Why Yoga is Good for Your Health

Physical Benefits

From a physical point of view, yoga and its poses (called asanas) have been proven to be highly effective in improving various aspects of health, including:

• Muscle Tone

  Muscles that have become weak or flaccid are repeatedly stimulated to tone them up and remove excessive fat.

• Flexibility

  Yoga contains positions which exercise all the different joints of the body, including joints that we are not normally aware of. Seemingly unrelated “non strenuous” yoga positions act upon certain parts of the body in an interrelated manner. When done together, they work in harmony to create a situation where flexibility is attained relatively easily.

• Detoxification

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  Yoga ensures the optimum blood supply to various parts of the body by gently stretching muscles and joints as well as massaging the various organs. This aids in the cleansing out of toxins from every part of the body in addition to providing nourishment, subsequently leading to benefits such as increased energy and delayed aging.

• Increased lubrication

  Increased lubrication of the joints, ligaments and tendons by exercising them through the various yoga positions.

• Massaging of All Organs of the Body

  Yoga is possibly the only type of exercise that massages every one of the internal organs and glands of the body thoroughly. This includes glands which rarely ever get externally stimulated, such as the prostate gland. Yoga works in a natural way on all the different parts of the body. This massage and stimulation of the organs in sequence provides huge benefits to our bodies by keeping away illness and maintaining optimum physical health.

However, all these amazing physical benefits are really just a bonus on top of what yoga is really about. The ultimate benefit of yoga comes from its ability to bring peace to the mind by harmonizing the mind and body together.

The Body and Mind Connection

How often have you been worrying about something, had something “on your mind”, and in turn this has caused you physical symptoms of ill health? Stress, which starts in the mind, can cause a wide range of physical symptoms, including headache, tight chest and lack of appetite. Also, physical health problems can manifest themselves as problems of the mind, such as stiffness and soreness can cause a person to become irritable, and having weak muscles can cause a lack of self-confidence.

Yoga and meditation help to prevent these mental and physical imbalances from impacting on our health. Actually, yoga really is meditation, since both yoga and meditation work in harmony to achieve the objective of the unity of mind, body and spirit, leading to a state of eternal bliss.

Meditation

There are various methods of meditation, but the most commonly used are:

• Focusing on your breath
• Saying a mantra (word) silently in your mind

Meditation can be done either sat on the floor with the legs crossed, or sat in a chair.

The purpose of meditation is to calm the mind and create inner peace, harmony and tranquility, and also emotional balance through detachment. By meditating, you are creating a condition where you are no longer affected by what is going on around you. This can lead to a remarkable feeling of calmness and a positive outlook on life.

Since stress can cause a wide range of physical health problems, the complete absence of stress, by means of meditation, is a great way to improve one’s physical health too.

Ultimately, if practiced regularly every day, meditation’s ultimate goal is “enlightenment” (also known as “nirvana”), a freedom from physical matter and base desires.

Links

• Yoga Postures – a large online list of yoga postures for you to try.
• Project Meditation – an online community where you can get a free audio meditation course and also chat online to other meditaters via message boards.