In general, muscles are designed to move the body and bones are designed to support the body. When bones are stacked up correctly—like building blocks—they are in balance with gravity, or aligned. The spine is in alignment when it has four long, gentle curves; the neck and lower back have concave curves, the tailbone area and rib cage area have

Dynamic stretching is jerky and forced; yoga stretching is slow and controlled. Dynamic stretching aims for a certain degree of flexibility; yoga stretching aims for physical, mental, and spiritual balance.

• Deterring the maximum pumping action within each muscle.

practice squaring the feet is to sit on the floor with the feet pressing evenly into a wall. Keep the legs straight, with the kneecaps lifted. You can lean back on your hands. Squaring your feet is easiest to accomplish when you can see them, as in the sitting poses.

The degree of flexibility achieved does not determine success in yoga. Success is measured by your inward attention to the body and mind in the pose. No matter how flexible you are, yoga is accessible to you; it’s simply a matter of being willing to feel and respond to yourself.

Be persistent and energetic and, at the same time, be gentle and nonviolent toward yourself.

There are many poses in the book that are not classical yoga postures; for example, many of the hamstring stretches. They are included because they are necessary steps in preparing your body to do the poses. You can’t do what you can’t do, so these stretches provide a way to get there. Besides, by doing these poses with attention to how you feel,

Genuine fitness means achieving a balance between strength and flexibility.

All athletic exertion, then, can be viewed as the repetitive and coordinated contraction of muscles and muscle groups. Such continual contractions determine the resting length of the muscle spindle, the message center of the muscle. When the spindle learns that the muscle is continually being asked to shorten, it adjusts to the demands placed upon