MODERN PERSPECTIVE OF YOGA : -


Yoga is an ancient system of exercises dating back many thousand years. Many people link this system with spirituality which is true of not only Yoga but of any exercise system. In any exercises one has to perceive continuously, simultaneously, nonjudgementally and totally his or her internal as well as external environment. This awareness will lead to the integrated development of an organism as a whole.

However the evolution of Yoga happened in times when people were using their mental and physical faculties in a very different way. The body movements were changing depending upon the seasons. Movements changed from ploughing to planting to harvesting . Modern man has mechanized himself to such an extent that his body undergoes same movements year after year. He gets up from the same bed and the same side of it. The morning ablutions happen before the same basin and toilette. Breakfast is taken at the same table and chair holding the same news paper which gives almost the same news year after year. This continues in the way he goes to his office works there and comes back.

In this life style about sixty percent of the body which is muscle is either misutilised or not utilized at all. The architecture of the human body is dependent on the bones. The architecture of the bones is dependent on the muscular activity. If bones are not axially compressed the internal architecture starts loosing its pattern to a pattern of dysfunction. The trabecular complexity slowly alters and the bones become mechanically incompetent. This sort of body is unfit to start doing any kind of Yoga.

Anybody who wants to undertake Yoga must as a beginning start using his muscles in a proper way to get a kind of body awareness which will then be enhanced by Yoga. Yoga must be performed by a strong body, in the sense a body with a strong musculoskeletal structure. Simply doing Yoga stretches without any inherent strength in the body results in many injuries which cannot be attributed to Yoga but to the wrong initiation into it.

Thus muscle training in the form of weight training is vitally important for the modern man or woman before they start Yogic disciplines. The pleasure , joy and the bliss which they will experience through this way will be incomparable to anything they have done before.