There are many benefits of practising yoga, and increasingly these are being researched and recorded through human studies.

Particularly in the west, we focus more on the health benefits of yoga, such as de-stressing, lowering blood pressure, becoming more flexible, than on the more philosophical or esoteric elements. (The difference between modern yoga today and yoga from 500 or 1000 years ago could be a book on its own, never mind a separate blog post!)

We acknowledge that the ancient yogis knew things about the body, without the use of modern technology and tests and studies, and that we are still benefitting from this knowledge, along with what current research has found.

And it's found (proved) that yoga including pranayama and meditation, are very beneficial in a number of ways.

To summarise these findings I created an infographic referencing published research which shows the benefits of practising yoga. You might practise yoga for one or more of these reasons, but the rest are going on in the background as well!