You would like to start a new yoga class, but which class do you choose? There are so many to choose from these days, based on doing the same yoga poses but offer different approaches. Your needs, physical abilities and personality can help you choose the right class for you, so hopefully you don’t get put off by a style of yoga that isn’t up your street. Here’s a very brief insight

Vinyasa

Free Spirit – You like eclectic experiences, a little different each time.

Bikram/Hot
Power Yoga

Workout – You want your yoga class fast and sweaty.

Forrest

Injured – You have an injury or condition that requires special attention.

Hatha

You want to do some stretching, classes range from dynamic to restorative.

Iyengar

Meticulous – The more precise the instruction, the better.

Anusara

Self-motivated – Just teach me the moves and show me to the mat.

Kundalini

Spiritual Seeker – You like to move, but also hear uplifting teachings and get in touch with your spiritual side.

Ashtanga, Iyengar, Integral, Kripalu, Kundalini, Sivananda

Traditionalist – Founded  by an Indian guru.

We hope you find a yoga style that suits you and your life, enjoy every stretch of your practice.

Namaste

YWx

For years, yoga devotees have been telling us that bending and twisting our limbs into gravity-defying contortions is a great way to develop the perfect body. Now things have gone one step further, with a new wave of teachers claiming that yoga also offers a fast track to a beautiful mind.

Everyone from fraught mothers to stressed-out hedge-funders is catching on to the benefits of yoga therapy, a fusion of deep breathing, invigorating postures and self-help. This version of the ancient Indian practice is gaining credence within the medical community for helping with a range of issues, such as recession depression and anxiety, through to bipolar disorder and other mental-health problems.

In London, yoga therapy is now being offered at a number of NHS hospitals, while in New York, patients seeking help for depression and anxiety are as likely to find their hard-nosed psychiatrist treating them on a yoga mat as on a couch. It’s not surprising. We might all be sick of hearing about the economic climate, but it is undeniably taking its toll. We are currently in the biggest anxiety matrix the country has seen for more than 50 years. In recent months, mental-health charities have reported a surge in people seeking help for stress and depression. And after all the scare stories about the side effects of antidepressants, patients are increasingly wary of using medication to solve the problem.

Jane Kersel runs courses in Central London,  “The beginners courses are so much fuller right now because people are finding new ways to deal with anxiety and depression. Yoga encourages sufferers to reconnect the mind with the body,” she explains.

Yoga therapy to the rescue? Well, yes, actually. A new study from the Bronx Psychiatric Center in America suggests that yoga therapy can help improve negative symptoms and quality of life in patients with chronic schizophrenia. And while a bit of iyengar or ashtanga is certainly going to help ease your aching limbs, yoga therapy is specifically designed to capitalise on the positive effect it can have on the brain. Robin Monro, director of the Yoga Biomedical Trust, which promotes the development of yoga therapy in the UK, has seen a huge growth in the popularity of yoga therapy. “We get a lot of self-referrals, people who work in the City who have very stressful jobs and need tools to cope,” he says. “And, increasingly, psychiatrists and GPs are referring patients to our therapists, too.”

So how does yoga therapy differ from your usual weekly class? “You don’t need to know anything about yoga,” says Heather Mason, who runs courses designed to combat depression and anxiety. “But anyone who has some yoga knowledge might notice that the sequence of poses is very deliberately designed to move quickly between those that speed up the heartbeat and those that demand controlled breathing.

“This re-creates the same sort of physiological conditions that occur at times of emotional stress and teaches students that they can actually exert some control over what might seem an involuntary response. The idea is that having learnt this sort of control in class, students can apply it when they are feeling anxious or stressed.”

What about those who feel too vulnerable to be in a room full of yogis? Kersel recommends a one-to-one for a more personal, specialist session. “If someone is highly depressed, they’re better off having a one-to-one where you can offload and talk to the teacher in private. It’s helpful to have a sounding board, someone there to listen.” The yoga instructor Janine Thomas agrees. “Health issues can be addressed individually in a private class. For example, a student suffering from anxiety needs to learn how to lengthen the breath to slow the heart rate and calm the nervous system. They will also benefit from relaxed, restorative postures, especially forward bends, which naturally encourage a long exhale, and meditation techniques. Once they have mastered these skills on the mat, they can then apply them to stressful situations in daily life.”

