Yoga practitioners often ascribe ancient traditions to the practice of yoga. And it is true, there is an ancient tradition of yoga well documented over thousands of years.

BUT - the physical practice of yoga perhaps isn't as ancient as we think.  In any typical western yoga class, we do yoga postures, putting outselves in all sorts of twists, bends and sometimes inversions. We stay there, trying to focus on our breathing and settle our minds. But this is a curious thing...

The history of modern physical yoga postures isn't perhaps what we think. Possibly only originating from 100 years ago when gymnastics and yoga met in India. It is true, some of the postures can be found in a text dating from around the 14th Century, but many of the postures we practice in a class today are perhaps relatively modern. Some claim that the Yogis noticed how popular gymnastics was and how appealing the physical form was and cleverly incorporated some of the ideas blending them with yoga practices to encourage people to give it a go.

Interesting, and there is some credible evidence to suggest it is true. But does it really make any difference if it is 100 or 10,000 years old? Surely what matters is that if you give it a go, it should leave you feeling better and over time help support your health and life. It should stand on its own two-feet. Does it need the justification of some ancient authenticity?

Mark Singleton authored the book "Yoga Body. The origins of modern posture practice" by Oxford University Press. It depicts the rising of the physical form of yoga that we see in most yoga classes in the west. And it tries to provide some context about where it came from. He provides compelling explainations challenging some of the apparent myths of where this ancient and timeless practice originates.
 
A good blog post providing more context about Mark's book and modern yoga practice is here.  

But hopefully it doesn't matter if it is authentically ancient or not. Yoga can still be experienced through your posture practice without the addition of romantic origins. Your practice should help you develop strength and stability, physically and mentally, and connect with yourself and the world around you. Over time you should start to notice that you are more compassionate, more self-aware and less selfish that will ultimately benefit those around you. Your practice helps you develop space for self-enquiry. Yes and along the way you may find yourself fitter, stronger, leaner and more toned.

So maybe a yoga class isn't an ancient tradition, but it sure does help you feel better about things and is a great support in life. 

We do it all day long, and most of the time we don't even think about it. Maybe we notice our breathing if we are climbing a flight of stairs and we breathe more heavily. Or perhaps if we are upset and our breathing becomes affected we become aware of it. But mostly it just carries on unconsciously.

In yoga we become trained to listen, feel and even count our breath. We see it as a mirror reflecting how we are and learn to observe it and even control it sometimes, for beneficial effects.

A smooth, flowing, regulated breath helps to stabilise our thoughts and our minds. Steady full breathing encourages relaxation to set in and helps release deeply held tension that we aren't even conscious we are carrying.

Students often first come to yoga without having consciously listened to their own breathing before. This alone can be challenging for some but eventually it is deeply rewarding. We almost need to 'learn' how to breathe properly. This sounds silly as we manage quite successfully to breathe all day long. But often we don't breathe very effectively or efficiently and there is usually room for improvement. There are even projects dedicated just to improve our breathing, like The Breathing Projectin NYC.

Ultimately better breathing can promote better health. The shallow every-day breathing that we often use can be encouraged to be deeper.

Try this for a moment
Try taking a full, deep, slow inhale. Keep inhaling until the belly expands, notice the chest rise up gently. Then slowly exhale and feel the body gradually soften as you do so. Breathe out until there is no breath remaining in the lungs. Try using the tummy at the end, pulling it in to squeeze any last air out of the body. Notice how much longer that breath took than usual, and then perhaps realise how much more fully you could breathe if you paid attention to it. Allow the shoulders to relax and take another full breath.

The benefits of breathing properly are broad and wide ranging. To name a few, they include reduced anxiety, stress and even blood-pressure. Relaxed respiratory muscles and some neck muscles. More efficient breathing and oxygen exchange and improved cardiovascular system. Strengthened diaphragm and intercostal (rib) muscles. Better posture. Improved physical endurance. And of course, a calmer state of mind.

Yoga dedicates a whole aspect of its teaching to Pranayama or breath control and many techniques take years to master.

The breath is more powerful than we realise. Try noticing it at a few different points today and see if it tells you anything about youself. It almost certainly will if you take the time to listen.

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This question is one that I get asked regularly. The responses are different for different people and of course, there isn't a right or wrong answer, yoga is different things to different people...

Yoga for fitness? 
People take to physical activity for the challenges that are supposed to help keep us supple and healthy. Yoga can provide a range of challenges, some intense and others more relaxing depending on the yoga practice. The movements can help you feel better in yourself (as long as you work within your own limits and progress sensibly), can strengthen you and keep you suitably supple.  However here is definitely more to it than a regular fitness regime, otherwise why not go to the gym?

Yoga for stiffness?
Yoga is notorious for its bendiness and many people believe they need to be bendy to do yoga.
Not so!
The bendy poses are not in the majority, and many postures are completely accesible for stiff people too and over time the stiffness will ease up so yes, great to help improve stiffness.

Yoga for posture improvement?
Yoga is perfect for strengthening and improving posture. After all, the physical postures or asana were originally designed to keep the body strong and stable to enable hours of meditation by the yogi. So the benefits of practising yoga asana can support our modern day posture needs too.

Yoga for relaxation?
Stretching and limbering up the body can help encourage the body to let go of tension. Along side this, focusing our minds on body and breath work can help relax our minds from the tensions of daily grind. Yoga can help us ease up on tension and encourage the body, and the breath, and even the mind, to relax.

Yoga for stress-relief? 
It is well known that the work in yoga leaves people feeling calm and with a pervasive sense of well-being. Some people report this also from running, swimming, eating chocolate... Yoga definitely helps both release stress, and also to have the ability to recognise it earlier. By taking the time to listen to our bodies and minds, and recognising the signs of stress early, and by  understanding what the causes are, we can begin a deeper pattern of change to prevent stress-related problems.

Yoga for healing?
Yoga is known for its therapeutic help, and I work with a lot of private yoga students who will testify to this. For a variety of reasons, they find a regular yoga practice helps improve their bodies and also helps them with much more besides. Movement and good breathing can help heal the body and mind and encourage repair, renewal and strength.

Yoga can be as gentle or as strong as is needed to ensure it is beneficial to whoever is practicing it. I work with people recovering from sometimes serious illness who physically are very limited. But there is always something you can do that will gradually lead to greater ability and hopefully progress you back to health either physically, mentally or more often than not, both!

Yoga for spirituality?
Yoga has the ability to calm down and settle an overactive body and mind.  We can stop worrying, still the incessant chit chat of the mind and move towards creating a refreshing calm, a reprieve to help us handle every day life. This in turn can lend itself to meditation and contemplation of what spirituality might mean to us. By accessing a still and settled mind we can experience the world from a different perspective and perhaps notice things we hadn't noticed before, bringing us closer to who we really are.

Yoga to support personal change
The philosophy and psychology of yoga has many teachings on how we perpetuate our habits, good and bad. It teaches how we can reflect on them, what their triggers and patterns are, how to know ourselves well enough that we can ultimately move towards changing them and ourselves. Yoga practice is a starting point for personal change and development.

As I told a private student today, one of the joys of yoga is that it is sooo efficient. It can do all this and more in a relatively short practice, the more you practice, more the of these benefits you can get.

So why do we practice yoga? 
Is it so we can become a little bendier than we were before? Or perhaps there is more purpose than this?

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