How Yoga Works

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We all have heard how doing yoga helps in numerous ways. Practitioners credit yoga for alleviating back problems, obesity, blood pressure, cholesterol, arthritis and a host of other medical conditions. These anecdotes are real and meaningful. But how does yoga work? We could ask 100 practitioners how yoga works and get 100 different answers. One person might say, "I feel calmer after a yoga class, so it works"; another might say, "My injury doesnt hurt anymore, so it works"; and yet another person might say, "Yoga helps me feel closer to God, so it works."

Yoga is holistic and so are its effects. As with any holistic endeavor, measuring the constituent parts is not the same thing as understanding the sum of those parts. Holism involves looking at all sides of a problem, and trying to intervene at as many points as possible and gently so. Viewed holistically, almost all problems are multifaceted. A truly holistic approach looks at all the parts, organs and systems of the body and tries to optimize them.

Yoga envisions a web of causation that is much more complex than the limited number of factors modern medicine considers. For example, in the case of heart disease it circumvents cholesterol and blood pressure to look at stress and the role of your mind in perpetuating it, your emotional temperament, your connections with other people etc. The idea is that a wide variety of factors can affect your well-being, and the most efficient way to remedy health problems is to work on many areas simultaneously.

This is precisely what the practice of yoga does. Yoga says that if you look clearly you will see that everything about you is connected to everything else. From a therapeutic standpoint, this provides the insight that you improve the functioning of any one organ or system by trying to improve all and it is yogas holistic emphasis on strengthening you throughout your body and mind.

Yoga has so many different aspects to it and means different things to different people. It works in so many different ways for different people depending upon their needs and what they want to get out of it. Some people want physical benefits, some emotional and/or spiritual, and some mental benefits. And for many, yoga benefits in all the areas. People do yoga for various reasons and no connection is ever the same as the last-either you feel deeper into your inner spirit or you feel calm, or you feel at peace, or you feel enlightened. All very different results but all along the lines of the benefits of yoga and how it works. Each time a person does yoga, its a different experience irrespective of whether the practitioner is a yoga veteran or a beginner.

Nevertheless, let us study as laymen how yogasanas (yogic physical exercises) and pranayamas (yogic breathing exercises) work. In any good physical fitness program there are four parameters, viz., a good cardio workout, stretching, balance and strength. Yogasanas have all these four components. Sun salutes, churning the mill, rowing the boat etc. are some yogasanas which can give a good cardio workout if the numbers of rounds are increased to a challenging level.

Ever heard of massaging the internal organs of the body? Yoga is perhaps the only form of exercise, which massages all the internal organs of the body in a thorough manner. This is done by stretching and compressing the body in all the forward bending, backward bending and twisting poses of the yogasanas. The spine also becomes supple and flexible as it is bent in all the directions. As the cliché goes, "You are as young as your spine." It means that if your spine is supple and flexible, many of the ills of aging are avoided. Spine carries the nervous system and supports the body. A supple spine is a healthy spine.

Balancing yogasanas are anti-ageing because they keep nervous system intact and working at the optimum level. As people age they lose balance and muscle coordination prompting the use of walking stick in old age. But balancing postures ensure that no matter how old you grow you will never need a walking stick. Strength or weight training is also an important component of a good fitness program. They keep our bones healthy. Yogasanas use free weights i.e. the weight of your own body. In all the arm balance postures, the weight of the body is utilized. The beauty of yogasanas is that rather than being an exercise that takes energy away, it actually energizes the body. It conserves the energy unlike other forms of exercise.

Pranayamas are yogic breathing exercises that utilize breathing to influence the flow of prana (vital energy) in the nadis (energy channels) of the pranamaya kosha (energy body). They are very important and have subtle effects on our system. In the pranayama practices, four important aspects of breathing are utilized. They are: (a) Pooraka or inhalation (b) Rechaka or exhalation (c) Antar kumbhaka or internal breath retention and (d) Bahir kumbhaka or external retention. The different practices of pranayama involve various techniques which utilize these four aspects of breathing.

To illustrate how pranayama works, let us take example of two most popular practices viz. Nadi Shodhana Pranayama and Bhramari Pranayama.

Nadi Shodhana Pranayama is an exercise in which we breathe in through alternate nostril. We close the right nostril and inhale through the left. Then we close the left, open the right nostril and breathe out. Next we breathe in through the right nostril, close it and open the left nostril and breathe out. This is one round. One should do a minimum of 5 to 10 rounds. Our right nostril is connected to the left hemisphere of the brain and the left nostril to the right hemisphere. Both the hemispheres have different functions and control different aspects of our activities. For example, the right hemisphere of brain controls mental, intuitive and creative aspects while the left hemisphere controls physical, rational and mathematical aspects. A person who is introvert will have an active right hemisphere whereas an extrovert will have a dominant left hemisphere. This practice of alternate nostril breathing balances both hemispheres and thereby balances the complete personality. At physiological level, any disease is the result of imbalance in the body. This practice helps us to restore the balance.

Bhramari Pranayama is an exercise in which you take a deep breath in, plug your ears and make a long, soothing humming sound from the throat as you exhale. During the humming, awareness should be focused on the inner resonance of the sound in the region of head cavity. This practice massages the brain and the nervous system. To understand how it works we have to take an example of a tank filled with water. In the still water if we throw a pebble or a stone, the ripples go right through the water to the bottom of the tank. Similarly, our body is 75% water and brain is 85% water. When we make a humming sound, it produces rippling effect throughout our body and brain. This vibration of the sound creates a soothing effect on the mind and the nervous system.

To conclude, yoga is a systematic method to improve the body, understand the mind, and free the spirit. It is not organ specific but a science that works holistically to strengthen the inner being. Yogis tend to be more flexible, stronger, more energetic, thinner, and more youthful than people who dont do yoga.