If you google "benefits of yoga" you'll get over 527,000 results. Increased mobility and flexibility. Decreased stress and lower blood pressure. Body detoxification and improved elimination. Muscle tone and joint lubrication. The list of yoga benefits goes on and on. As science improves it has come to validate what people for thousands of years have known instinctively:  Doing yoga makes you feel better.

I wish it were really complex, because then there might be more belief in what yoga does. It's been my experience that most people come to the yoga mat looking for specific body improvements, but they keep coming back because of a sense of well being received when yoga is a part of their lives. This improved sense of self is not only during practice time, but permeates into our lives off the yoga mat. There's a reason yoga has been around for thousands of years — it's because it works.

I hope you’ll give it a chance to work for you. Please take a moment and read what yoga has come to mean to real people with real bodies.

(Photos by Korey Howell Photography, Austin, TX