Yoga

Yoga is a mind-body practice that brings together physical postures, breathing techniques, and meditation or relaxation. It comes from India, where it has long been understood as a discipline for body, mind, and spirit. Today it ranges from gentle, restorative classes to athletic styles, and from group classes to one-to-one yoga therapy adapted to a person's needs.

A class or session often begins with centering and breathing, moves through postures at your own level, and ends with rest. In yoga therapy, a trained therapist first looks at your health, movement, stress, and lifestyle, then builds a practice tailored to you, with a simple home routine. No prior flexibility or experience is needed, and poses can be adapted with props or a chair.

People practice yoga to ease back and neck discomfort, manage stress, support sleep, calm anxious feelings, improve flexibility and balance, and feel more at home in their bodies. Some use it as support during recovery from illness or injury, or while living with a long-term condition. Many describe it as a space to slow down.

The evidence is moderate and growing. Trials and reviews suggest yoga may help with chronic low back pain, stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and sleep, with some results comparable to physical therapy for back pain. Many studies are small and hard to blind, and effects differ by style and person, so it is best seen as supportive.

Yoga is safe for most people when adapted to your body, and it complements rather than replaces medical care. Tell your teacher or therapist about injuries, recent surgery, pregnancy, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, or other conditions so poses can be modified. Choose an instructor with recognized training, and never push through sharp pain.

Yoga developed in India, and its history is long but hard to date precisely. The word appears in early Sanskrit texts and takes on its meaning as a discipline of body and mind in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The Yoga Sutras, attributed to Patanjali, set out an eight-limbed path, and scholars place the text between about the second century BCE and the fourth century CE. Claims that yoga is over 5,000 years old rest on readings of Indus Valley imagery that historians still debate.

Postural practice grew in medieval hatha yoga texts such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, written around the fifteenth century. Swami Vivekananda introduced yoga philosophy to Western audiences at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. In the twentieth century, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888 to 1989) taught a posture-based style in Mysore, and his students B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Indra Devi each shaped well-known approaches.

Postural yoga reached the United States and Europe in a large way from the 1960s onward, and studios, teacher trainings, and styles multiplied. Yoga Alliance, founded in 1999, keeps a voluntary registry of teachers and schools. In 2014 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed June 21 as International Day of Yoga. Today yoga is taught around the world, and styles differ widely, from gentle and restorative to athletic.