Yoga is more than just a workout—it’s actually a combination of four components: postures (like tree pose), breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation that can transform your health on many different levels.
Physical benefits of yoga include:
- increased flexibility
- increased muscle strength and tone
- improved respiration, energy and vitality
- maintaining a balanced metabolism
- weight reduction
- cardio and circulatory health
- improved athletic performance
- protection from injury
There is a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The term "Yoga" in the Western world often denotes a modern form of hatha yoga and yoga as exercise, consisting largely of the postures or asanas.
Yoga works across multiple systems in your body at one time to help:
- Dramatically ease lower back pain and even alleviate arthritis pain
- Lower the need for diabetes medications by as much as 40%
- Rev up your immunity by raising levels of disease-fighting antioxidants in your body
- Switch on genes that promote health — works even if you’re a beginner
- Reduce depression, chronic pain, and even improve PTSD symptoms
- Lower your risk of falling and help you regain your balance if you stumble
- And you may even be able to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and fight age-related declines in memory through the meditation component of yoga.
The practice of yoga has been thought to date back to pre-vedic Indian traditions; possibly in the Indus valley civilization around 3000 BCE. Yoga is mentioned in the Rigveda, and also referenced in the Upanishads. Although, yoga most likely developed as a systematic study around the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, in ancient India's ascetic and śramaṇa movements. The chronology of earliest texts describing yoga-practices is unclear, varyingly credited to the Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the 2nd century BCE, and gained prominence in the west in the 20th century after being first introduced by Swami Vivekananda. Hatha yoga texts began to emerge sometime between the 9th and 11th century with origins in tantra.
Yoga gurus from India later introduced yoga to the West, following the success of Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th and early 20th century with his adaptation of yoga tradition, excluding asanas. Outside India, it has developed into a posture-based physical fitness, stress-relief and relaxation technique. Yoga in Indian traditions, however, is more than physical exercise; it has a meditative and spiritual core. One of the six major orthodox schools of Hinduism is also called Yoga, which has its own epistemology, ontology and metaphysics, and is closely related to Hindu Samkhya philosophy.
The ultimate goal of Yoga is Moksha (liberation), although the exact form this takes depends on the philosophical or theological system with which it is conjugated.
In the classical Astanga yoga system, the ultimate goal of yoga practice is to achieve the state of Samadhi and abide in that state as pure awareness. Yoga can be a perfect remedy. It’s one form of exercise that helps relieve stress while improving strength, balance, flexibility, and overall health.