It’s more than just buying healthy recipe ebooks online and eating well, and it’s more than just stretching and exercising often. . . True health is a balanced and beautiful communion with the mind, the body, and the soul.
Yoga can be the key to true health if it's not just done as a weekly physical exercise, but as a way of life. Of course, there are many different types of physical yoga to chose from, and this is a good start.
You may be familiar with some of these types of physical yoga, such as Hatha, Vinyasa, Iyengar, Ashtanga, Bikram, Hot Yoga, Kundalini, and Yin Yoga.
What most people don’t realize, however, is that yoga stretches far beyond the mat, block, and strap kind of exercise; in fact, that’s not even where yoga began. Yoga began in the East as a philosophy, meditation, and way of life, and was later introduced to the west an exercise.
It turns out, there is a yoga for just about everything. There is a yoga for the breath, a yoga for resisting Earthly temptations, a yoga for mindfulness, a yoga for eating, a yoga for sleeping, a yoga for meditation, a yoga for sex, but my absolutely favorite, taught to me by the spectacular Ram Dass, is a way of life called Karma Yoga. Karma Yoga is defined as “the discipline of selfless action as a way to perfection.” But Ram Dass puts it more beautifully, by saying:
“Well in the simplest sense you could say that Karma Yoga is using your Karma as a way of coming into union with God. It’s using the stuff of your life. It is usually used as the way in which you do work in the world. And whether or not that work in the world is a vehicle for spiritual awakening. In books like the Bhagavad Gita Karma Yoga is specified as Krishna saying to Arjuna “Do what you do, but offer the fruits of it to me.” That’s what Karma Yoga is. So in that sense, it has a devotional quality to it...Because Karma Yoga really has that you serve others as a way of serving God. You serve others as a way of putting flowers at the feet of God, of honoring God.”
Yoga is so many things, and the best and truest way to a life of health, through and through, the body, mind, and spirit, is by practicing yoga; not just on the mat, but in everything you do.
