Mindful YogaMindful Yoga or Mindfulness Yoga combines Buddhist-style mindfulness practice with yoga as exercise to provide a means of exercise that is also meditative and useful for reducing stress. Buddhism and Hinduism have since ancient times shared many aspects of philosophy and practice including mindfulness, understanding the suffering caused by an erroneous view of reality, and using concentrated and meditative states to address such suffering. The use of a hybrid of yoga and mindfulness for stress was pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn in America in 1990.
Yoga as exerciseYoga as exercise is a physical activity consisting mainly of postures, often connected by flowing sequences, sometimes accompanied by breathing exercises, and frequently ending with relaxation lying down or meditation. Yoga in this form has become familiar across the world, especially in the US and Europe. It is derived from medieval Haṭha yoga, which made use of similar postures, but it is generally simply called "yoga". Academics have given yoga as exercise a variety of names, including modern postural yoga and transnational anglophone yoga.
Iyengar YogaIyengar Yoga, named after and developed by B. K. S. Iyengar, and described in his bestselling 1966 book Light on Yoga, is a form of yoga as exercise that has an emphasis on detail, precision and alignment in the performance of yoga postures (asanas). The style often makes use of props, such as belts, blocks, and blankets, as aids in performing the asanas. The props enable beginning students, the elderly, or those with physical limitations to perform the asanas correctly, minimising the risk of injury or strain.
AsanaAn āsana (Sanskrit: आसन) is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose, and later extended in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, to any type of position, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define "asana" as "[a position that] is steady and comfortable". Patanjali mentions the ability to sit for extended periods as one of the eight limbs of his system. Asanas are also called yoga poses or yoga postures in English.
Modern yogaModern yoga is a wide range of yoga practices with differing purposes, encompassing in its various forms yoga philosophy derived from the Vedas, physical postures derived from Hatha yoga, devotional and tantra-based practices, and Hindu nation-building approaches. The scholar Elizabeth de Michelis proposed a 4-part typology of modern yoga in 2004, separating modern psychosomatic, denominational, postural, and meditational yogas.
PranayamaPrānāyāma (Sanskrit: प्राणायाम) is the yogic practice of focusing on breath. In Sanskrit, prāṇa means "vital life force", and yāma means to gain control. In yoga, breath is associated with prāṇa, thus, pranayama is a means to elevate the prāṇa ṣakti, or life energies. Prānāyāma is described in Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Later in Hatha yoga texts, it meant the complete suspension of breathing. Prāṇāyāma (Devanagari: प्राणायाम ) is a Sanskrit compound.
