Moving and grooving

My experience with the physical practice of yoga is, when applied in a way that balances strength and flexibility it balances the body. I also found that yoga works its way through the body, developing muscles in stages. Such as in downward dog, which uses lots of shoulder and arms. To develop or go deeper into this pose for most beginners, shoulders have to be strengthened and relaxed, then the biceps, triceps, forearms, and hands. Once the arms can bare the bodies weight with ease, you then can focus on relaxing calves and hamstrings. After the legs are relaxed and the heels are touching the floor the weight becomes balanced. In the final step the shoulders are stretched further back in the sockets and the head sinks to the ground. All this leads from the beginning pose on the left, to the advanced pose on the right.

This happens over all the major body parts used; such as shoulders and back strengthen first then obliques, and inner thighs become sore as those become developed. It is important to note the need to balance flexibility with strength. It is possible to become flexible enough to do damage to tendons and ligaments through hyper-extension and bearing too much weight joints. Obversly if you work solely on strength the body tightens and becomes stiff to the point that it is impossible to even grab something off the ground. These physical benefits might be what draws in many people, looking for a quick fitness fix or to join the yoga fitness trend. Yoga has become a fitness trend and it could be said anything that will get people exercising is good, but this is far from yoga's origins.

Asana is for the purpose of preparing you for meditation. (1) This is true in the physical sense as, if you ask the average person who is over 30 to sit with a straight back perfectly still for forty five, thirty, even fifteen minutes they will be shifting around uncomfortable. This movement keeps the mind from reaching the  level of relaxing needed in meditation. A second less noticed aspect of yoga asana is as the body loosens up the mental tensions generated from the physical tensions are removed allowing for person release into meditation easier.

Some people though find the idea of meditating unattractive for reasons such as in Ed and Deb Shapiro's article on prana.com 7 reasons it's hard to meditate. Things such as: I don't have time, it's uncomfortable to sit, my mind won't stop, there are too many distractions, no seen benefit, I'm not good at it, and it's just too weird. All these are the mind being so wound  up it can't let go. Even if the mind is still chaotic with the physical and mental relaxation gleaned  from yoga it is possible to sit in the chaos. Then over time the mind will let go more, some experience change after the first session of meditation. Yoga helps those who are mentally wound up by distracting the mind with the poses, mixing that with deep breathing allow the mind to relax.  So even the most physical practitioner will experience mental effects.

In the Yoga Journal article The Scientific Basis of Yoga Therapy by M.D. Tom McCall  he describes how the scientifically proven effects of yoga on the body go well beyond physical fitness. "yoga is arguably the most comprehensive approach to fighting stress ever invented...One of yoga's secrets, documented in research from the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation near Bangalore, is that more active practices followed by relaxing ones lead to deeper relaxation than relaxing practices alone."

Yoga doesn't have to be some spiritual practice of meditation, and chanting in a cave somewhere. Just don't be surprised to be changed though, mentally and emotionally even if it is just the physical practice that brings you to the mat.

Work cited
Gates, Rolf. Kenison, Katrina. Meditations from the Mat. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print.