Hatha Yoga
'Yoga brings perfection, peace and lasting happiness. You can have increased energy, vigour, vitality, longevity and a high standard of health. You can turn out efficient work within a short span of time. Yoga will infuse in you new strength, confidence and self-reliance. The body and mind will be at your beck and call'. Swami Sivananda
Yoga is not a religion, it is a philosophy, a framework for spiritual growth and mastery over the physical and mental body. It is not necessary to surrender your own religious beliefs to practice yoga.
Hatha Yoga Benefits
One of the most immediate health benefits of practicing Hatha yoga poses is a feeling of calm; when you focus on your yoga practice, you may focus less on your worries or woes. Yoga can increase your flexibility, range of motion and strength as well as enhance your balance, leaving you with a higher fitness level and reduced risk of injuries.
Therapeutic Benefits
Hatha yoga poses can help heal or soothe a specific health ailment or condition. You can alleviate chronic neck pain with a series of poses that focus on gently stretching and elongating your spine. You can relieve sinusitis with poses that focus on inversion, forward bends and poses that calm your mind. Other poses can help alleviate anxiety, asthma, carpal tunnel syndrome, insomnia, sciatica and a host of other conditions. Still others may help with pregnancy, menstruation and infertility.
Awareness
Practicing poses helps align your body, breath and mind, a connection that takes your attention away from the chaos of the outside world and into your inner being. With your attention focused inward, you can become more aware of the way you habitually think or react to situations, without judging if such thinking or reactions are necessarily good or bad -- they just are. Hatha yoga can help you recognize your behaviours and respond more effectively to your experiences.
Spiritual Development
Hatha yoga's overall goal is to enhance your spiritual development, which it does by releasing the energy that flows throughout your body and balancing the opposite aspects of your being. According to yoga theory, everyone has masculine and feminine aspects to his being, referred to as the hot, active energy of the sun -- or "ha" -- and the cooling, receptive energy of the moon, or "tha." Hatha, which literally translates to sun-moon, balances these two opposites while opening your body's energy channels. The main channel is the spine, which holds the divine energy, or kundalini sakti, at its base. The object is to achieve balance so that energy streams freely through your body, ultimately facilitating a spiritual awakening.
References:
Five Points of Yoga
Proper Exercise (Asanas) - Yoga poses help develop a strong, healthy body by enhancing flexibility and improving circulation.
Proper Breathing (Pranayama) - Deep, conscious breathing reduces stress and many diseases.
Proper Relaxation - Helps keep the body from going into overload mode, easing worry and fatigue.
Proper Diet - Eating simple, healthy and vegetarian foods that are easy to digest notably have a positive effect on the mind and body, as well as the environment and other living beings.
Positive Thinking (Vedanta) and Meditation (Dhyana) - These are the true keys to achieving peace of mind and eliminating negativity in our lives.