G A D I S L U G U

Much more than a convenient practice, Yoga Today is a growing community where you can immerse yourself in a lifestyle of health and wellbeing.

Interact with our expert instructors, expand your practice online, and discover the place where yoga lives today and everyday.

Basic Yoga to Expand the Body

Work towards being present and opening yourself up to something greater in this basic Vinyasa practice with Adi! We'll use the breath to find a sense of stillness within and will move through a series of postures to gently extend and expand the body.

What Is Yoga?

It seems like a hot new trend, but yoga actually began more than 3,000 years ago in India. The word yoga is Sanskrit (one of the ancient languages of the East). It means to "yoke," or unite, the mind, body, and spirit.

Although yoga includes physical exercise, it is also a lifestyle practice for which exercise is just one component. Training your mind, body, and breath, as well as connecting with your spirituality, are the main goals of the yoga lifestyle.

The physical part of the yoga lifestyle is called hatha yoga. Hatha yoga focuses on asanas, or poses. A person who practices yoga goes through a series of specific poses while controlling his or her breathing. Some types of yoga also involve meditation and chanting.

Yoga comes out of an oral tradition in which the teaching was transmitted directly from teacher to student. The Indian sage Patanjali has been credited with the collation of this oral tradition into his classic work, the Yoga Sutra, a 2,000-year-old treatise on yogic philosophy. A collection of 195 statements, the Sutra provides a kind of philosophical guidebook for dealing with the challenges of being human. Giving guidance on how to gain mastery over the mind and emotions and advice on spiritual growth, the Yoga Sutra provides the framework upon which all yoga practiced today is based. "Sutra," literally meaning "thread," has also been translated as "aphorism," a tersely phrased statement of truth. Another definition of "sutra" is "the condensation of the greatest amount of knowledge into the most concise description possible." Keeping these meanings in the mind, we might think of the art and science of yoga as a kind of magnificent tapestry that is woven together by the threads of universal truths.