Research has shown that happy emotions contribute to long-term wellbeing. But none of us wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed everyday. So how do you generate joy when you don’t already feel joyful? One answer of course is yoga. :)

Generate joy by focusing on the here and now

One secret to increase your joy is to realize that happiness is not some external quality that can be acquired. Instead, happiness is something that is already inside of you, but which may be hidden from view at times. Yoga can help you uncover that joy inside of you. How? By reducing your stress levels. One major reason we have trouble accessing our inner joy is stress. And stress in our modern lives is almost always caused by something in the past or the future.

Even when you are stressing out over someone sneezing too close to you in the supermarket, it’s not really the sneezing that is stressing you out. Rather, it’s the thought that you might get sick. Thus the stress of getting sneezed at actually is about the future, not the present. Yoga helps you to become more fully immersed in each moment, especially if you practice with body and breath awareness. Occupying your mind with the here and now simply crowds out all those stressful thoughts about the past and the future.

Support joy by focusing on specific poses and alignment cues

Meditation provides you with the same focus on the present moment, but yoga does something else that makes it even more effective in generating joy: There is a two-way connection between emotions and posture, and certain poses (especially backbends and inversions) have a noticeably elevating effect on our moods. Conversely, practicing any pose with an overly hunched back and a collapsed chest can actually promote depression.

Bringing awareness to your posture and reducing the rounding of your upper back will help you generate even more joy. This is true because it creates more space in the front of your chest and literally opens your heart. The physical components of yoga thus can have a very direct positive effect on your emotions. Simply changing the shape of your body can reconnect you with the joy hidden inside. 

This week we will focus on poses and alignment cues that help us generate more joy, and on making joy the focus of our practice.