Sue Milad: Yoga for a beautiful posture

Yoga leads to serenity, well-being and inner peace. It positively affects the body as much as the mind and reduces stress.
Meet Sue Milad, a meditation and yoga therapist who's telling us about her courses and offering us three effective exercises to do at home.

The basics:

"It's a wellness session. The course is not just about aesthetic postures that we see in magazines." It's based on physical postures, breathing, concentration and finally meditation.

The course given by Sue relies on the four parameters that follow in order to create harmony between the physical and the psychological state:

- The course starts with a little warm-up.

- When doing exercises in synchronization with breathing exercises, each patient has 'custom made' exercises depending on the problem being treated.

- Then, breathing and concentration exercises.

- And finally the session ends with meditation.

At what frequency?

There is relatively quick and visible progress, with an average of two sessions per week.

3 exercises to do at home for a good posture and a straight back:

Standing:

Firmly plant your feet on the ground, knees and right thighs pulled backward; close your eyes and visualize roots coming out. Then raise your toes and push your coccyx forward to lengthen your lower back as if an imaginary belt lies on your lower back and you want to close it. Try to visualize your spine, vertebra by vertebra and lengthen it; the shoulders are turned backwards and then down, and your bottom scapulas are stuck together. Tuck your chin to lengthen the neck, which you position parallel to the ground. Imagine a string pulling you from the top of your head to the ceiling, in order to extend your body further. The shoulders are far from the ears, relax your facial muscles to defuse your face; put your hands in prayer on your heart to seek energy. 
Breathe through your nose to inflate your belly as you inhale and deflate it as you exhale. Keep your eyes closed to internalize your senses and see yourself from the inside.
Hold this posture for a minimum time of 10 deep, slow breaths.
For the rest of the exercises, read our June 2016 issue.