When most people think of yoga, they picture someone young, flexible, twisted in a pretzel-like pose. But real yoga – the kind that welcomes you just as you are, regardless of your shape, size, ethnicity, gender, age or ability is powerful.
Yoga, especially when practised through a body positive lens, is a tool for emotional healing, deeper rest, improved posture, self-acceptance and growing self-confidence. It’s a return to yourself, a softening, a way of remembering that you are enough – and always have been.
It was yoga that helped to transform my life after I woke up one morning and discovered I had Bell’s Palsy (a condition where one side of your face becomes paralysed).
I had the condition for five years with no improvement and it was my yoga journey that helped me to heal both mentally and physically. It allowed me to slow down and connect to my body – and in doing so, I realised I hadn’t truly been happy for a long time. I left the corporate world after 20+ years, beginning to go with the flow of life and discovering a path that allowed me to find my purpose.
That’s why I’m so passionate about sharing yoga. Its benefits are many – and they’re truly transformational, although I know it might sound cliché.
The true yoga is when you take it off the mat and into your everyday life.
Emotional Balance
Yoga helps you meet yourself where you are – emotionally, mentally, and physically.
When life feels overwhelming, yoga offers a moment to pause, breathe, and simply be. Through mindful movement, breathwork, and stillness, you start building emotional awareness. You notice what you’re feeling without needing to push it away or fix it.
Over time, you learn to sit with discomfort, breathe through tension, and stay grounded even when life feels uncertain. That’s emotional balance, not controlling your emotions but creating space to move through them with more ease.
It’s not about being calm all the time – it’s about knowing you have tools to return to when things feel heavy. Learning to pause rather than respond helps you to navigate life in a more easeful way.
Better Sleep
Yoga helps you move out of fight-or-flight mode – that wired, overstimulated state we often carry into the evening – and into a space where your body feels safe enough to rest.
When you practice yoga, you slow your breathing, allow your body to relax, allowing you to bring awareness to the present moment. These simple acts calm the nervous system, reduce cortisol (the stress hormone), and gently activate the parasympathetic nervous system – your rest-and-digest mode. Essentially allowing you to let go of your day.
This shift tells your body: it’s safe and you’re no longer on alert. Your muscles begin to relax. Your heart rate slows down. Your mind becomes quieter.
Whether it’s gentle movement, restorative poses, or breathwork – yoga helps you unwind from the day and prepares both your body and mind for deeper, more restful sleep. And when practised regularly, it doesn’t just improve how you fall asleep – it transforms your whole relationship with rest. You start to see rest as something you deserve, not something you have to earn. It becomes a radical act and you lose the guilt associated with this.
There’s nothing performative about rest. No badge for the most burned-out person in the room. Instead, we learn that slowing down is wise. Rest is the foundation of everything.
Improved Posture
Posture isn’t just about standing up tall and straight – it’s about how you carry yourself in life. Are you holding tension? Shrinking yourself? Yoga helps bring awareness to your physical and emotional alignment.
When people move through a body positive yoga practice, they begin to take up space differently. The focus isn’t on “fixing” posture for aesthetic reasons, but on cultivating embodied presence. You learn where you’re holding stress. You move in a way that supports your spine, your joints, your breath – and your confidence.
Over time, yoga gently builds strength, flexibility, and ease. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. Even standing tall and breathing deeply can shift your entire mood.
In our modern lives sitting, slouching, scrolling – our posture often takes a hit. Yoga helps you reconnect to your body, become stronger, open your chest, and stand taller with awareness. It’s not about “perfect” posture, it’s about alignment that feels good and supports your daily movement with ease.
Yoga invites us to come home to our bodies. Through mindful movement and body awareness, it gently realigns, strengthens and supports better posture – not to look a certain way, but to feel more comfortable and confident in your own skin.
As posture improves, many people also notice a shift in how they move through life, quite literally. Joints feel freer, steps feel lighter, and there’s a greater sense of ease and mobility. When we move with more awareness, we often experience less pain and more freedom, physically and emotionally.
Yoga helps you tune in, move better, and support your body in a way that feels sustainable and kind.
Confidence
Confidence doesn’t come from achieving the most advanced pose. It comes from feeling seen, safe, and celebrated just as you are. In my classes, there are no mirrors. No comparison. Just community, curiosity, and joy.
People often say: “I didn’t think I belonged in yoga.” My response is always: yoga is for everyBODY. You have always been doing yoga – when you bend down to tie your shoelaces, that is yoga, when you stretch out your bed, that is yoga too.
When you practice in a space that centres inclusion, something shifts. You begin to trust your body, soften into self-acceptance, and start to show up on and off the mat with more ease.
One of the most beautiful things about yoga is how it builds inner confidence. You begin to feel more at home in your body. You learn to trust yourself and are no longer achieving perfection. That kind of confidence isn’t about performance – it’s about presence.
One of my students says, “she has given up the need to achieve perfection”.
In a world that constantly demands we hold it together, yoga gives us space to fall apart and rebuild. It helps us reconnect with our inner world so we can respond rather than react. Through breath, gentle movement, and mindfulness, we learn to pause, to feel, and to process.
In body positive yoga, emotional safety is key. You’re not told to “push through” you’re encouraged to listen. It’s not about bypassing difficult feelings but creating space for them to move through you, without shame or judgment.
I’ve seen students dissolve into tears during a quiet pose, not from sadness, but from finally feeling permission to exhale – to let go. That, to me, is yoga doing what it was always meant to do: reconnect us with our wholeness.
Yoga has often been misrepresented as something only for the thin, the bendy, the “already confident.” But I’ve seen the opposite. I’ve witnessed people step into their bodies, their power, and their voice through accessible, compassionate yoga.
Yoga doesn’t give you confidence by changing your body, it gives you confidence by helping you come home to it.
It teaches you to trust yourself, to move with intention, and to stop apologising for taking up space.
True confidence isn’t loud. It’s not performative.
It’s the quiet knowing that you are already enough.
That’s what yoga gives you.
Simple Practices to Support Confidence, Rest & Reconnection
You don’t need to spend an hour on the mat to feel the benefits of yoga. These small, intentional moments can help you build confidence, improve rest, and reconnect with your body no fancy poses required.
Try one today and notice how it makes you feel:
The Pause Before Speaking
Before you say “yes” or answer a question, take one full breath. It creates space to respond from your truth, not pressure.
Tadasana (Mountain Pose)
Stand with feet hip-width apart.
Roll your shoulders up, back, and down.
Take five slow breaths and feel your strength.
Mirror Affirmation Practice
Place your hand on your heart or belly.
Say: “This body is wise. This body is enough. This body is mine.”
Repeat daily. Speak gently — you’re listening.
Bed Yoga for Confidence
Lie down and stretch your arms overhead.
Breathe deeply.
Let your body take up space. Say: “It’s safe to rest. I deserve this.”
Curiosity over Criticism
When self-doubt creeps in, shift the question from:
“What’s wrong with me?”
to: “What does my body need right now?”
That’s where confidence begins.
BIO;
Donna Noble is a trailblazing Body Positive Yoga teacher, wellbeing coach, speaker, and author of Teaching Body Positive Yoga. With a mission to make wellness truly inclusive, she helps people reconnect with their bodies, build confidence, and embrace rest as a form of resistance. Donna has been featured in Stylist, Red, BBC Radio London, and Yoga Journal. She leads retreats, writes, and speaks globally – inviting everyBODY to feel seen, safe, and celebrated in their practice, both on and off the mat.
| donnanoleyoga@gmail.com | |
| Website | https://thenobleartofyoga.co.uk |
