Everyone comes to yoga as a beginner. Even the most talented yoga instructor started as a beginner and needed to become informed and learn the basic principles before moving on. The many facets of yoga provide everyone with the opportunity to study and practice at a level that is best suited for both the mental and physical conditioning of the individual. Many yoga for beginners activities start with a few simple yoga poses and place primary focus on principles surrounding breathing and relaxation.

How you approach beginning yoga will depend on your goals and needs. Many people are attracted to yoga by their need to relax more or to manage stress. An older person might look to learning some basic yoga poses to help maintain flexibility and balance. A person with back pain or headache might build yoga into a treatment regime. This 5000-year-old discipline provides options to improve your physical, mental and spiritual health.

The key to yoga for beginners is to check it out to see if is right for you. Get a free eBook download about yoga from the internet or a book from your local library. Investigate whether there is a beginner's class in your area. Ask yourself whether you have the time or the money to add this activity to your lifestyle. Then get started!

The following article was one of the best that I had found for taking on the ritual of new year's resolutions. I have taken the liberty of crediting the author for her great work and incorporating it into another often stressful time---
the HOLIDAYS SEASON.

Instead of focusing on New Year's resolutions just yet, that will come soon enough, I would suggest that we look at the practice of yoga in this manner as a way to balance our body, mind and spirit during this time of year.

Whether you are making New Year's Resolutions, attacking Spring Cleaning or trying to tackle your Holiday Lists, you need to follow the same principles as outlined below by Catherine Guthrie.

A new year's resolution is a noteworthy concept-start off the year with a change for the better. A spring cleaning resolution is also a noteworthy concept. I think that a Stressfree Holiday season, especially in 2008, is perhaps the most important time to practice yoga. Why not celebrate this time of the Holidays season with a sankalpa.

POSITIVE POWER: A Sanskrit word, sankalpa means "will, purpose, or determination." To make a sankalpa is to set an intention-it's like a "This Holiday Season" resolution with a yogic twist. While a resolution often zeros in on a perceived negative aspect of ourselves, a sankalpa explores what's behind the thought or feeling.

*EFFORT COUNTS: A sankalpa also praises the nobility of the effort rather than focusing on what you are doing wrong. The intention, or sankalpa? To open your heart to new possibilities. With a sankalpa, as an exercise in effort and surrender-create an intention and open yourself to the universe.

Sankalpa Setting

*LOOK INWARD: For several days, set aside time to write in a journal and meditate. Contemplate how you would like to feel during the Holidays and rest of this year. Make your holiday season more joyful and worthwhile?

*REPHRASE IT: Create a short sentence or phrase for your sankalpa. "May I be happy and open to what life brings me."

*BE FIRM BUT FAIR: Change doesn't happen overnight. When you stray from the essence of your sankalpa, don't berate yourself. Instead, gently remind yourself of your intention. But be firm in your resolve-it's a good idea to incorporate your sankalpa into your daily routine. Use it as a mantra during pranayama or meditation practice; post it on your computer, phone, or mirror; or simply say it to yourself quietly before going to sleep. -C.G

Catherine Guthrie is a writer and yoga teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, and a regular contributor to Yoga Journal. Her article was originally written for New Year's Resolutions and modified here for doing a Holdiay season intention for your body, mind and spirit because her principles serve far more than just one time of year.

Yoga originated in ancient India and is one of the longest surviving philosophical systems in the world. Some scholars have estimated that yoga is as old as 5,000 years; artifacts detailing yoga postures have been found in India from over 3000 B.C. Yoga masters (yogis) claim that it is a highly developed science of healthy living that has been tested and perfected for all these years.

Yoga was first brought to America in the late 1800s when Swami Vivekananda, an Indian teacher and yogi, presented a lecture on meditation in Chicago. Yoga slowly began gaining followers, and flourished during the 1960s when there was a surge of interest in Eastern philosophy. There has since been a vast exchange of yoga knowledge in America, with many students going to India to study and many Indian experts coming here to teach, resulting in the establishment of a wide variety schools.

Today, yoga is thriving, and it has become easy to find teachers and practitioners throughout America. A recent Roper poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, found that 11 million Americans do yoga at least occasionally and 6 million perform it regularly. Yoga stretches are used by physical therapists and professional sports teams, and the benefits of yoga are being touted by movie stars and Fortune 500 executives. Many prestigious schools of medicine have studied and introduced yoga techniques as proven therapies for illness and stress. Some medical schools, like UCLA, even offer yoga classes as part of their physician training program.

