HowYou Can Benifit From Daily Use Of Yoga

This report, including extracts from "Yoga Made Easy" includes information based upon research about YogaYoga is an ancient health-art developed and perfected over the centuries by the Sages and Wise Men of ancient India.

Yoga is not a religion, a metaphysical doctrine, or a philosophy. Yoga can take years off your face and years from your body--and add years to your life.Not only does Yoga make you look and feel years younger, years healthier, but it lends your body superb healthiness.

This system of Yoga does not demand difficult positions and postures, uncomfortable exercises or strenuous diets. It works like magic because it enables the body to realize its full potential of good health.You know that Nature built into your body certain natural safeguards against disease, certain "defense mechanisms" for self-repair. Well, modern Yoga helps the body's machinery function smoothly, efficiently, at peak performance.

Yoga assists all your muscles and bones and organs to operate at top masculine or female vigor. Yoga stimulates into peak performance the latent abilities of your body to throw off the attacks of disease, the psychosomatic "nervous illnesses" that nag and plague millions.

Yoga has the amazing power to refresh and relax you, soothe your nerves, calm your mind, give you the serenity and strength and inner stamina that is part of the "Magic of the East."Yoga prevents the premature grey in your hair, the ugly wrinkles in your face.

For far too long the secret wisdom and lore of this ancient art has been denied to men and women of the Western world. In so doing, I have taken full cognizance of modern advances in nutrition, vitamin-therapy, health foods, and the new systems of diet and exercise, as well as the most recent medical knowledge and research into methods of revitalizing the human body and halting the "aging process."You want a full life. You want to feel well.

You want energy, vitality, staying power. This system of Yoga applies age-old secrets to everyday life at the modern tempoWhy Yoga?As recently as a century ago, when the average life expectancy throughout the Western world was less than forty years, people gave little thought to keeping fit.

Life was simply not long enough. Surgery is capable of life-saving magic. Even as the years of our lives stretch out longer, existence becomes infinitely more complex. The Atomic Age is hardly a relaxed age. As for our physical conditions, as fast as the human body is enabled, through technical advances, to last longer, it falls prey to a new, totally different roster of ills.

It is possible for anyone who will only take the trouble to learn to live serenely in our Age of Anxiety. The key to such well-being is Yoga.Yoga, you say? The misconceptions about Yoga are many, and naturally what sticks in the minds of most people is the flamboyant, or what we might call the circus approach.

True Yoga philosophy and Yoga health practices are sane, serious, utilitarian and easily applicable to our own daily lives.If you are an average man or women coping with just average problems, here is what you are doubtless up against: Your day is too short.

Heaven help you if, on top of all this, a major crisis looms. Next come the perpetual frowns, the wrinkles, the graying hair, a general sense of defeat and of growing old before one's time.Think of Yoga as a tool that will help you banish fear, and the fear of fear.

For instance, proper breathing and relaxation, the very cornerstone of allYoga teachings, result in deeper, more beneficial sleep and a general sense of restfulness and well-being; and these in turn enable one to function at the very optimum of one's abilities.

So starts an entire beneficial cycle: a healthy body means a better-functioning body, it means added tone, improved functioning of the glands; and that in turn means better metabolism, muscle tone, skin tone, elimination and general vitality and vigor.It means eyes that sparkle, hair that shines and appetites time will not dull.

As for the spiritual and mental results of Yoga practice, these soon become manifest in a fresh ability to make the most of one's inner resources. As one's powers of relaxation increase, there follows an enormous improvement in concentration.

The prize, if found, was to be a promise of physical perfection without end: beauty that did not fade, an ever-supple, lovely body, a face without lines. For in reality it isn't _eternal _ life that man longs for, but rather a long, good, useful life lived to the full and without fear-- fear of pain, of dependence, of invalidism and weakness and all the other miseries which can make old age a burden and an indignity.

Once you learn to live without tensions, you discover your own optimum potential and are on the way, though without urgency, to live up to it; in short, once you begin to achieve that inner harmony which will allow you to stop living at odds with yourself, you will find your entire view­point changing.

People often ask, understandably enough, whether there aren't some limitations as to the time of life when the study of Yoga may begin. Old people may take it up as well as the young, and even children have benefited by it.

On the other hand the very young, who with their wonderfully elastic limbs and limber joints are often able to approach the most difficult Yoga postures in the spirit of play, will gain little from such practices if permitted to perform them like acrobatic stunts.

The prime purpose of Yoga is a reeducation of one's mental processes along with the physical. Therefore, encouraging children to participate will only serve a purpose if it will teach them the habit of relaxing, help them grow up relaxed. Above all, always keep in mind that success is a relative matter--a matter of degree.

What IsYoga Let us begin with a working definition: Yoga is a method by which to obtain control of one's latent powers. It offers the means to reach complete Self-realization.This the Yogis achieve by turning their thoughts inward, away from the objective world. The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word Yoga is yoke.

Yoga is very definitely not a religion: some Yogis are deeply religious, others are not.The name, derived from the Sanskrit Ha, which stands for the female principle and Tha, the male principle, implies that this Yoga may be practiced by both men and women with the object of achieving complete control of the body.

The second important feature of Hatha Yoga is the practice of asanas or postures. In short, we make exercise hard work.Bear in mind that the body is always first slowly prepared for each pose and that the limbering-up process, which each student pursues at his own pace, is geared in such a way as not to overtax his capacities.

By the time he is ready to practice an asana, certainly by the time he has mastered it, really is relaxing as well as beneficial. Then the profound balance achieved by the body makes it possible for the mind to soar.Yoga teaches that it is essential never to overdo, never to strain and tire. Rhythmic deep breathing is an essential part of all exercises.

Much more emphasis is put on breathing than is true of any of the Western schools of physical culture, since the Yogis understand that for purely physiological reasons deep breathing is a sure way to calm the nerves, and this in turn reduces tensions and improves concentration.One might say that the overall reason for combining deep breathing with asanas and mudras is that the Yogi, while purifying and disciplining his body, aims to bring his mind, too, under similar control.

Many Western students are content with the sheer physical well-being they are able to achieve, with no concern at all for the second aim, which is for mental and spiritual discipline.Hatha Yoga, in common with other Yoga schools, teaches certain rules of conduct, or yamas.

This chanting is done in conjunc­tion with deep breathing, which admittedly does arrest mind-wandering so that the practitioner becomes drawn into himself in spiritual contemplation. There is hardly a place for it in our Western world.In Laya Yoga the student remains perfectly still, in a profound state of trance.

As we have already mentioned, this form of Yoga is not safe for anyone to practice who has not gained complete control over his emotions as well as over his mental processes.Essentially practical, Karma Yoga teaches helping others as a means of helping one's self. Still another school is Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge as against that of Action.

Jnana educates the mind to perceive Self and so free itself from all forms of delusion.Bhakti Yoga is a system of intense devotion, with emphasis on faith. Finally we come to Raja Yoga which, translated literally, means "King of Yogas."

By then the Yogi has learned to stop his thinking processes so completely that his consciousness is absorbed into the Infinite. Raja Yoga may be thought of as the synthesis of all the systems of Yoga as a whole.Now to recapitulate: The gaining of a healthy body and a mind calm and passive under all circumstances is common to all Yogas. Control of one's mental processes as well as of the emotions is a basic common goal.

In our own Occidental utilitarian terms, then, Yoga techniques, translated into Yogism, offer us the means for better Self-realization in the realm of the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual.