In fact, the following are ten of the many ways that these practices can help you increase your inner strength. Yoga and meditation can:

Increase Your Physical Strength

Seeing and feeling the results of your yoga practice—from increased flexibility and muscular strength to having a leaner, more toned appearance—will make you feel strong on the inside, too. You’ll feel more confident in everything you do, because you look and feel great!

Teach You Patience, Even In Difficult Situations

When you’re holding a tough yoga pose or really need to scratch an itch while meditating, it can take tremendous patience not to move too soon. Increasing your patience in these instances will carry over to your ability to take a deep breath and remain patient during all those tough times when life keeps you waiting.

Help You To Better Understand Your Body

Yoga and meditation put you in touch with your body. Before you know it, you’ll realize that, say, tensing up your shoulders is your body’s way of saying that you’re getting too stressed out. Understanding cues like that can help you see when you’re starting to get stressed, angry, sad, etc., so you can better combat your negative feelings.

Get You More In Touch With Your Thoughts And Emotions

These practices, particularly meditation, can teach you to tune into your thoughts and feelings in a way that will help you better understand the “why” of your actions. Do you overeat when you’re stressed? Blow your top at the drop of a hat when you’re overworked? Some introspection can help you work toward changing these bad habits.

Give You Peace, Even On Difficult Days

If you can fit in a mere half hour of yoga or just ten minutes of meditation somewhere in your day, it can give you something relaxing to anticipate. Thinking about your impending “me time” can help get you through a miserable day at work or a rough patch in your personal life.

Bring More Balance To Your Life

Yoga and meditation do this both literally—through balancing postures like Tree Pose— and emotionally—through an increased ability to manage stress and unhappiness.

Teach You To Slow Down In A Fast Paced World

People are working longer hours and taking less vacation time thanks to the tough economy. Moms and dads are stretched thin between their careers, their parenting obligations, and just trying to find time for date night. Putting everything on hold for even a brief yoga class or meditation session is a great reminder that we all have to take time out for ourselves and just slow down.

Show You How Consistency And Determination Will Improve Your Life

Routinely practice yoga, and you’ll be able to lean further into every stretch as time progresses; routinely put in time toward achieving another goal in your life, and you’ll get closer and closer to realizing that goal.

Lift Your Mood

The exercise aspect of yoga and the relaxing practice of meditation can increase your endorphin levels, which helps to elevate your mood. Happier people are healthier people, which means you take fewer sick days from your job and are generally more of a go-getter. Not only will you find yourself accomplishing more, but your good mood will win over your friends, co-workers, and more—all things that lead to success.

Force You To Unplug And Focus On Yourself

You can’t check Facebook on your laptop while you’re in Downward-Facing Dog, and you can’t answer your cell phone while you’re meditating in a Half Lotus. Instead, yoga and meditation make you focus on yourself, your mind, and your body. Being more in touch with your self is a huge step toward developing increased inner strength.

This meant that I was probably going to go along crying through my day, feeling miserable and not at all in the mood to smile and be cheerful. I resented that this had to happen right now, when I had a full schedule. I wasn’t really feeling like this was an appropriate time for a meltdown!

Spend Time With Your Tears

But because I fully trust my practice, I know that the best thing for me is not to suppress or conceal whatever needs to be dealt with, but to go ahead and work through it and get things taken care of. I have to deal with whatever I have at the moment and allow myself to feel and heal as necessary. In this case it meant I cried all through my visit to the salon, before my radio show, after my radio show, during my acupuncture appointment, in my car . . . pretty much through the whole day.

Coming Out The Other Side

And at the end of it all, I knew the message of the dreams. It was simple: I needed to have a cry. Nothing more sinister than that. I had some stuff simmering below the surface, some grief and sadness I hadn’t dealt with. Eventually, it boiled up to the surface and demanded my full attention. The difference between the me of now and the me of a decade ago is that these days I know that loving myself means allowing myself to feel okay about crying, okay about expressing any feeling that I need to express. The people who witnessed my crying responded in kind with Kleenex and hugs. Amazing how that happens!

When I checked my e-mail later in the day, I noticed that a friend had sent me this Hopi prayer. Even as soon as I had unburdened myself of my emotional baggage, gifts were already starting to come back to me in an expression of the Divine. I was so moved, I thought I’d share the prayer with you, just in case you have some things in your own heart that you need to deal with and could use a little encouragement. Enjoy!

Hopi Message

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered: Where are you living? What are you doing? What are your relationships? Are you in right relationship? Where is your water? Know your garden.

It is a time to speak your Truth. Create your community. Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for the leader. This could be a good time!

There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river. See who is in there with you, and celebrate.

At this time in history we are to take nothing personally. Least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word “struggle” from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

It’s easy to say that we are working towards something, and we may even feel that we are making a serious effort, but our efforts – like anything else in life – can become a habit, and habits are not always effective. One of the key components to success is to only spend time on practices that produce the desired results.

Despite our best intentions, we often get into the habit of continually doing things that do not bring us the results that we want, yet we do not realize it until we have expended a lot of time and energy. A mental checklist – or even a physical checklist – can help us to stay on track daily, maximizing our results, and minimizing wasted time and effort.

There are numerous success systems that people use on their road to greatness, and it falls to each person to choose and utilize whatever systems work best for them. However, no matter what system you choose, if you don’t use it properly and consistently, you won’t get the results.

Here are several popular success systems, and tips on how you can make sure you are using them effectively.

