Yoga Adhyaya

Learning and practicing yoga regularly has proven to be very effective in eliminating various health disorders. Please visit our Yoga against disorders page to learn more about specific asanas that help alleviating common problems.

Be Flexible
Yoga has positions that act upon the various joints of the body. As we start practicing yoga, we will start using all the joints in our body, including the ones that we seldom use or exercise. Yoga tends to increase lubrication of the joints, ligaments and tendons.

It has been found that the body, which may have been quite rigid starts experiencing a remarkable flexibility in even those parts which have not been consciously worked upon. Why? Unrelated “non strenuous” yoga positions are known to act upon certain parts of the body in an interrelated manner. When chained together, the asanas work in harmony to create a situation where flexibility is attained relatively easily.

Be your own doctor and chiropractor
Yoga is perhaps the only form of activity, which massages all the internal glands and organs of the body, including those such as the prostate - that hardly get externally stimulated during our entire lifetime. This stimulation and massage of the organs in turn benefits us by keeping free from ailments. It is said that a yogi can often foresee impending health problems and infections enabling her to make pre-emptive corrections.

Detoxification
By gently stretching muscles and joints as well as massaging various organs, yoga ensures the optimum blood supply to all parts of the body. This helps in the flushing out of toxins from the body as well as providing nourishment up to the last point. This leads to benefits such as delayed ageing, energy and a remarkable zest for life.

Tone your Muscles
Yoga stimulates muscles that are flaccid and weak. Many asanas are performed slowly and require you to hold the position for a few breath cycles. This helps develop better muscle control and balance. The muscle fibers developed by yoga practitioners tend to be elongated than the ones developed by traditional body builders. The chances of injuring oneself are lesser too, as during Yoga, we mostly focus on groups of muscles rather than isolating a single muscle to train.

Body, Mind and Spirit
These physical benefits are just a “side effect” of Yoga. Practice of Yoga harmonizes the mind with the body and results in great benefits. It is a well-known fact that the mind enables people to achieve extraordinary physical feats, which prove beyond doubt the connection between the mind and the body.

Yoga and meditation work together to strike a balance among physical processes. Often we find that confusion and conflicts in our minds affect the way we perform different tasks. With yoga and meditation, we often do not feel stressed, keeping our body, mind and spirit lively and energetic.

The meditative practices through yoga help in achieving an emotional balance through detachment. Meditation creates conditions, where one is unaffected by the events that occur around her. This in turn creates a remarkable calmness and a positive outlook, which also has great benefits on the physical health of the body.

Having seen this, it is educative to note why the ancient yogis performed yoga and the interdependence of yoga and meditation. The ultimate goal of the yogis was “self realization” or “enlightenment”, a concept, which perhaps is quite esoteric to you and me.

But what is interesting is that for this they had to meditate for extensive spells of time – days, weeks and much more. This required a great amount of physical fitness, energy and the capacity to survive on almost nothing. Yoga asanas provided them the fullest fitness with the least metabolism or stress. Meditation in turn provided them the strength and will to perform these asanas.