Yoga

Yoga


Yoga, is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines that originated in ancient India. Yoga is one of the six orthodox philosophical schools of Hinduism.There are a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

there are four paths or types of yoga:

  1. Karma yoga

  2. Kriya yoga

  3. Bhakti yoga

  4. Jnana yoga.

Research studies have shown that traditional yoga systems that include breathing exercises and asanas or postures, chants, and meditation can reduce stress and improve immunity and lung functions. Traditional forms and modern methods of yoga are practiced worldwide.

The practice of yoga has been thought to date back to pre-vedic Indian traditions, possibly in the Indus valley civilization around 3000 BCE. Yoga is mentioned in the Rigveda, and also referenced in the Upanishads, though it most likely developed as a systematic study around the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, in ancient

India's ascetic and Sramana movements. The chronology of earliest texts describing yoga practices is unclear, varyingly credited to the Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the 2nd century BCE,and gained prominence in the Nest in the 20th century after being first introduced by Swami Vivekananda. Hatha yoga texts began to emerge sometime between the 9th and 11th century with origins in tantra.


Results/Goals:-

The ultimate goal of Yoga is Moksha (liberation), although the exact form this takes depends on the philosophical or theological system with which it is conjugated.

In the classical Astanga yoga system, the ultimate goal of yoga practice is to achieve the state of Samadhi and abidein that state as pure awareness

According to Jacobsen, Yoga has five principal traditional meanings:

1.A disciplined method for attaining a goal.

2.Techniques of controlling the body and the mind

3.A name of a school or system of philosophy (darśana).

4.With prefixes such as "hatha-, mantra-, and laya- traditions specialising in particular techniques of yoga.

5.The goal of Yoga practice

The Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Lord') is part of the Mahabharata and also contains extensive teachings on Yoga. According to Mallinson and Singleton, the Gita "seeks to appropriate yoga from the renunciate milieu in which it originated, teaching that it is compatible with worldly activity carried out according to one's caste and life stage; it is only the fruits of one's actions that are to be renounced." In addition to an entire chapter (ch. 6) dedicated to traditional yoga practice, including meditation,

it introduces three prominent types of yoga:

  • Karma yoga: The yoga of action.

  • Bhakti yoga: The yoga of devotion.

  • Jnana yoga: The yoga of knowledge.

The Gita consists of 18 chapters and 700 shlokas (verses), with each chapter named as a different yoga, thus delineating eighteen different yogas. Some scholars divide the Gita into three sections, with the first six chapters with 280 shlokas dealing with Karma yoga, the middle six containing 209 shlokas with Bhakti yoga, and the last six chapters with 211 shlokas as Jnana yoga; however, this is rough because elementss of karma, bhakti and jnana are found in all chapters.

Patanjali's writing defined an Ashtanga or "Eight-Limbed"

Yoga in Yoga Sutras They are:

1.Yama (The five "abstentions"): Ahimsa (Non-violence, non-harming other living beings), Satya (truthfulness, non-falsehood), Asteya (non-stealing), Brahmacharya (celibacy, fidelity to one's partner), and Aparigraha (non-avarice, non-possessiveness).

2.Niyama (The five "observances"): Sauca (purity, clearness of mind, speech and body), Santosha (contentment, acceptance of others and of one's circumstances), Tapas (persistent meditation, perseverance, austerity), Svādhyāya (study of self, self-reflection, study of Vedas), and Ishvara- Pranidhana (contemplation of God/Supreme Being/True Self).

3. Asana: Literally means "seat", and in Patanjali's Sutras refers to the seated position used for meditation.

4.Pranayama ("Breath exercises"): Prāna, breath, "ayāma", to "stretch, extend, restrain, stop".

5.Pratyahara ("Abstraction"): Withdrawal of the sense organs from external objects.

6.Dharana ("Concentration"): Fixing the attention on a single object.

7.Dhyana ("Meditation"): Intense contemplation of the nature of the object of meditation.

8.Samadhi ("Liberation'"): merging consciousness with the object of meditation.

Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda :-

Yoga came to the attention of an educated western public in the mid-19th century along with other topics of Indian philosophy. In the context of this budding interest, N. C Paul published his Treatise on Yoga Philosophy in 1851. The first Hindu teacher to actively advocate and disseminate aspects of yoga, not including asanas, toa western audience, Swami Vivekananda, toured Europe and the United States in the 1890s. The reception which Swami Vivekananda received built on the active interest of intellectuals, in particular the New England Transcendentalists, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who drew on German Romanticism and philosophers and scholars like G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Max Mueller (1823-1900), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and others who had (to varying degrees) interests in things Indian.

Theosophists including Madame Blavatsky also had a large influence on the Western public's view of Yoga. Esoteric views current at the end of the 19th century provided a further basis for the reception of Vedanta and of Yoga with its theory and practice of correspondence between the spiritual and the physical. The reception of Yoga and of Vedanta thus entwined with each other and with the (mostly Neoplatonism-based) currents of religious and philosophical reform and transformation throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mircea Eliade brought a new element into the reception of Yoga with the strong emphasis on Tantric Yoga in his seminal book: Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.With the introduction of the Tantra traditions and Freedom.With the introduction of the Tantra traditions and philosophy of Yoga, the conception of the "transcendent" too be attained by Yogic practice shifted from experiencing the "transcendent" ("Atman-Brahman" in Advaitic theory) in the mind to the body itself.



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Written By - Himanshu Sharma