Mason also believes that yoga therapy is one of the few treatments that genuinely offers a holistic cure. “If you work only on the body, you’re not addressing the thought patterns that cause stress. And if you deal only with the mental side of things, you’re ignoring the biochemical and physiological changes that emotional trauma can bring. Yoga therapy addresses both aspects of the problem.”

It’s an approach that has worked very successfully for Amanda Lyddon, a 47-year-old aromatherapist who has suffered from mental-health problems for most of her life. “My yoga is not just about what I do on my mat, it’s given me skills that I can use every day,” she says. “If I feel anxious, I know what to do to calm myself down. That’s life-changing, empowering.”

In 2000, Lyddon was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After lithium left her feeling suicidal, she decided to look into alternative ways of managing her condition. She started practising yoga and noticed that she felt calmer as a result. “I had long periods of depression, when I couldn’t get up, couldn’t work, couldn’t look after my children, and other episodes when I would just party all the time and burn myself out,” she says. “Now things are on more of an even keel.”

Morag Jameson, 34, another yoga therapy devotee, agrees. “After years of panic attacks, becoming aware that I could control my breath was very empowering. Gradually I began to feel in control of my body, instead of feeling as if my body was controlling me. Working through a series of postures, combined with breath work, makes me feel grounded, centred and free.”

One of the key principles of yoga therapy is working with the breath, known as pranayama, which is an integral part of all types of yoga. It seems there is some logic behind your mum’s advice to stop and take a few deep breaths when you’re starting to panic. “In stressful situations, we tend to take shallow breaths from the chest rather than full breaths from the abdomen,” says Mason. “This sends a message to the brain that we are in danger and kicks off stress responses. Conversely, when you breathe from the abdomen, you’re sending a message to the brain that everything’s okay.”

Learning how to breathe properly can change the biochemistry of the brain. “More challenging yoga poses put the body under physical stress,” admits Mason. “But by making my students aware of this and encouraging them to breathe properly, I’m training the nervous system to keep both the breathing, and consequently the body’s physiological response, relaxed at times of stress.”

Lyddon believes that this approach has helped turn her life around. “Before, day-to-day life was a struggle, but now I’m beginning to feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. I’m going back to university in October, and I honestly feel that I now have the tools I need to stave off relapses.”

Claire Coleman

So ubiquitous is yoga, and in so many forms, that we now have the British Yoga Championships, devotees of which are attempting to get yoga "recognised" as an Olympic sport. And one of the reigning British yoga champions has been doing yoga for only two years.

Pushing the Olympic dream forward is the Bikram school of yoga, founded by Bikram Choudry, who was always more of an athlete than an aesthete. His system of the same 26 poses performed in a room heated to 41C was devised originally to restore his own health after a gymnastics accident at 20. Now, thanks to a nine-week teacher-training course and 840 studios world-wide, Bikram is claimed to be the fastest-growing yoga system in the world.

I feel even more shocked to hear that the egregious spread of any number of types of yoga has extended back to India itself, the home of yoga, where fashionable girls in Mumbai are taking it up for the first time because "Madonna does it".

Power yoga classes, the Californian way, seem to have become a platform for both teachers and pupils to show off toned torsos as well as to perform and impress with their fabulous ability to bend and contort the body into ever more demanding positions. What happened to inquiry and the acquisition of wisdom? What happened to the teaching of BKS Iyengar, who suggested that all you need for yoga practice is a mat and some space in the shade?

No longer does the aspiring yogi have to choose from acknowledged schools such as Hatha, Iyengar, Sivenanda, Ashtanga or Kundalini – the Bhagavad Gita (regarded as a sacred text by the majority of Hindu traditions) actually names 18 different kinds, each with its own emphasis. Today, due to the proliferation of yoga across the western world, teachers with only a few weeks or years of knowledge are offering a plethora of new permutations, some of which have strayed a very long way from the original systems.

