using chemicals on your face can cause adverse reactions. This is not what you want when combating skin issues such as acne and dryness.
• Your skin absorbs what you apply to it. So, applying gentle, healing products is important.

Organic products can provide benefits similar to traditional products – with less risk of harmful side effects. Tea tree-based products can help combat acne. Cucumber helps tone the skin. Coconut, jojoba and hemp seed oils moisturize and protect the skin. And all without harmful chemicals!

If you’re looking for better ways to care for your skin, it's important to remember that our skin is our largest organ. You want it to absorb natural nourishing ingredients – not chemicals. 

At The Floating Lotus, we use Éminence Organics facial and body products. We find that using organic ingredients leaves our clients with glowing skin and less skin sensitivity. Every client receives a list of products used during their visit, as a reference for future visits or for purchasing products to use at home.

Interested in making your own natural skin-care and spa products? We offer workshops throughout the year that teach you how to make your own natural products using readily available ingredients.

Visit our website to make an appointment or check out upcoming workshops. We look forward to helping you achieve natural, healthy, glowing skin – organically!

5 Surprising Ways Massage Improves Your Health

We all know that massage is great for relaxation, but how else does it affect your body? One of the keys to massage is movement. Both yoga and massage increase flexibility and range of motion by stretching and lengthening muscles. But the benefits don’t stop there! Massage is also known to:

1. Reduce stress, depression and anxiety! Massage relaxes the body and melts away tension. The light human touch can be a cure for many ailments, including depression.
2. Improve circulation! When blood flow increases, it can aid in the nutrition and cell regeneration of the skin.
3. Give your skin color and elasticity! This increased circulation also improves your coloring, the overall appearance of skin and collagen production.
4. Increase immunity! The stimulation of massage increases the activity of the body’s natural T-cells. You’ll be able to fight viruses more effectively!
5. Detoxify the body! Massage helps to increase the production of sweat, allowing toxins to escape the body.

The benefits are endless! If you are an expectant mother, get migraines, have arthritis, are undergoing chemotherapy or are a geriatric patient, massage can help ease your pain/symptoms.

Okay, so now you’re ready to schedule your appointment! Here are some tips to help make your experience perfect:

• Arrive 10 minutes early with a positive, open mind — rushing can take away from the relaxation of the massage.
• Undress to your comfort level. You will always be draped during the session.
• Work with your therapist to set up the room to your comfort. We can definitely alter the lighting, room temperature, pressure or bed temperature. We want you to be stress-free!
• Relax and enjoy!

After that? Keep coming back! Clients have told us that massage has helped their mobility, chronic pain symptoms, mental health and emotional release. We recommend clients get a minimum four massages a year. See you soon!

How yoga can help relieve menstrual cramps!

How yoga can help relieve menstrual cramps!

When it's that time of the month, for some of us, that means lots of painful cramps! Ouch! No fun. You've tried everything -- warm compresses, hot showers or baths, even pain medicines. Have you ever considered yoga? 

I know you may be thinking, "I don't want to move, let alone stretch in a thousand different positions while I'm cramping." That's completely understandable, but did you know studies have shown a correlation between yoga and less pain during menstruation? 

Yoga offers a nurturing and reflective time for ourselves during a moment when our hormones are shifting. Uterine cramping are caused by prostaglandins hormones and can made worse by stress hormones. Yoga can help lower stress, reducing the amount of stress hormones produced and easing pain. Makes sense, right? 

There are number of yoga poses that can help with this issue. The Floating Lotus suggests poses such as Supta Baddha Konasana and Janu Sirsasana for anything related to female health. You may still not feel up to leaving the house, and that's okay, you can try these poses at home.  

The poses not only help during this time of the month, but so does having a group of supportive women to connect with.  

In Biblical times, women would live together in a tent known as the red tent during menstruation. As women, when we become emotionally connected to one another our cycles link up. It is healing to be supportive and also reassuring to have female friends to help us during times when we are feeling low. Feeling the symptoms of our menstrual cycle certainly can make us feel low!.  

So next time those cramps hit hard, consider a yoga class!