Individual Panchanga Yoga Classes
Laxmi Guesthouse b&b Genoa
Daily practice of this five simple techniques revolves around soul, energy, emotions, thoughts, and body. Panchanga Yoga is easy to practice, and strengthens our ability to heal and prevent illnesses. It enhances the concentration and the entire well-being in order to achieve calm and mental clarity.
Yoga is a body-mind discipline aiming at a union between the individual Self and the universal Self, that is, the liberation of the soul from the slavery to the external world. Practiced in India since time immemorial, Yoga is articulated in eight degrees (anga): Yama (prohibitions, such as ‘you shall not kill’, ‘you shall not steal’, etc.); Niyama (prescriptions and moral rules); Asana (body positions); Pranayama (breath control); Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses from the external world); Dharana (concentration); Samadhi (ecstasy).
Panchanga Yoga is the Yoga of the five ways: Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Bakthi Yoga, Jnana Yoga, and Karma Yoga; it helps to discipline the mind and the intellect, relieve daily stress, gently soothe stiffness in the body, harmonize our emotions, transform our ego, and achieve purity. Yoga is perhaps the most well-known traditional Indian discipline in the Western world.
It is known and valued as a path to spirituality, as a remedy against the stress and hardships of contemporary life, as a gentle and natural therapy able to heal many common ailments and prevent illnesses thanks to its health-improving action, and as a most effective remedy to increase our energies, maintain a flexible and healthy body, assure calm and inner peace to our mind and emotions.
The world of Yoga has many facets… Its goal is always the same: to allow a human being to achieve the Union (in Sanskrit, "yoga") with the divine. This ancient discipline has developed different ways to achieve this goal, each conceived for different human beings, with different lifestyles and body-mind characteristics.
The Yoga of devotion (Bhakti Yoga), based on love and the ability to develop and expand it; the Yoga of action (Karma Yoga), whose practitioners shall act without paying attention to the good they may obtain from their actions, until they will be able to forget themselves and merge into the divine; the Yoga of the intellect (Jnana Yoga), that enhances intellectual faculties and suits those inclined to rational thought; the "royal" Yoga (Raja Yoga), based essentially on meditation; the Yoga enhancing the flow of divine energy (prana) in the individual, and teaching how to handle it through specific exercises, in particular breathing exercises ("pranayama"), until the individual will become part of the flow (Hatha Yoga).
Yoga is all this, but also much more. Giving an all-encompassing definition of it is not possible, since Yoga cannot "be"; rather, it "happens": Yoga is waiting and preparing for an event (the union).