This 30-Minute Yoga Flow Is As Much for Mental Health As Physical Flexibility

Over the course of this past year, we’ve been forced to adapt to unprecedented, uncomfortable, and even scary circumstances, and as things shift once more in a new direction, we are being called to adapt yet again. But doing so requires flexibility of the mind that isn’t always easy to access and it can be downright difficult to understand how to tap into it in the first place. In the latest episode of Good Moves, however, Alicia Ferguson, co-founder of BK Yoga Club, offers a yoga flow for flexibility that challenges us to bring together the mental and physical.

Her approach relies on the idea of the mind-body connection. “I’d like to invite the idea here that flexibility in the body and flexibility in the mind are actually interrelated,” she says. “So we perform these physical exercises to really help us achieve mental openness and mental flexibility.”

As she moves through the 30-minute flow, she repeatedly encourages breathing into each pose while scanning the body for any stiff, rigid, or sticky parts—anywhere you’re being met with resistance. (And after a year of sedentary living, that may be almost every part!) “How can we breathe openness, how can we breathe life into those areas,” she prompts.

Sometimes when we think about flexibility, she says, we experience a knee-jerk reaction that we aren’t actually adaptable. “But what happens when you reframe?” she asks. Ideally, when you allow your mind to tell a new story—that you are flexible— it opens you up, not just in a yoga pose but in life.

To test out this hypothesis, roll out your mat and press play on the video above.

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