Yoga is the science of uniting mind, body, and spirit. The consistent practice of Yoga eventuates in purification of the body, emotions, and thoughts. Hatha Yoga facilitates this by helping the practitioner live mindfully so that every action is carried on consciously and deliberately. Eventually old personality habits are replaced by ways of being that are influenced by the Soul. This results in making better conscious choices regarding how we live.

The Yoga practitioner encourages the physical body to come into balance by the performance of postures linking breath with movement, harmonizing mind and breath, meditation and healthy nutrition. In a world bombarded with commercials that encourage unhealthy diets, the yogi is empowered with the ability to make better conscious choices. She or he learns to live mindfully and deliberately. The yogi learns to listen to the body and becomes sensitive to what it needs and what it doesn’t need.

A yogic diet is one that lives on as little food as is practical. Ideally the food that we eat is as close to its natural state as possible for digestion. The food should be free of pesticides and additives—organic food is best. Optimally the yogi would have a whole-food plant based diet. Many of the vegetables that we eat have to travel great distances to reach the market shelves. By then many of the nutrients are greatly depleted. The meat supply is often injected with hormones and very often the animals used for food sources are treated quite badly throughout the process. One can also question the environmental sustainability of many non-organic food production processes.

While Yoga supports healthy weight, exercise alone is insufficient for healthy weight reduction. Many Americans are either overweight or obese. This unfortunate condition contributes to type II diabetes, heart disease, joint pain and arthritis, hypertension, and many other preventable ailments. We need to address the contribution that the American diet makes to this unhealthy condition. Yoga has a way of empowering the practitioner to make more mindful choices by improving our discipline and encouraging a more conscious way of being.

Supplementation is often the only way to ensure that we are getting all of the nutrients that the body needs to sustain or regain its natural healthy state. However, the quality and efficacy of dietary supplements must be assured through scientific research to ensure there are no GMO’s, pesticides, mercury or other harmful ingredients within them. They must be rigorously tested to ensure that they are pure, safe, and effective. It also helps if the company that produces them is of high integrity and cares about the environment and how the ingredients for their products are sourced.

I have found just such a company in Shaklee. As a Yoga instructor seeking to help people achieve better health, Shaklee’s philosophy is in harmony with my own. Shaklee believes that nature holds the answers to a healthy and productive life. By using pure and potent ingredients and the foremost scientific research, Shaklee formulates nutrition products that are truly life enhancing.

The ingredients used in Shaklee’s exclusive formulas go through an incredibly stringent screening process that surpasses even the pharmaceutical standards of the United States Pharmacopeia (USP). Their purity standards are some of the toughest in the nutrition industry to guarantee that all of their products are 100% safe. Shaklee’s scientists find pure and potent ingredients from nature, spending thousands of hours reviewing scientific literature and conducting their own studies to verify efficacy. They use unique combinations of scientifically supported ingredients to create Shaklee’s exclusive formulas.

Decades of clinical studies go into understanding nutrition and how our bodies absorb nutrients. Shaklee scientists have published 125 scientific papers and presentations, including 7 presentations in the last year. Their cutting-edge, patented Shaklee delivery systems are designed to release nutrients in your body in a way that promotes better absorption. The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, once said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Shaklee has been embodying this principle for 60 years. Shaklee has been a pioneer in developing healthy, pure, safe and effective products that support heart health, healthy aging, weight reduction and much more. For more information on Yoga at Mountain Spirit Co-Op or “The Shaklee Effect” call David Clay at 928-458-5577.