The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards

nebulous

an emerging body of scientific evidence suggests that yoga can activate the brain’s right hemisphere—the one that tends to govern intuition, creativity, instincts, aesthetics, spatial reasoning, and the sensing and expressing of emotion. So the discipline may act as an inspirational force in part because it shifts the hemispheric balance toward a m

bedlam.

He told of a hidden interplay between two kinds of sense organs woven into the body’s tendons and muscles. As a muscle stretched, he wrote, the two systems sent conflicting signals. Contraction was stronger than relaxation, so the muscle stayed tense. If the stretch continued, however, that signal began to diminish of its own accord and the relaxat

“paroxysmal,”

Hatha means violence or force. The discipline arose in a carefully structured campaign of vigorous activity meant to promote the quick attainment of enlightenment through ecstasy.