A yoga practitioner today most often works through a sequence of asanas, held postures that build strength, flexibility and steadiness of the body, paired with attention to the breath and a settled mind, usually on a mat in a class or a home practice rather than a monastery. Classical yoga, as systematized in the Yoga Sutras, frames the discipline instead as an eight-limbed path: ethical restraints and observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and finally a state of absorption in which the fluctuations of the mind fall still. Medieval hatha yoga added a physiology of subtle channels and centers, holding that disciplined posture and breath could redirect a latent energy toward the crown of the head, and it treated the body itself, purified and mastered, as the vehicle for that end rather than an obstacle to it.
Devotional streams within Hinduism instead treat yoga as union with a personal deity, reached through chanting, service and surrender rather than technique. Buddhist and Jain yogas set the same vocabulary toward their own goals, insight into impermanence in the first case, restraint of karmic influx in the second. What unites these otherwise divergent practices is less a shared method than a shared claim, that sustained, disciplined attention to body, breath and mind can still the ordinary noise of consciousness and open onto something the tradition in question considers more real. Contemporary studio yoga keeps the posture work and much of the vocabulary while typically setting aside the liberation goal for health, flexibility and stress relief.