Why should you practice Hatha Yoga?
- It promotes a healthier looking body.
- It promotes a healthier, calmer, and more focused mind.
- Its instant benefits include stress-relief and renewed enthusiasm. It allows you to channel your energy so that it’s not wasted on negative emotions.
- Yoga can be adapted to your individual needs whether you are young or old, male or female, healthy or sick.
- Practised properly, yoga is low-impact and will not put excessive strain on your heart, muscles, and joints.
- Yoga is inexpensive and requires no special equipment.
- Yoga can improve the quality of your sleep so that you wake up feeling refreshed and full of vitality.
- Yoga is fun!
Yoga has been called a science or technology of liberation. This is because, unlike purely theoretical philosophies, yoga seeks to provide the student with a practical path towards the common goal of liberation. The word yoga can be roughly translated (from its India origins) as “the ability to focus the mind on a single point without distraction”.
Yogic theory teaches that the body is just the outside shell of the self. There are five bodies that collectively contribute to the self:
- Annamaya kosha– the food sheath, or physical body.
- Pranamaya kosha– the energy sheath.
- Manomaya kosha– the mental sheath (the processing of basic information).
- Vijnanamaya kosha– the intellectual sheath (the part of the mind which generates a higher level of understanding).
- Anandamaya kosha– the bliss sheath (universal consciousness).
Yoga is a way of encouraging the five sheaths to work together optimally, in order to enhance our sense of the self. Hatha yoga uses posture and breathing exercises to accomplish this. For example, an improved flow of energy to the physical body can lead to improved powers in the intellectual sheath. Prana is defined as the vital life force that makes up the universe. It exists both within us and in our surrounding environments. Prana flows through the body using a system of energy channels (nadis) which intersect to form chakras. Pranayama (breathing control) helps to improve the flow of prana through our bodies by clearing the nadis (energy channels) to allow prana to flow through more easily. Meditation on a particular chakra can also bring about better flow of energy through it.Dedicated asana (posture practice) is a vehicle which can help us to regulate our breathing and thus, improve our pranayama. Together, asana (posture practice) and pranayama (breathing exercises) are the building blocks of yogic theory.
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