Doing yoga is about the most environmentally beneficial human activity you can do.

Compared to jet skiing, quail hunting, shoe shopping, tea sipping, and even dog walking, doing yoga has far less impact on our environment and natural resources.

Ultimately the only resource yoga requires is your time and the only energy you use is your own.

Yet the most amazing thing is that yoga not only saves energy - it creates it!

Have you noticed that after a good yoga class you have more energy walking out than you had walking in? That's because one of the primary purposes of yoga is the cultivation, conservation and distribution of the energy in our body that the yogis call prana.

Prana is the vital life force energy, often associated with the breath, that creates both health and consciousness. All yoga practices, from asana to pranayama, mantra, and meditation increase the prana or energy that we have access to.

Yoga is the only system in the universe that actually creates more energy than is expended in its production. It works transcendentally outside the material laws of physics and taps into the realm of spirit where prana actually resides.

This prana, this energy of the body, mind and spirit, is the ultimate energy we need to create and conserve.

And strangely enough, if we learn to use our own vital energy, control our own prana, then we will begin to solve the energy problems that have created the high prices for food and gasoline and threaten the well-being of our planet.

When you practice yoga for a period of time, the following invariably occurs: You have less need for "stuff." You reduce your consumption at all levels, from food to clothes to one-night stands. You eliminate cravings that lead to dissipating resources. You become aware of the relationship between your internal and external environment. You feel connected with everything around you and you experience an abundance of energy and possibilities.

And all this occurs because yoga creates the real energy everyone is craving but few have -- the energy to change your consciousness and your way of being.

When you generate, conserve and direct your own prana, your own energy, through the practice of yoga, you become powerfully independent. Your addictive behaviors, compulsions, drive for consumption, and everything that comes from the terrifying sense of a lack of not having enough energy within yourself to become fully human, all vanish.

So until we solve our own internal energy problem, we will keep going outside of ourselves for that buzz, that stimulation that makes us feel more alive, at least temporarily. We will continue to buy something, drive something, eat something, or do something that sucks on the energy outside ourselves to feed the pranic vacuum we carry around inside ourselves.

We will remain in denial that our scarcity of external energy and resources is only a reflection of our inability to solve the energy problem within ourselves that have led to our fundamental behaviors, attitudes, and misunderstandings that created this scarcity. We will continue to drink grande lattes from Starbucks and grumble yet pay for the hundred-dollar tank of gas so we can roar off in search of the next energy fix.

Or we could do yoga. We can quietly become energy independent. We can cultivate, conserve, and use our own energy, our own prana, wisely. We can speak kindly. We can move gracefully. We can eat and consume consciously. We can share graciously because we have experienced our own abundance of energy always available to us with the next breath.

What does the price of gas have to do with yoga? Everything.

May you treat your next breath as an honored guest, with a welcome as it comes and a blessing as it leaves, realizing the host and the guest are one and the same and the source of all energy.

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