Come as you are. Leave feeling better.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning to yoke or to unite, a joining of body, breath and mind into one harmonious whole. Far more than a form of exercise, yoga is one of the world’s oldest living wisdom traditions, with roots stretching back over 5,000 years in ancient India.

Yoga was first mentioned in the Rg Veda, one of the oldest sacred texts in the world. It was in the Upanishads, (another set of ancient Indian scriptures) where the philosophy of yoga began to take shape, emphasising the unity of all life and the pursuit of self-realisation.

The sage Patanjali, later compiled these teachings into the Yoga Sutras, a classical text believed to date somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Their intention was to bring together existing yogic wisdom into a form that everyone could follow and understand. The Yoga Sutras describe an eightfold path encompassing ethical living, physical postures, breathwork, sensory withdrawal, concentration and meditation, all leading toward a state of inner stillness and clarity.

Importantly, physical posture (asana) is just one of these eight limbs, never intended as an end in itself. In the ancient texts, posture was understood as a way of preparing the body to sit comfortably and steadily for meditation. Yoga, in its truest sense, is the practice of turning inward.