I'm a really unlikely person to be doing yoga.

I was brought up in a fairly blue-collar environment.

I'm not an educated woman.

Very independent.

And buying into all the spiritual fluffiness

has never, ever been anything that I would have predicted

would have happened to my life.

Why I'm so attracted to it is because it's anything but fluffy.

Yoga has infiltrated law schools and strip malls, churches and hospitals.

This 5,000-year-old spiritual technology is converging with 21st century medical science

and with many religious and philosophical perspectives.

Sean Corn takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga.

She describes how it helps her face the darkness in herself and the world

and how she's come to see yoga as a form of body prayer.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Though yoga is thought of in the West as primarily about physical postures,

it originated in northern India as a practice for spiritual and ethical balance.

Gandhi's non-violence was an expression of his understanding of yoga.

The American Yoga Association calls yoga a science of life

aiming to bring balance between the physical body, the mind and the spirit

between action, intelligence and the higher self.

Over 20 million people currently practice yoga in the United States alone

...