What is Yoga?

Yoga in general, is a spiritual practice or discipline that helps the individual unify his/her body, mind, and heart.

Yoga is a direct experience of the vast interrelatedness of all life and of all things.

You will feel at peace at the end of a yoga class because there is a natural realignment of your body which leads to a natural realignment of your perception of life and of who you are.

You will need to develop discipline and there is hard work involved especially when you first begin.

Hatha Yoga is the study and practice of physical alignments and breath.

Yoga is much more that postural alignment and breathing.

If you stay with yoga long enough, you may discover a "spiritual awakening" (for lack of a better phrase.) You will find out that who you are, is not just your body, and not just the conversations in your mind.

Through steady practice, you will manifest less self-importance, less material attachment, more capacity for joy, less judgmental ness, and more tolerance toward others.

Yoga is about transformation, not hamstrings, but along the way we have to take care of them. This is not dogma, but a direct experience. Yoga will open your eyes to things you have not experienced before. It will take you beyond the mundane survival level and into a whole new appreciation of life.

Genuine yoga will change your life, your habits, your body, your health, your mind, your breathing patterns, your attitudes, your outlook. Yoga is about learning from direct experience. You will develop wisdom of how your body works most efficiently. You will learn how your conscious and unconscious mind can either support or harm you, and then later, a deeper wisdom naturally gets revealed. The benefits of Yoga will come to those who practice.

There are many types of Yoga. That which comes to mind first is Hatha Yoga an element of Raja yoga, yoga that deals mainly with physical postures and breathing. Karma Yoga emphasizes spiritual practice to help the individual unify body, mind, and heart through certain practices in one’s daily life and work. Bhakti Yoga, a devotional form, generally encompasses chanting, reading of scriptures and worship practices. In general, Yoga is any practice that can turn the practitioner inward to find and experience an individual’s spiritual essence, to realize or awaken to his/her spiritual nature. Another type of yoga is jnana yoga.

Each posture, or asana, is held for a period of time and synchronised with the breath. Generally, a yoga session begins with gentle asanas and works up to the more vigorous or challenging postures. A full yoga session should exercise every part of the body and should include pranayama (breath control practices), relaxation and meditation. The different postures or asanas include:

	Lying postures
	Sitting postures
	Standing postures
	Forward bends
	Twisting postures
	Back bending postures
	Inverted, or upside down postures.

There is no competition in Yoga, everyone is different.

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