Health Benefits of yoga

The Mayo Clinic says, “Yoga is considered a mind-body type of complementary and alternative medicine practice. Yoga brings together physical and mental disciplines to achieve peacefulness of body and mind, helping you relax and manage stress and anxiety.”

Through the practice of yoga, we become aware of the interconnectedness between our emotional, mental and physical levels. Gradually this awareness leads to an understanding of the more subtle areas of existence. The ultimate goal of yoga is to make it possible for you to be able to fuse together the gross material (annamaya), physical (pranamaya), mental (manomaya), intellectual (vijnanamaya) and spiritual (anandamaya) levels within your being.

Benefits of yoga:

* Yoga increases your level of fitness, including flexibility and strength. By practicing yoga regularly, you begin to notice the muscles of your body becoming leaner and your overall strength increasing. Abdominal crunches and push-ups may not seem that hard anymore after practicing yoga.

* Your flexibility will increase. Are you one of those people who can never touch your toes, no matter how hard you try? Yoga gives you the ability to stretch and reach. Your body lengthens and stretches farther than you could ever imagine during a good yoga workout.

* Yoga poses and yoga stretches increase the blood flow to the muscle and allow the muscles to move more freely on a quicker basis. This means less injuries from those tight muscles that are unstretched and cold.

* Yoga is known to relieve stress. Breathing control aids in relaxing the mind and body, focusing only on the present. The crying baby, the endless workload, the Blackberry constantly beeping will be forgotten for at least a little while. In yoga, you learn to concentrate on you and that’s it.

* Mental health and physical energy are difficult to quantify, but virtually everyone who participates in yoga over a period of time reports a positive effect on outlook and energy level. Yogic stretching and breathing exercises have been seen to result in an invigorating effect on both mental and physical energy and improved mood.