Visualization

Visualizing is basically the act of seeing yourself as being successful before you actually attain whatever success you are looking for. Visualization has long been held as one of the most effective and simple to use success systems, yet people often do not get results because they visualize ineffectively, or they do not visualize often enough.

Effective visualization includes all of the following:

• Feeling like you are actually in that present moment, rather than feeling like that moment is in the future. Visualizations are always in the NOW.
• Feeling exactly how you are going to feel when that moment actually arrives. Don’t visualize a scene in your head as if looking at a painting or a picture. Make it real and make it enjoyable by feeling the feelings of actually being there.
• Having a sense of 100% confidence and expectation whenever you visualize. You are not visualizing something that you hope is going to happen, but rather something that you KNOW is going to happen.
• Visualizing frequently, preferably several times per day. The most effective times for visualization are when you are about to fall asleep at night, and when you first wake up in the morning. However, visualization can be done anytime, anywhere.

Recommended Resources: Vision Boards, Mind Movies

Affirmations

Affirmations are basically the act of saying something over and over again – in your head or out loud – in order to “reprogram” yourself so you can attain whatever it is that you are affirming for. Unfortunately, saying something to ourselves that isn’t yet true sounds like a lie, so it feels like a lie, and we end up not believing it, and thus not getting very much out of it.

Here are some ways to get the most out of your affirmations:

• Say your affirmations out loud. We are all proficient at saying things in our head, but if that hasn’t been working, bring those statements out into the “real world”. Not only does that make your affirmations more effective, but it also helps you to realize how you truly feel about whatever it is that you are saying.
• Say your affirmations in front of a mirror. Again, realizing how you feel about what you are affirming for will help you to overcome any self-limiting beliefs about it. Say it out loud and in front of a mirror so you can look yourself in the eyes when you do it. It’s hard to lie to someone straight to their face.
• Say your affirmations in the present tense. Again, just as with visualization, you are creating something NOW, not in the future. “I am so happy and grateful now that…” as opposed to “I will be so happy when…”
• Say your affirmations many times throughout the day. Affirmations work by programming your conscious mind as well as your subconscious mind, so don’t be afraid that you’ll “overdo it” by affirming too often.

Recommended Resources: BMindful, ThinkRightNow

Meditation

Meditation is probably one of the least understood success systems because – in essence – it means to just do nothing! You just sit there, and most meditative practices will have you not even thinking, let alone doing anything else. There are other types of meditation as well, yet all of them share the goal of having you free your mind so that it can let go of the day-to-day struggles, leaving you with clarity and peace of mind.

Clarity and peace of mind may not seem very valuable to someone who wants to be on the fast track to success, yet when you consider that 90%-95% of your life is controlled by your subconscious mind, the power of clarity and peace of mind becomes immediately apparent.

Here are some ways to get the most out of meditation:

• Make sure to let go of your thoughts when you meditate. If you are just sitting there thinking about all of your problems and all of the things that you have to do, you might as well just get up and go do them. You are not getting anything out of meditation if you are not letting go and letting your mind wander.
• Make sure to stay awake. Many people cannot stay comfortable is a sitting up position for long periods of time, so they lay down to meditate. Although there are some meditations that can be used as you fall asleep, most meditations are supposed to involve conscious awareness, which you obviously don’t have if you’re asleep.
• Meditate without having some definite purpose in mind, such as trying to think of a solution to a problem. Although meditating is an incredible way to resolve issues, if you give conscious thought to the problem during the meditation, all you are doing is engaging your conscious mind, rather than your subconscious mind. Instead, think of the issue that you want to solve very briefly before you meditate, release your attachment to finding a solution for it, and then start your meditation.
• Look for answers and clarity unexpectedly, rather than immediately following your meditation. Meditation helps your subconscious mind to achieve focus and to find solutions, and sometimes that happens quickly, while other times it will take longer. If you consciously try to “rush” your subconscious mind, you will potentially shut down the entire subconscious solution-finding process.

Recommended Resources: Meditation Music, Guided Meditations

Attitude

No success system in the world is going to help you if you don’t have your mind right. You can visualize, affirm, and meditate all d
ay long, but if you don’t have an attitude of confidence, success, and expectancy, you will meet with limited results. Your attitude creates the very reality that you walk through every day, so create an environment that ensures your success by keeping your mind and your emotions focused on success, rather than failure.

Here are some ways to get the most out of your own attitude:

• Check your attitude as soon as you get up to start your day. Our dreams and/or our memories from the previous day can carry over into the new day. If those are positive, uplifting, and confident memories or feelings, then go with it. If not, then release any negativity before programming yourself for a new day by using affirmations, visualizations, and meditations.
• Check your attitude frequently throughout the day. It’s easy to “fake it until you make it” when you don’t really feel like smiling or acting confident, but faking it will only get you so far. Negativity can creep back in without you even realizing it, so set reminders or cues to go off throughout the day that snap you back into a positive, confident mindset.
• Check your attitude after a negative situation. If you get into an argument with someone, get stuck in traffic, get a negative message or piece of mail, etc., it can be very easy to fall into a feeling of gloom and doom. People who succumb to those types of feelings are not the kind of people who produce success. If you just got mad, sad, frustrated, or upset by something, now is the perfect time to go back to those affirmations, visualizations, and meditations.

Recommended Resources: Positivity Space, Manifest a Miracle

Conclusion

Everyone wants whatever it is that they want out of life, but only a small percentage of the population are willing to consistently and effectively take action in order to get what they want.

If you have been struggling to attain your desires, why not pick a success system (or two or three), and consistently apply those systems over the long-term? You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain!