Research shows that yoga can help treat depression and anxiety (across multiple meta-analyses), manage stress, and improve the well-being of cancer survivors.

Studies also suggest that yoga helps young musicians achieve a state of flow, enables women over 55 to experience the supremacy of ordinariness, and brings ashram residents to a “radical shift in consciousness” similar to what most people only experience with psychoactive drugs.

The beauty of this practice lies in its challenge: The poses you might think of when you hear “asana” or “yoga” are indeed physical exercises, but they are also deeply psychological and perceptual exercises, much like meditation.

Almost all the researchers I’ve spoken to have warned me that no one truly knows exactly “how yoga works.” The long-term benefits of practice are highly subjective, and designing a study that accesses another person’s phenomenology is incredibly difficult.

Due to its long and cross-continental history, defining “yoga” itself is challenging. Amy Matthews, the director of The Breath Project and co-author of Yoga Anatomy, describes yoga as any “movement practice” where your body, breath, and attention are all focused on the same point.

A runner entering a meditative state, synchronized with their breath, is practicing yoga. In a standard asana practice, the essence is not just performing the postures, but allowing the body, breath, and mind to communicate with each other. Matter doesn’t dominate the mind; rather, the mind communicates with matter.

If you repeat the same poses every day, year after year, you’ll become deeply familiar with how your body expresses itself in these forms. During this process, you’ll also enhance proprioception—the awareness of where your body is in space and the internal sensations it brings. It’s not just the feeling of air on your skin, but the way your bones, tendons, and tissues respond as you mindfully stretch and twist.

As your yoga instructors encourage you, you gain a finer understanding of where your body is and how the layers of tissue above it respond. As Harvard Medical School assistant professor Sat Bir Singh Khalsa told me, these increases in internal awareness can transform your entire lifestyle.

“Someone who has been practicing yoga for eight weeks and then smokes a cigarette will say, ‘Oh my God, I never realized how bad that felt. I can’t stand this, it feels so awful,'” he explains. Through training, the body’s sensations become more perceptible, making the toxicity of certain objects or behaviors feel more intense. This is why yoga can be incredibly powerful in managing lifestyle diseases. “People change their diets and behaviors to feel better because for the first time in their lives, they’re truly feeling more.”

The mind and body are two aspects of the same unified entity, he says. “Yes, it can be useful to think of the brain as something separate—that’s a valid way to think about these things—but it’s not true, it’s a metaphor. They’re two parts of the same thing,” he adds. And with yoga, you’re engaging with all of it…

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