Yoga was developed in India thousands of years ago. The various techniques were passed from teacher to student. Somewhere between 300 BC and 300 AD, no one really knows exactly when, an Indian sage named Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. His work was not original, but rather a compilation and organization of practices already thousands of years old. Remarkably, he was able to codify the entire practice of yoga into only 196 "sutras", which are aphorisms or sayings. It may surprise most western readers to learn that very few of these sayings, arguably only three, refer to physical exercise. Instead, Patanjali describes an eight-limb path that includes a wide range of disciplines, from non-violence to breath control to self-study, far beyond those postures that we in the west associate with yoga.

Where does this eight-limb path lead? In a word, to "yoga", in that yoga essentially mean "union". Thus one might say that the practice of yoga is designed to bring one closer to the reality of yoga, or union, with one's self, or a union among one's body, mind and spirit. Yoga is not a religion, however. Rather, it is a system that helps one rediscover and reconnect with the union of mind, body and spirit that any infant has. One can witness this total union, for example, when an infant is hungry. It simply cries until satisfied. For the infant, it is simple: "Now, I am hungry. Cry. Now I am fed. No cry." The union, the yoga, is found in the infant's sense of now?. The infant is totally in the present moment, and not interested in putting off its desire for food now in favor of the promise of a great meal later. Nor could it even conceive of ignoring the sensations of hunger coming from its body so that perhaps it might lose weight by letting itself go hungry. Indeed, all this sounds ridiculous in relation to an infant. What the infant knows is "now" and now it is hungry. "Feed me". Nothing else exists. The infant is completely in its moment to moment experience.

Obtaining this state of focus and awareness of the present moment is much more challenging for adults, and much more rewarding. The practice of yoga postures is a vehicle, one of many, for reaching such complete absorption in the moment. Yoga contains no judgments of other methods of achieving this union, such as prayer, meditation, or even running or doing needlepoint. The object is to become absorbed in the present moment, rather than trying to fix the past or plan the future.

To understand why the practice of yoga postures can be such an effective vehicle for generating this state of union, we will need to digress for a brief discussion about energy. The idea that the body is full of energy channels is critical to an understanding of yoga and many other fields: Martial artists work on harnessing the power of their energy at least as much as they work on the physical form of their technique. Acupuncturists put their needles into critical spots in energy pathways. Even modern western medicine implicitly accepts the notion of ?energy channels? in the body as illustrated by the maxim ?first, do no harm?. Modern medicine knows that the body somehow has the intelligence to heal itself of most ailments without any help. How else do we get over the common cold?

In yoga, the energy of the body is referred to as prana, and is often translated as "life force". All the various practices of yoga, from breath control to postures to cultivating a sense of contentment, are designed to increase one's store of prana and one's control over it. Yoga postures open and stretch the body allowing an increased flow of energy through the body that helps invigorate and even heal the body. That is why so many people feel so much better after a yoga class: by stretching, energy has been freed up to circulate around the body. Interesting too is that many people find that different ailments recede or even disappear without other medical treatment. This is not so different from resting to allow your body to fight off a cold: the enhanced quantity and flow of energy through the body has given the body the necessary extra resources it needs to heal.

We?re now ready to understand why the practice of yoga postures is such an effective pathway toward achieving union of body, mind and spirit. Remember, this union can only be found in the present moment. Well, the body is always in the present moment. The mind can be thinking about all sorts of things, missing the present moment most of the time. But the body can?t be in the future. It can't linger in the past. It is here now. What we need is to invite the mind to join the body in the here and now. Postures are one very effective way of doing that.

At first, the postures may be challenging. That's great because it helps keep the mind from wandering off to what it may be having for dinner. The yoga practice itself demands the mind's attention and thus constantly reminds the practitioner to come back to the present. With time, the continued practice of yoga postures allows the body to experience an increased flow of energy and sensation, helping to captivate even more of the mind?s attention. With even more repetition, the body comes to know these postures well and can relax more deeply into them, no matter how challenging the pose. The practitioner then can deepen his or her focus on the sensations and energy flows in the body rather than worrying about the physical shape of the pose. The practitioner?s concentration thus continues to improve and sharpen.

A virtuous circle begins to form: More physical practice, deeper relaxation, more concentration, all building more energy that allows a deeper physical practice, even deeper relaxation and more focused concentration, building even more energy, and so on. In a sense, the sensations the body experiences while doing yoga practice are used as a way to seduce the mind into joining into a union with the body.

The best news is that these benefits often seem to begin almost right away, even after one class. As one of my teachers put it, "Just because you walked with your back to the sun for 20 years doesn"t mean you have to walk back again for 20 years to see the sun. All you have to do is turn around." Beginning a yoga practice can be just like that. The new student almost immediately begins to feel a new and wonderful connection to his/her body, mind and spirit.