What Is Yoga?

India is the birthplace of yoga. Yoga is believed to be the purest path to physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fitness. The hermit Patanjali is considered to be the father of yoga.  He was a philosopher cum doctor.

Yoga prescribes a dispassionate and neutral outlook towards life. This is achieved when one manages to free his mind from the intellectual and emotional ties that bind it. The individual will eventually attain a state where he cannot discriminate between love and hate, good and the bad and pleasure and pain. Ahimsa (non-violence), Satya (truth), Asteya (control desire), Brahmacharya (celibacy) and Aparagriha (avoiding greed) are fundamental principles of yoga.

Yogic techniques were initially viewed with skepticism in the Western world but now all of them have been scientifically proven in the West. People spend more than $3 billion every year in the United States practicing yoga. Many scientists in India are working together to collate all authentic yoga techniques in a single compendium.