This is my first guest post for the blog featuring Suzanne Anderson of Yoga Makes You Well. Suzanne and I both attend the same meditation class and she often leads the stretching prior to meditation. In this post she explains why we perform stretching and yoga prior to meditation.
Meditation and stretching go together all the way back as far as anyone can see. Why is that? The most obvious answer is that the body has to be loose in order to sit easily. If we sit and all these irritating pains keep yelling at us, we cannot sit with ease. So we stretch first.
I teach yoga and I study it along with meditation. They go together like peas and carrots. The body gets a workout while it is moving. The mind gets a workout when it is still. Yoga does for the body many of the same things meditation does for the mind. They both help regenerative processes get started.
Suzanne is a yogini, a meditator, and a massage therapist. She blogs at YogaMakesYouWell and is an excellent yoga teacher and fellow confidant on the quest to better meditation.