Today you can choose from any number of "yoga fusions", among them power chi yoga (a combination of tai chi and Ashtanga yoga), Sport yoga (aerobics and yoga), Fitcamp Fusion (yoga and pilates), weight loss yoga, disco yoga and laughter yoga (the latest hot trend from Los Angeles) – and that’s not a joke. I could go on.

"In the 60s, we didn’t know anything about yoga and we accepted all things oriental with blind faith," says Peter Blackaby, a distinguished teacher with a practice in Brighton. "But after 40 years yoga has flowered and, yes, diversified and some of it is mad. Absolutely mad."

Indeed, some teachers think that if they throw in some pseudo-science, a bit of Sanskrit, some chanting but little instruction, then that is all right. In one class in LA they even played bagpipe music and I wondered if they thought that it was Indian. And remember the woman who came back from India some years ago practising a yoga that involved not eating, just breathing?

"There is such a thing as intelligent yoga," says Blackaby. "It’s about letting go, unravelling muscles only where you need to. There is nothing mindless or sleepy about it. "

For this article, I went recently to a so-called Ashtanga class in central London with a friend who is happily caught up in a passion for yoga. I have been to classes all over the world, in chilly church halls, mouldy basements, Zen gymnasiums, hotel spas as well as on distant beaches and in shaded gardens.

I have woken at dawn and driven from London to Oxford for regular classes and workshops. I have tried classes in Thailand, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Shanghai. I have done days of yoga, three- and five-hour sessions and 40-minute bursts; classes where "gurus to the famous" presided and joss sticks were burned; where there was Sanskrit chanting, mystic breathing, and yogic jumping. I have done classes on my own and classes with up to 100 people.

In the Ashtanga class I tried, the pupils were packed in so tightly that the teacher couldn’t possibly see whether we were unravelling or not and she had no assistant. (It appeared to be more about making money than sharing knowledge.) She had what I call an Ashtanga body – taut and defined – and she started the class with an extremely advanced set of breathing exercises that are potentially dangerous. We then progressed to the familiar, tiresome routine of endless down-dogs, up-dogs and chatarangas that seem typical of many of today’s classes; repetitious poses that merely add up to callisthenics with absolutely no attention paid to the very stiff who were trying to go much further than their capabilities allowed.

Rarely do I go to a class (except those with my own teacher, Chloe Fremantle) in which upside-down poses (headstand, shoulder stand and variations), let alone a series of thoughtful floor poses (twists and balances), are taught or the individual is considered. It is all about pumping people up, rather than bringing them down into a calm, mindful place – despite ending the session with a bit of chanting (Sanskrit? Hindu? Tibetan?), to add a touch of random spirituality.

"In 1976, studying with Iyengar in India, we were told that we were very lucky to be learning yoga because it was something that was only for high-class, spiritual Indians," says teacher and yoga book author Mary Stewart. "Nowadays yoga has been dumbed down. Publishers demand a ‘celebrity’ on the book or magazine cover even if they don’t know how to do the poses," she says. "And I was asked to include a 10-minute programme presumably because no one these days is thought to have the attention span to do it for longer. In 1983, I was told that the word yoga could not be used, if the book I was co-writing was to sell in middle America."

And this is the same yoga that Carl Jung described as "the spiritual achievement of the East, one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created". What would he say about Geri Halliwell’s video? Would he be disenchanted to know that the desire for money and fame has corrupted Indians as well as westerners, many of whom have played along with what they think westerners want, both in India and, particularly, in guru-friendly California, branding their schools and systems for the rewards of money, status, cars and jewellery.

"Beneath the bogus spirituality and superficiality of some of the yoga around," says Stewart, "there is a yearning among generations all over the world for something deeper and more meaningful." I agree.

Yoga that is about strength and competition misses the point and inevitably ends up with injury and disillusion. Poses should be beneficial, not detrimental, as we strive for balance and the ability to sit and meditate with ease. The practice is about grounding and releasing; it involves effort but not push and struggle.

With or without Olympic yoga, there are people who will take yoga onwards and who realise the deep significance and power of its roots. "How can I say what is good and bad?" said the great Iyengar, recently interviewed about the way yoga is going. "People will find what they are looking for."

That seems to say it all.

Om peace

Kathy Philips