ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an understanding of yoga using the scientific paradigm, to set a framework for future research into yoga and to give clinicians an outline of how yoga can be used to help heal many chronic diseases of the body and mind for which western medicine has no effective cure. Around the third century BC, Patanjali systematized the yoga practices, and rooted the philosophy of yoga based on the Samkhya School of Philosophy. An early American to introduce yoga to the United States was Richard Hittleman, who in 1950 returned from India, and taught yoga in New York. The chapter describes that yoga is a noninvasive and alternative therapy that brings change in both physiological and psychological levels of a child affected by Autism spectrum disorder. It discusses that right and left yogic uninostril breathing and alternate nostril breathing techniques have important physiological effects which are in sync with the traditional swara yoga notion.
