Why yoga is so popular now a days?

A little more than a hundred of years ago nobody had heard of yoga in the West. But during this time more and more people are becoming familiar with this system. There are people who begin practicing yoga and immediately get the results. And due to this fact yoga is getting more and more popular. It’s necessary to make the difference between the popularity of yoga and preservation of yoga. Yoga is becoming popular but unfortunately some basic original concepts are understood with great difficulty. And without them we can go further. In other words we’ve got a poor understanding of the ancient treatises on which entire practices are based. We took a small part and this part fitted pretty well, so it spread fast while the rest of the knowledge is not used.

Modern lifestyle

Our way of life is subject to the modern civilization. People used to go on foot or ride horses before, now we go by cars. We used to spend more time on reading manuscripts, now we spend more time in front of computers. We used to be supposed to move more in our work, now we move less and less. We use public transport to go to work and come back home. As a result it turns out that we have a sedentary way of life. At the same time our work tends to become more and more stressful. Everything’s accelerated. We have to react promptly to the changing circumstances. That’s why the degree of concentration as a demand of our modern life is constantly growing. As a side-effect we observe the splash of different psychic disorders. We strain ourselves mentally while the body is relaxed. In the ancient times everything was more balanced. The mental or psychic strain was correlated with the physical one. Now these two things are one their own. This is a modern lifestyle.

When practicing this system of self-exploration thousands of years ago wise men faced the same problem. These men had to sit in certain poses for hours meditating on various life issues, on the essence of being, human nature, and Self. They wondered how the universe worked. In the ancient times yogis or yoginis could sit for five hours in one pose without a movement working on these questions. This kind of strain affects the body as much as stress does.

It occurs that now we face the same phenomena as the wise men thousands of years ago. To compensate the impact of negative effects from long meditations they worked out different methods, including this one named hatha yoga. Doing hatha yoga you can make up the lateral effects of sedentary way of life. And this fits perfectly well to the modern society as we observe the same problems now. That’s why it’s easy to presume that yoga will be more and more popular among the modern people. Indeed there is some statistics. There are more people who have tried practicing yoga at least once in Western countries and this number is quite impressive and it’s bigger if compared with that in India. There you will find lower number of yogis than in the USA. That is the paradox.