Chapter 1 YOGA FOR LIFE "The practice of yoga is the commitment to become established in the state of freedom." PATANJALI, Yoga Sutras, Chapter 1, Verse 13 The bliss of having just finished a successful yoga practice is unlike anything else in the world. An hour of maintaining focused control over the body, breath, and mind reenergizes you, no matter how tired, stressed, or uninterested you felt at the start. Serene energy unfolds, and you feel balanced, powerful, strong, refreshed, calm, and at peace. Indeed, after their very first yoga class, many beginning students stand a little straighter, feel a little stronger, breathe a little more mindfully, and enjoy life with a pleasant new combination of ease and awareness. They experience the sensation of release and well-being that comes after they have explored the core of their body, stretched their muscles, and focused on their breath. It is a captivating feeling! It is only natural to seek to expand this harmony beyond the practice mat and into your daily activities, and that is the idea behind Yoga Zone Yoga for Life. There is no mystical explanation for why practicing yoga makes people feel so good-the answer is purely scientific.

The Sanskrit term samadhi refers to the blissful feeling that one experiences at the end of practice and that has been sought for thousands of years. When you do the poses and breathing exercises, and when you gain focus over your thoughts and your body, you achieve rhythms in your brain that you cannot achieve in the course of normal life. First, your brain waves enter an alpha rhythm similar to that of beginning sleep, and then when you become more and more practiced, you can enter into the delta rhythms of deep sleep-all while remaining fully awake. In fact, at the Menninger Foundation in Kansas Dr. Elmer Green observed an advanced yogi, Swami Rama, practice a self-induced state of deep relaxation called yoga nidra, also known as "the sleepless sleep." Swami Rama was able to lower himself through deeper and deeper states of unconsciousness, while simultaneously maintaining an aural awareness of all that was occurring around him in the laboratory setting. By monitoring the yogi's brain waves, Dr. Green confirmed that they were becoming slower and slower.

Swami Rama moved progressively toward a near-hibernation state, and his senses disengaged finally-first smell, then taste, sight, and touch, and finally, the sense of hearing, which explains why he was still able to hear what was happening in the room. You are probably familiar with a similar mental state even if you don't think you are. Your brain usually enters this so-called "hypnogogic" condition, albeit only for a few seconds or at most a few minutes, as your body drifts off to sleep. During meditation you are able to induce and extend that mental state between consciousness and sleep, or yoga nidra. When you achieve control over your brain rhythms, remarkable results may begin to take place in your life. You will feel more in control of your emotions and your responses to the world because you will be more cognizant of the difference between reality and fleeting emotion. Small, miraculous occurrences may happen: you will be thinking of someone, and your phone will ring-that person is calling you; you will dream of something, and it will happen the next day; your golf or tennis swing will attain that once-in-a-blue-moon effortless perfection. These sorts of miraculous occurrences-or in Sanskrit, siddhis-make you feel that you have a connection, albeit brief, to some larger universal force.

According to the tenets of yoga, a siddhi occurs when you are able to channel the intelligence from the universe into your daily life. Essentially this means that with meditation, physical postures, and control of the breath, you can become aware of magic in your.