Ananda Yoga & Detox Center

  Both yoga and meditation have been around for thousands of years. To understand their connection, it helps to understand what each one is individually. Yoga is a spiritual Hindu practice that incorporates breath, a simple form of meditation and physical incorporation of the body to bring the mind and body together, creating harmony. First introduced to the west in the early 1900's, by mid century, yoga has grown exponentially in popularity and has continued to grow over the last few decades. Meditation is best described as a training of the mind to reach different levels of consciousness and awareness. These levels of consciousness can include access to parts of the brain that control imagination, creativity, memory and more. Through meditation, these characteristics can be explored and possibly enhanced through practice. The health benefits of yoga and meditation seem to go hand in hand, but let's break the two down, anyway. Health benefits of meditation Blood pres...

  The ability for yoga to heal is an essential part of every class that I teach, so when an opportunity came up to explore yoga at a famous rehabilitation facility located in the mountains in the northern reaches of Thailand, far from the stresses of big-city living, I thought that it would be a terrific idea: Why not take the healing to those that need it the most? After talking extensively to the management team, however, I quickly realized that the great sensitivity of the process of addiction recovery should not be taken lightly.   In Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras," one of the most ancient and respected texts on the subject, the second verse is often translated as "Yoga is the Calming of the Fluctuation of the Mind." What we have then, is a very tangible definition of what yoga is. Many modern practitioners have been influenced by later developments and interpretations of yoga, so the meaning has become a bit unclear, with definitions ranging from "uni...