Chapter 1

Yoga 101: Building a Foundation

In This Chapter

Debunking yoga myths

Deciphering the word yoga

Exploring the primary branches, styles, and approaches to yoga

Understanding the yogic principles of being

Taking control of your mind, body, health, and life with yoga

Although yoga is now a household word, many people don't know exactly what it is. Far more than just physical exercise, yoga can transform you, even if transformation isn't your intention when you first step onto the mat. This chapter explains what yoga really is, describes how it relates to your health and happiness, and introduces you to the many different branches and approaches to yoga. Yoga really does offer something for everyone.

Whatever your age, weight, flexibility, or beliefs may be, you can practice and benefit from some version of yoga. Yoga may have originated in India, but it's for all of humanity.

Understanding the True Character of Yoga

Whenever you hear that yoga is just this or just that, your nonsense alert should kick into action. Yoga is too comprehensive to reduce to any one aspect; it's like a skyscraper with many floors and numerous rooms at each level. Yoga isn't just gymnastics or stretching, fitness training, a way to control your weight, stress reduction, meditation, or a spiritual path. It's all these tools and a great deal more.

Taking a holistic view

The yoga we enjoy today comes from a 5,000-year-old Indian tradition. Some of the exercises look like gymnastics and so, not surprisingly, have made their way into Western gymnastics. These exercises, or postures, help you become (and stay) fit and trim, control your weight, and reduce your stress level. Yoga also offers a whole range of meditation practices, including breathing techniques that exercise your lungs and calm your nervous system, or that charge your brain and the rest of your body with delicious energy.

You can also use yoga as an efficient system of healthcare that has proven its usefulness in both restoring and maintaining health. Yoga continues to gain acceptance within the medical establishment; more physicians are recommending yoga to their patients not only for stress reduction but also as a safe and sane method of exercise and physical therapy (notably, for the back, neck, knees, and hips).

Still, yoga is far more than a system of preventative or restorative healthcare. Yoga looks at health from a broad, holistic perspective that integrative medicine is only now rediscovering. This perspective appreciates the enormous influence of the mind - your psychological attitudes and beliefs - on physical health.

Finding unity

Yoga means "union" or "integration" and also "discipline." The system of yoga, then, is a unitive, or integrating, discipline. Yoga seeks unity at various levels. First, it seeks to unite body and mind, which people all too often separate. Some people are chronically "out of the body." They can't feel their feet or the ground beneath them, as if they hover like ghosts just above their bodies. They're unable to cope with the ordinary pressures of daily life, so they collapse under stress. They don't understand their own emotions. Unable to cope with the ordinary pressures of life, they're easily hurt emotionally.

Yoga also seeks to unite the rational mind and the emotions. People frequently bottle up their emotions and don't express their real feelings. Instead, they choose to rationalize away these feelings. Chronic avoidance can become a serious health hazard; if people aren't aware that they're suppressing feelings such as anger, the anger consumes them from the inside out.

Here's how yoga can help you with your personal growth:

• It can put you in touch with your real feelings and balance your emotional life.
• It can help you understand and accept yourself so that you feel comfortable with who you are. You don't have to "fake it" or reduce your life to constant role playing.
• It helps you become more able to empathize and communicate with others.

Yoga is a powerful means of psychological integration. It makes you aware that you're part of a larger whole, not merely an island unto yourself. People can't thrive in isolation. Even the most independent individual is greatly indebted to others. When your mind and body are happily reunited, this union with others comes about naturally. The moral principles of yoga are all-embracing, encouraging you to seek kinship with everyone and everything.

Finding yourself: Are you a yogi (or a yogini)?

Someone who's practicing the discipline of balancing mind and body through yoga is traditionally called a yogi (if male) or a yogini (if female). This book uses both terms. Becoming a yogi or yogini means you do more than practice yoga postures. Yoginis embrace yoga as a self-transforming spiritual discipline. A yogi who has really mastered yoga is called an adept. If such an adept also teaches (and not all of them do), this person is traditionally called a guru. The Sanskrit word guru literally means "weighty one." According to traditional esoteric sources, the syllable gu signifies spiritual darkness, and ru signifies the act of removing. Thus, a guru is a teacher who leads the student from darkness to light.

Very few Westerners have achieved complete mastery of yoga, mainly because yoga is still a relatively young movement in the West. So please be careful about anyone who claims to be enlightened or to have been given the title of guru! However, at the level at which yoga is generally taught outside its Indian homeland, many competent yoga teachers or instructors can lend a helping hand to beginners.

Balancing your life

The Hindu tradition explains yoga as the discipline of balance, another way of expressing the ideal of unity through yoga. Everything in you must harmonize to function optimally. A disharmonious mind is disturbing in itself, but sooner or later, it also causes physical problems. An imbalanced body can easily warp your emotions and thought processes. If you have strained relationships with others, you cause distress not only for them but also for yourself. And when your relationship with your physical environment is disharmonious, well, you trigger serious repercussions for everyone.

A beautiful and simple yoga exercise called the tree (see Book II, Chapter 3) improves your sense of balance and promotes your inner stillness. Even when conditions force a tree to grow askew, it always balances itself out by growing a branch in the opposite direction. In this posture, you stand still like a tree, perfectly balanced.

Yoga helps you apply this principle to your life. Whenever life's demands and challenges force you to bend to one side, your inner strength and peace of mind serve as counterweights. Rising above all adversity, you can never be uprooted. For more strategies on finding balance, relieving stress, and attaining mindfulness, head to Book VII.

Considering Your Options: The Eight Main Branches of Yoga

Picture yoga as a giant tree with eight branches; each branch has its own unique character, but each is also part of the same tree. With so many different paths, you're sure to find one that's right for your personality, lifestyle, and goals. This section outlines the eight main branches of yoga and then delves a little deeper into Hatha Yoga, which is the kind of yoga focused on in this book.

An overview of the types of yoga

Here are the eight principal branches of yoga:

• Bhakti (bhuk-tee) Yoga, the yoga of devotion: Bhakti Yoga practitioners believe that a supreme being (the Divine) transcends their lives, and they feel moved to connect or even completely merge with that supreme being through acts of devotion. Bhakti Yoga includes such practices as making flower offerings, singing hymns of praise, and thinking about the Divine.
• Hatha (haht-ha) Yoga, the yoga of physical discipline: All branches of yoga seek to achieve the same final goal, enlightenment, but Hatha Yoga approaches this goal through the body rather than through the mind or the emotions. Hatha Yoga practitioners believe that, unless they properly purify and prepare their bodies, the higher stages of meditation and beyond are virtually impossible to achieve; such an attempt is like trying to climb Mt. Everest without the necessary gear or training. This book focuses on this particular branch of yoga.
• Jnana (gyah-nah) Yoga, the yoga of wisdom: Jnana Yoga teaches the ideal of nondualism - that reality is singular and your perception of countless distinct phenomena is a basic misconception. (What about the chair or sofa you're sitting on? Isn't that real? Jnana Yoga masters answer these questions by saying that all these things are real at your present level of consciousness, but they aren't ultimately real as separate or distinct things. Upon enlightenment, everything merges into one, and you become one with the immortal spirit.)
• Karma (kahr-mah) Yoga, the yoga of self-transcending action: Karma Yoga's most important principle is to...