Spring is finally in the air after a seemingly never-ending winter of hail-storms, torrential rain and temperatures which converted even the most hardened ‘summer-haters’ to impatient ‘summer-waiters’.

With summer on the way, it’s time to let the heaviness you’ve been carrying around this winter fall away and evaporate in the warm spring sun.

To spring-clean your body and mind you can turn to the energising tools of yoga to banish excess toxins and create new vitality. More so, power yoga combines traditional yoga postures with fluid movements and key breathing techniques to deliver a powerful, non-stop aerobic workout designed to maximise your power, energy and vitality – and they deliver through a series of heart-thumping, sweat-pumping workouts that will leave you trim, energised and heart-healthy.

With the days finally getting longer, now is the time to turn our attention inward to clean away the residues of a heavy diet, holiday desserts (who can resist figolli?), tantalising beverages, and general inactivity.

More than just fancy poses, yoga will help you cleanse, detoxify and jump-start your system in preparation for a great summer. Yoga offers a three-pronged approach to cleansing and detoxification: mindfulness, physical postures and breathing techniques.

Mindfulness

The word yoga means to unite. In physical yoga practice, we join our full attention with our body, breath, mind, and the experience of presence, or consciousness, inside of us.

At first practising mindfulness may seem to yield few effects. Through consistent practice of mindfulness, though, the light of awareness begins to shine through and you become more mindful of everything you are doing. This is not a new religion but just a way of focusing your attention and becoming more aware of yourself.

Physical practice

Yoga poses are a great friend to detoxifying the body. A qualified, experienced yoga teacher can design a specific programme and make unique recommendations of poses for detoxifying your body.

The physical portion of a yoga cleanse must be carefully considered to ensure it meets your needs. Most of us over-eat during the winter months and most likely the stomach, pancreas, liver, and gall bladder have been working overtime to produce enough fluids, hormones, and enzymes to break down food, assimilate nutrients, and remove toxins.

Additionally, the stomach, small and large intestines and colon have been stuffed to capacity. To help counteract this, you would need a physical practice focusing on:

• compression of the internal organs (forward folding postures), which literally squeezes them like a sponge, releasing stuck toxins and increasing blood flow;

• twisting poses which move the contents of the intestines through the large intestine and colon in the correct direction for elimination;

• abdomen-opening poses which assist in regulating the glands producing digestive hormones.

Breathing practice

Take a deep, cleansing breath. Exactly! Though it might not be obvious, the breath is a natural detoxifying agent. Deep, healthy breaths increase the amount of oxygen in blood flowing through all of the tissues in the body. Sufficient oxygen is critical in cleansing and relaxing muscle and connective tissue, nourishingorgans, and maintaining the acid-base balance of blood.

Most people’s breathing follows a shallow pattern, in which 80 to to 100 per cent of the breath is carried out by just the lungs, which comprises only 25 per cent of the total human breathing capacity.

A yoga detoxification programme emphasises healthy breathing, where the diaphragm controls most of the breath. Focusing attention on breathing deeply and increasing vitality you will immediately feel cleaner, lighter, and more vibrant.

Talking about breathing, for some, spring can be far from a welcome relief as the increase in pollen in the air causes allergic reactions to those who suffer from hay fever.

There are yoga poses that can help both at the time of practice and cumulatively so a regular, daily practice is required if you would like lasting relief. However, if the amount of allergen is above a certain limit, no treatment will completely help, be it medicine or yoga. It may take time for nature to eradicate the allergen from the body.

Practically speaking, several poses are invaluable for relieving sinus pressure – namely Shoulderstand and Supported Half Plough Pose – which help blood circulate with tremendous force into the stagnated areas, clearing away the secretions to clear the passageways and restore free breathing.

Spring is the perfect time to start yoga or any other activity which gets your heart pumping and blood flowing. Whichever way you decide to welcome summer, just take some time choosing the right activity which fits in with your lifestyle and aims together with the right instructor who needs to be experienced, qualified and above all passionate about what they are doing.

Sveta is a certified Power Yoga, Hatha, Ashtanga Vinyasa Flow and Kundalini Yoga instructor. For more details, visit www.poweryogaworld.com.