With the internet the world seems be to shrinking and expanding all at the same time. I grew up in a very small town in Maryland, Tall Timbers, where only 35 lived year round at the time. It's a beautiful place on the Potomac River so most of the houses were built to be summer retreats and not for full time residents. We were lucky however, my dad was a tugboat captain so we lived there year round. He pushed oil barges up to D.C. and back again to get the winter fuel to the big city.
Now, in D. C. thanks to the closeness of the internet an internal communications advisor at the British Embassy contacted me about reprinting my how to do Office Yoga for their wellness newsletter. He works just blocks away from my first home away from home after high school when I moved to Washington to become a telephone operator. Yes, it was 1967 and I held and matched cords to flashing lights, but that's another long story. He also asked me to sent a note on the benefits of yoga. My reply follows.
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.
Hope it's working for you. And if not, please let me know how I can help.