More than 12 million Americans currently study yoga, a number that has doubled in the past four years. Only the cardio-kickboxing workouts, like Billy Blanks' Tae Bo, are more popular. Yoga comes from the ancient Sanskrit word root yuj , usually translated as meaning to yoke, bind, join, attach, or form a union.
Yoga is a unifying experience, between mind and body, the physical, the everyday, and the sacred.
It has many varieties, ranging from devotional bahkti yoga to the sexually focused tantra yoga. But almost all yoga practiced in the USA is a form or derivation of hatha or physical yoga. Ironically, hatha yoga, which can be traced back only about 1,000 years, was often dismissed as trivial by early masters of the discipline. The ultimate outgrowth is a grounded sense of integrated wholeness, a feeling of balanced physical and mental well-being. And its medical benefits are clearly independent of specific belief systems.