Yoga And Its Benefits

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YOGA AND ITS BENEFITS


Many health and lifestyle benefits are associated with the practice of Yoga. However, it is impossible to understand the attainment of these benefits without explaining the classical form of Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, as a way of life, the philosophy it is based on, and the eight methods that makes it up.

Yoga is a way of life whose creation and systemization is credited to Maharishi Patanjali. According to Patanjali, the basic idea of yoga is to unite the atma or individual soul with the paramatma or the Universal Soul. According to Yoga philosophy, by cleansing one's mind and controlling one's thought processes one can return to that primeval state, when the individual self was nothing but a part of the Divine Self. This is the sense encapsulated in the term samadhi. The aim of the yogi is to be able to perceive the world in its true light and to accept that truth in its entirety. The term 'yoga' stands for 'union'. A yogi's ultimate aim is to be able to attain this 'union' with the Eternal Self with the help of certain mental and physical exercises. Different schools of thought have been derived from Ashtanga Yoga, but they all adhere to different applications of the Ashtanga discipline, and are all ultimately aimed at liberation of the soul and an understanding of the Divine Unity. For the purposes of this paper, the understanding of the benefits that can be derived from Yoga, only and in-depth discussion of Ashtanga Yoga is necessary.

The Patanjala Yoga philosophy is also known as Ashtanga Yoga and is the practical manifestation of the Sankhya and Vedantic philosophies. It is an attempt to understand the nature of the mind, including “Its different states of being, impediments to growth, afflictions and the methods of harnessing it for the achievement of absolute self realization”.
Sankhya philosophy assigns three functions to the mental body: mind, intelligence
and false knowledge. Vedanta a...