In today’s modern and fast-paced society, there appears to be no escape from experiencing the negative aspects of stress. Although some stress is important and does help us to survive or react to potentially threatening situations, the stress we experience mainly these days, is different to when we had to fight for food or react instinctively to save our lives, our stress comes from having too little money, too much work, being overloaded with daily demands, or a combination of all of these.

For those who study the gentle discipline of yoga, stress can be greatly reduced as health improves, our minds becomes clearer and more focused, there is less fatigue and vitality returns.

Feeling good inwardly can and does help to counteract the problems we face in life. As we progress within our own individual practices, we become more confident and positive in our approach to life although there are additional means of improving our abilities to cope with stress still further.

Why not create a yoga journal and track every aspect of your daily practice? Buy a book which has blank pages so that you can capture your progress every day. When you are purchasing this book, choose one which appeals to your senses, make it a joy to write in as then you are more likely to keep this up.

List the postures you have done that day, make notes how the practice went. Pinpoint areas of difficulty or areas where you have excelled.

Write down any thoughts, feelings including negative thoughts, concerns and behaviors such as:

. Checked bank account and realized I had overspent.

Could feel myself panicking. Why did I just buy that new outfit?

. Someone left the lid off the juice at home and it got knocked over.

I felt really fed up and angry. No one else ever bothers to clean up.

. Feels like everybody is demanding too much of me at work and at home.

I feel tearful and unappreciated.

Charting these types of feelings or occurrences can help to identify stress triggers or hot spots, which will create feelings of frustration or negativity. Once a pattern forms within the yoga journal, it is easier to realize and acknowledge the sometimes seemingly trivial areas of your life, which typically seem to curb your potential to develop further.

A yoga journal should be an extension of your practice and will help you to improve mind body and spirit in a natural and yet productive way. Make your yoga journal available to others as well, this will help those around you to see how you are really feeling, understand what is important to you and perhaps be a little more sympathetic when they see what your triggers are especially if they are the culprits.

This yoga journal highlighting your yogic experiences will also allow you to look back and see clearly how far you have progressed on your journey to self-discovery and enlightenment.

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Whilst in America, naked yoga is taking the traditional yoga world by storm; people often question whether it is decent and correct to perform physical class activities whilst not wearing any clothes. Yoga can be a dynamic form in its own right and not all activities are seated and fairly discreet as in the lotus pose so those doing yoga nude must be exhibitionists?

Certainly being able to discard clothing and braving your naked torso in all it’s glory to potentially a room filled with strangers seems to suggest that the yoga practitioner is someone confident and quite brazen, but this is not necessarily so.

People of all shapes and sizes are casting their clothes to one side to take part in this new revolution.

Yoga has many aspects to it, hatha yoga has always traditionally focused on the physical body, the postures are designed to tone, limber, stretch even the most inflexible of bodies, so a physical connection is important even if from a health perspective. Other forms of yoga will focus much more heavily on the spiritual or meditation route but ideally; it makes sense to incorporate both spiritual and physical yoga practices.

Doing yoga nude, can have benefits. It allows the student to be able to identify areas where the posture does not look correct; perhaps the alignment is out slightly.

But the yoga student would be very aware that to do yoga properly and to gain the most benefits, it is useful to have a less advanced posture but one, which is correctly executed. Doing yoga nude in front of a mirror and with a teacher can correct any problems before they become a habit.

In a class, if you have the nerve to stand, stretch and bend in a variety of postures, you do at least have the comfort of knowing that others are sharing these vulnerable positions as well. This must be another reason why teachers advocate the benefits of turning the attention inwards.

By doing yoga nude, it may certainly be less embarrassing to focus purely on your own performance rather than others, but that internal focus is important as it can identify just how your body is feeling during and after each and every yoga posture.

There is a certain amount of freedom and liberation at the thought of yoga nude, there may also be a type of connection on a physical, emotional and spiritual level with others who practice without any clothes and realistically as long as those practicing are not hurting anyone else, they are probably benefiting from their efforts far greater than others who are a little less daring.