What is yoga? A lot of people are aware of this and a lot of people do it but there are still a lot of you who don’t. Let me introduce you to something I’ve been doing and have been loving for a while now and hopefully, at the end of this, you’d be intrigued by it, too. I’ve been practicing yoga consistently for 9 months now. I am blessed to have Bikram Yoga Alabang as my #RoadToSub300 partner. It was in these 9 months that I’ve come to appreciate and understand yoga. It is not just a good place to sweat A LOT. It’s a good way to enhance your endurance, flexibility, and patience just to name a few. In the next few weeks, I will be discussing some of the many poses in yoga; specifically, Bikram Yoga, and explain what benefit you can get out of each pose. For now, we will just discuss a little bit of yoga in general. Here is Wikipedia has to say about Yoga.
Yoga is the physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India with a view to attain a state of permanent peace of mind in order to experience one’s true self. The term yoga can be derived from either of two roots, yujir yoga (to yoke) or yuj samādhau (to concentrate). The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali defines yoga as “the stilling of the changing states of the mind”. Yoga has also been popularly defined as “union with the divine” in other contexts and traditions.
In my quick research of what yoga is, as of 2009, there are about 20 different types of yoga. There are also over 100 different yoga postures or asanas and each of the 20 types of yoga uses some but not all of the postures. Bikram Yoga, one of the 20 different types, uses 26 of the many asanas in its practice. This 90-minute session has you go on different postures bending your body in different directions testing your mental capacity and endurance. (in the next few weeks, I will be discussing some of my favorite postures)
I’ve been in it for 9 months now but still couldn’t perfectly do half of the postures. But I am not complaining. Among all of the different versions of Yoga, Bikram Yoga, to me, is the easiest especially for someone of my size.
Again, in the next few weeks, I will be discussing more of Bikram Yoga and their postures.