Yoga
The art of yoga was possibly developed in the northern parts of India about 5000 years ago. It was so common to this part of the world that allusions to the yoga ‘mudras’ (styles) are found in almost all major scripted works of ancient India. Even today, there is an immense popularity of yoga in the subcontinent region. No, that is the wrong way to put it. Rather, yoga of late has become a phenomenon that has attained global stature. People all over the world are taking to yoga as the best way to keep them healthy and realize the prized possessions that life has on offering for us. Yes, the popularity of yoga is increasing in leaps and bounds all around the globe. And more importantly, people are reaping the immense benefits of this art.
From time immemorial, several forms of yoga are in practice. The thing is quite similar even today. Naturally it becomes very troublesome on part of somebody, more so for a beginner, to choose from those types. However the premier yoga studios and fitness centers close in mainly on four of such types – the Hatha, Bikram, Kundalini, and Ashtanga variants of yoga.
Yoga (/ˈjoʊɡə/; Sanskrit, योगः Listen) is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India. There is a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.Among the most well-known types of yoga are Hatha yoga and Rāja yoga.
The origins of yoga have been speculated to date back to pre-Vedic Indian traditions; it is mentioned in the Rigveda,but most likely developed around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, in ancient India’s ascetic and śramaṇa movements.note The chronology of earliest texts describing yoga-practices is unclear, varyingly credited to Hindu Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the first half of the 1st millennium CE, but only gained prominence in the West in the 20th century. Hatha yoga texts emerged around the 11th century with origins in tantra.
Yoga gurus from India later introduced yoga to the west, following the success of Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the 1980s, yoga became popular as a system of physical exercise across the Western world.Yoga in Indian traditions, however, is more than physical exercise; it has a meditative and spiritual core. One of the six major orthodox schools of Hinduism is also called Yoga, which has its own epistemology and metaphysics, and is closely related to Hindu Samkhya philosophy.
