9. Do I need to follow a specific lifestyle when practicing yoga?

No, you don’t. Yoga doesn’t require people to maintain any special or different lifestyle from the one generally accepted.

On the other hand, yoga is not insisting on that you should lead the common lifestyle. Yoga advocates the complete freedom of a person in this regard and calls upon leading the lifestyle that you find as the most suitable. Yoga is quite powerful teaching to bring the benefit to people regardless of their kind of lifestyle. But at the same time yoga considers that it would be most optimal to stick to a healthy lifestyle for any person.

In addition it should be remembered, that yoga is so ancient that during its existence the lifestyle of people, who practiced it, changed a great number of times. Lifestyle of people of the Bronze Age and of the ancient Vedic era in the East differed considerably from the lifestyle of Buddha times or from the Iron Age. Times of Buddha differ from Middle Ages. And so on until today. Yoga flourished in all these times and, apparently, there is no reason to think that the modern way of life is somehow contrary to the practice of yoga.

 

Another thing is that too fast change of lifestyle, as we witness it in the modern era, is leading to the danger of losing the ancient yoga knowledge, because the way of life and priorities of even close generations  considerably vary among themselves, making it difficult to transfer this knowledge to the younger generation. But these are rather the problems of transfer and adaptation of yoga knowledge than the problems of a technique of yoga, which remained unchanged for thousands of years.

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