Know what immediately comes to most peoples' mind when the word Yoga is mentioned? They think of a physical practice for stretching and reducing stress.

Yeah, it’s true that those are two very positive benefits of practicing yoga. BUT the physical movements are actually only a very small part of Yoga and a relatively recent development in the whole scheme of things.
I know that's certainly what came to my mind in the beginning, but there's more....

The physical Yoga was mostly designed to facilitate the real practice of Yoga - the understanding and complete mastery over the mind. 

So, the actual meaning of Yoga is the science of the mind.

Let's face it, we all want to know more about our minds: how they work and how we can work with them. 

A seasoned yogi knows that they can learn to work with the mind (or consciousness) through form (or practicing yoga).

Example: I just spent the past five days in an intense yoga workshop designed to take my practice to a deeper level. We would practice asana (the yoga postures) for 2 1/2+ hours at a time. Some days I found my mind coming up with all sorts of reasons why this sucked. Why I wanted to leave. Why I was the victim of this awful punishment of practicing for sooo long. (See how moving my body triggered something in my mind and gave me a shot at learning how to work through it?!)

Well, I had to be reminded that these thoughts are actually a choice.