Benefits of Practicing Yoga All forms of exercise promise to improve your health in one way or another. However, few if any exercise methods comes close to offering the wide range of benefits offered by the practice of yoga. With yoga, it is not just a physical improvement that you will see, although many who practice yoga tout these improvements as some of the best of any form of exercise they have tried. Yoga offers you the opportunity to reap benefits from physical appearance all the way to spiritual and mental health. Among the physical benefits of yoga, one of the most noteworthy is how it tones the body. Yoga improves muscle tone and eliminates fat in some of the most difficult areas of the body. It improves circulation and respiratory health through the breathing exercises and the movements that cause increased blood flow to those areas where circulation may be poor. Along with that, yoga improves flexibility and helps to relieve many forms of pain associated with common conditions such as arthritis and others. Furthermore, it is known that yoga helps to improve respiratory function through the breathing exercises, and that these also help the body to prevent common airway infection. Yoga also offers a variety of mental benefits. Among the most notable of these is the improved clarity of thought experiences by practitioners of yoga. Many people find that the focus of the exercises helps them to rid their minds of the stressful thoughts and other mental clutter that we have day to day. Beyond that, the increased oxygen flow to the brain from yoga helps the brain to function at its fullest capacity. When the brain can operate without a lack of oxygen, it helps to relieve stress and gives the practitioner a better sense of well-being than other forms of exercise provide. Yoga offers to its practitioners a benefit no other exercise can. It's the spiritual benefit of yoga, and it is tremendously helpful. No matter what religion you practice, when you surrender your being to a higher power through the practice of yoga you will find an inner tranquility that helps you to more effectively perform the breathing exercises as well as the physical ones. It is this spiritual element that allows you to most fully reap all of the other benefits yoga can provide. To find more on the benefits of yoga, go to http://www.betteryoga.net The Yogi Masters teach that there are two degrees of this awakening consciousness of the Real Self. The first, which they call "the Consciousness of the 'I'," is the full consciousness of real existence that comes to the Candidate, and which causes him to know that he is a real entity having a life not depending upon the body--life that will go on in spite of the destruction of the body--real life, in fact. The second degree, which they call "the Consciousness of the 'I AM'," is the consciousness of one's identity with the Universal Life, and his relationship to, and "in-touchness" with all life, expressed and unexpressed. These two degrees of consciousness come in time to all who seek "The Path." To some it comes suddenly; to others it dawns gradually; to many it comes assisted by the exercises and practical work of "Raja Yoga."