Yoga is a scientific system of physical and mental practices that originated in India more than three thousand years ago. Its purpose is to help each one of us achieve our highest potential and to experience enduring health and happiness. With Yoga, we can extend our healthy, productive years far beyond the accepted norm and, at the same time, improve the quality of our lives.

Yoga is not a religion, nor is it a mystic cult. It is a Hindu system of philosophic meditation and asceticism designed to effect the reunion of the devotee's soul with a God. It is a philosophy which integrates the individual life and the world surrounding us to achieve a basic harmony and equilibrium in the heart and mind of man.

How is physical health a part of so spiritual a philosophy as Yoga? Simply that the trichotomy of our lives, divided into body, soul and spirit, is echoed in the complete Yogic philosophy whose three approaches-asana (posture), pranayama (breath control), and meditation-are unified as one approach to self discovery.

Classical yoga is separated into eight limbs, each a part of the complete system for mental, physical and spiritual well-being. Four of the limbs deal with mental and physical exercises designed to bring the mind in tune with the body. The other four deal with different stages of meditation. There are six major types of yoga, all with the same goals of health and harmony but with varying techniques: hatha, raja, karma, bhakti, jnana, and tantra yoga. Hatha yoga is the most commonly practiced branch of yoga in America, and it is a highly developed system of nearly 200 physical postures, movements and breathing techniques designed to tune the body to its optimal health. The yoga philosophy believes the breath to be the most important facet of health, as the breath is the largest source of prana, or life force, and hatha yoga utilizes pranayama, which literally means the science or control of breathing. Hatha yoga was originally developed as a system to make the body strong and healthy enough to enable mental awareness and spiritual enlightenment.

There are several different schools of hatha yoga in America; the two most prevalent ones are Iyengar and ashtanga yoga. Iyengar yoga was founded by B.K.S. Iyengar, who is widely considered as one of the great living innovators of yoga. Iyengar yoga puts strict emphasis on form and alignment, and uses traditional hatha yoga techniques in new manners and sequences. Iyengar yoga can be good for physical therapy because it allows the use of props like straps and blocks to make it easier for some people to get into the yoga postures. Ashtanga yoga can be a more vigorous routine, using a flowing and dance-like sequence of hatha postures to generate body heat, which purifies the body through sweating and deep breathing.

The other types of yoga show some of the remaining ideas which permeate yoga.
*Raja yoga strives to bring about mental clarity and discipline through meditation, simplicity, and non-attachment to worldly things and desires.
*Karma yoga emphasizes charity, service to others, non-aggression and non-harming as means to awareness and peace.
*Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion and love of God, or Universal Spirit.
*Jnana yoga is the practice and development of knowledge and wisdom.
*Finally, tantra yoga is the path of self-awareness through religious rituals, including awareness of sexuality as sacred and vital.

A typical hatha yoga routine consists of a sequence of physical poses, or asanas, and the sequence is designed to work all parts of the body, with particular emphasis on making the spine supple and healthy and increasing circulation. Hatha yoga asanas utilize three basic movements: forward bends, backward bends, and twisting motions. Each asana is named for a common thing it resembles, like the sun salutation, cobra, locust, plough, bow, eagle, tree, and the head to knee pose, to name a few. Each pose has steps for entering and exiting it, and each posture requires proper form and alignment. A pose is held for some time, depending on its level of difficulty and one's strength and stamina, and the practitioner is also usually aware of when to inhale and exhale at certain points in each posture, as breathing properly is another fundamental aspect of yoga. Breathing should be deep and through the nose. Mental concentration in each position is also very important, which improves awareness, poise and posture. During a yoga routine there is often a position in which to perform meditation, if deep relaxation is one of the goals of the sequence.

Yoga routines can take anywhere from 20 minutes to two or more hours, with one hour being a good time investment to perform a sequence of postures and a meditation. Some yoga routines, depending on the teacher and school, can be as strenuous as the most difficult workout, and some routines merely stretch and align the body while the breath and heart rate are kept slow and steady. Yoga achieves its best results when it is practiced as a daily discipline, and yoga can be a life-long exercise routine, offering deeper and more challenging positions as a practitioner becomes more adept. The basic positions can increase a person's strength, flexibility and sense of well-being almost immediately, but it can take years to perfect and deepen them, which is an appealing and stimulating aspect of yoga for many.

Yoga is usually best learned from a yoga teacher or physical therapist, but yoga is simple enough that one can learn the basics from good books on the subject, which are plentiful.