The Popularity Of Yoga

From celebrities to athletes to court judges, yoga has become so popular that everybody is already indulging to free their minds from the bondage of stress. It is not only a good exercise, but one can also learn how to practice meditation when doing yoga.

All over the continent, Americans run from the pressure of their jobs and listen to the calm yet firm voice of an instructor softly goading them to 'solder a union' connecting the body & the mind. 15 million Americans bring in some manner of yoga in their exercise routine. Several in these classes are not looking internally but externally, they want to improve parts of their bodies. But others have high hopes of finding remedies for their conditions.

Oprah dedicated a single episode to the advantages of yoga with special appearances by celebrities, testimonies about quitting smoking, saved marriages, improvements on attitudes & grades, beating insomnia, etc.

But can yoga cure cancer, or protect against heart attacks, and can the alleged benefits pass measurements by known standards of medicine? To put it in another way is yoga a science? With this question, we are challenging a worldview that is different from ours. The Indian practice treats these things as mystical developing ways of depicting the body as it is undergone, from the inside to the outside. The Western practice looks at the body from the outside going inside, unwrapping one coating at a time, measuring and testing thru experiments, believing only in concrete things. The East cures the individual while the West cures the condition. Here we refer individuals to various specialists to patch up the different parts of our bodies. The Eastern practice is more holistic; it integrates the mind with the body.

The results of some studies look bright; a group of people with coronary heart disease used some yoga exercises coupled with a vegetarian diet made the blockages in their arteries stable, it even reversed it in others. Another study, still halfway through, includes males who have prostate cancer. So far the results are heartening. This ancient way could turn out to be the medical phenomenon of the future.

Yoga became popular in the US in the late sixties as Mia Farrow and the Beatles trekked to India to learn from the yogi Maharishi Mahesh. Through the years it evolved from cleansing & rebirth of the spirit to a method of prevention & management of stress. We are already at the latest wave of evolution which is about fitness of the body as well as the mind.

You can become a yoga instructor by enrolling in a SchoolYogaInstitute.com yoga certification course. You can find out first hand the effects of yoga on the body by taking this SchoolYogaInstitute.com yoga training course.