my thoughts as a yoga practitioner: Yoga is, first and foremost, a meditative practice. What separates it from sitting meditation is that the "hack" it employs

my thoughts as a yoga practitioner: Yoga is, first and foremost, a meditative practice. What separates it from sitting meditation is that the "hack" it employs not only combines breath awareness, but an ACTIVE breath/body/mind awareness. By moving through asanas, still using the breath as the "guide", one's awareness becomes on breath, on muscle, on bone, on gravity, balance, and all the subtleties of the mind and body's reactions. For example, one begins to "feel" what it is like for the subconscious to instinctively tighten muscles under slight distress, and learn how to gain increasing control over these subconscious processes as one's awareness becomes ever more focused and relaxed. Another example is one learns to feel "losing their breath" when they have lost attention to it and their body, and are stressing themselves out. An interesting TED talk describes the seat of awareness as a primitive network of neurons in the brainstem and body, the network that gives one a sense of "I am" and experiences the rest of the neurological processes. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=70236306 http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70236306?strkid=1954165956... If true, meditation and yoga can be thought of as techniques that progressively still the later evolved "higher" thought processes, and turns one's awareness back into the experiential parts of the mind. Yoga is simply a very active and tactile meditation hack, that provides strong stimulation responses through the nerve network that one is training to become more actively connected.