Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Historic Facts About Yoga

By Jack Wogan


Many people have started to practice yoga the last few years. While some of them do this because it's trendy, most of them use it as a substitute for their old philosophy of life. Yoga is meant to help people to become more aware of their spiritual side and to better understand themselves.

Yoga has a long history but has crossed the borders of Asia very recently. It seems that the first evidences of yoga poses, like statues and engravings, can be traced back in the prehistoric times, almost 8000 years ago. It is believed that these evidences were made to suggest that concentration and discipline were possible for both gods and humans. These early principles of yoga were expressed in the famous writings called Vedas which gave the main lines of the Vedic yoga.

Ideas of yoga became part of the greatest Indian literary writings as natural as they became part of the daily life. We can therefore find an entire collection of guidelines in the ancient Upanishads and they all mark a new era in the development of yoga. They also depict people which are close to obtain spiritual freedom. While the practice became more organized a lot of teachers, called guru, appeared and they were surrounded by students, called yogi.

A new step in the history of yoga was taken more than 1800 years ago, when the Yoga Sutras have appeared. Through these yoga offered to its adepts a well-defined and fully conceptualized discipline. The Yoga Sutras have stressed more on the importance of managing to separate the soul from the material world, by this revealing its pure primordial form.

The mixture of civilizations which created USA became a fertile ground for the practice of yoga and from there it spread through the Occident. The main ideas of the discipline found a great echo on the north-American continent and they became even more popular while more and more of the movie stars started practicing yoga. It may have started with a single yoga teacher moving to Hollywood, but today there are numerous gurus and the practice, as popular as it is, is made both for the soul and body.

Nowadays those who want to keep their minds and their bodies in good shape can go to studios where they can try different types of yoga many of which are combined with exercise techniques. Since the holiday season is nearby you could also invest in this practice and decide to choose a yoga retreat where you will be able to completely relax and find yourself far from the crowded cities, the noise and the stress.




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