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Thoughts of summer vacation conjure up recollections of road trips with my sister and I standing next to state signs for commemorative photos.

We took home memories but I’m not sure my parents felt rejuvenated.

A large part of having a vacation without needing a second one is attitude. Keep your mind in the moment and let what happens flow – just like yoga practice.

Or you can make yoga your vacation and deepen the total body reset. Yes, even if you have kids or a spouse along. Picking a focus for your trip might help narrow down the possibilities.

Karma Yoga or selfless service is now incorporated into many travel yoga programs. Then again, volunteering in your own town is also a great mini-vacation as altruism is one of the proven keys to happiness.

So look for groups that offer that element or check VolunTourism for information planning a trip, what to expect and how to prepare. One company I came across mixes yoga, volunteering and family into one trip. Paravati Family Travel goes to Ladakh, India, where visitors stay a few days with a family, children attend the local school and meditation and yoga sessions are included.

For a little less adventure but still a new path, look for places that are making a come back.

Hurricane Ivan hit Granada hard in 2004 but the island has rebuilt with at least one new yoga offering. The Laluna yoga pavilion overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Daily group sessions alternate between Kundalini, Vinyasa, Yin and Pilates and the island’s first teacher training program starts this fall.

Somewhere in between? Many families are saving money and opting for a multi-generational trip. Decide on a great location and rental homes are easier to find in this economy. Head to a local yoga studio and if there’s a teacher you like, invite them for a family session on the lawn or beach.

Wherever you are, be there. And go home with more than a sunburn and postcards you forgot to mail.

What does it take for you to find yogic bliss?

Do you need the expensive pants and mat or a calming teacher?

Or can you take a deep breath and stop the mind chatter no matter where you are?

A New York Times article this weekend highlighted how yoga is moving from celebrity teachers and expense to donation-based studios.

Packed mat-to-mat the classes are meant to be about what the student makes of the class, not what the class can give the student, said teacher Greg Gumucio, who founded Yoga to the People.

The writer ended the article with the phrase that keeps popping up: what is yoga?

Fellow yoga blogger Michelle Garrison at Meta Vie posted that for her yoga is about efficiency: mixing a cardio workout, weight training and church.

This discussion continued at The Washington Post’s website where Deepak Chopra responded to the column I cited last week.

Chopra argues that yoga did not stem from Hinduism because yoga came first and furthermore that the popularity of yoga is not something to be mourned. Some of the comments also make for interesting reading.

“Most Indians, when they contemplate the immense popularity of yoga in the U.S. may smile at the pop aspects of the phenomenon but feel on the whole that something good is happening,” Chopra wrote.

I don’t think this discussion will quiet any time soon, so what is yoga to you?

On this Earth Day, I’m reminded that one of the tenants of yoga is to be non-harming. Not to yourself, others or the world.

From sports gear to vacations many companies are working on becoming more earth friendly.

Some yoga resorts and retreat centers have taken this to heart and vacationers are too.

While in some cases that might mean giving up 24-hour electricity, Whitney Littlewood, founder of Leela Travel, said the resorts remain luxurious.

Littlewood hopes her trips will show yogis what a sustainable life looks like.

She organizes retreats and vacations specifically to such locations that are sustainable.

“When you’re doing yoga and moving inside and it’s absolutely beautiful and untouched, this is what it’s like to live sustainably and be with nature,” Littlewood said.

The retreats give people a chance to leave their routine, take a step back and do something healthy for themselves and the world, she said.

Littlewood aims to take yogis to places off the beaten track and filled with plants and animals, such as Mexico, Central America, Southeast Asia and India.

This fall she has groups arranged for Belize and Thailand.

In picking where to stay, Littlewood checks for the Rainforest Alliance certification because she knows the non-profit’s research would have factored in power, water, food and the community.

She said that lets her know about how a location is getting power and what percent is clean power, she said. The same goes for water. Where does it come from? Do they have a well? Is it shared with the community? Is water reused in the garden? Do they have dry composting toilets?

Beyond power and water, Littlewood looks at what food each location offers and if there is farming on site. If so, could they include in the program an organic gardening session or volunteering in the garden?

But for a truly sustainable business, Littlewood likes to see an interaction with the community. What percent of the workforce is local and how is the resort giving back to the community?

So do you look at a resort’s sustainability as a factor for staying there?

Is that important to you?

As one friend of mine said this week, “I see yoga everywhere now.”

I’m glad she’s on the look out for yoga-related articles for me. And she’s right. Yoga is much more on the minds of Americans these days. From an article about proper positions in poses with a slideshow to an Indian guru’s rise to politics – yoga is in the news.

Part of that has included major publications carrying articles and columns about the discourse concerning yoga’s identity. Such a discussion can begin if the “y” in yoga should be capitalized. Is it a proper noun?

The Associated Press Stylebook, which governs such things in the publishing world, says no.

Some magazines and websites capitalize it, others do not.

This is all part of where yoga has been and where it is going, not only in its 100-plus-year history in the United States, but also around the world.

In a column on The Washington Post’s website, the Hindu American Foundation‘s Co-founder Aseem Shukla explains that as yoga has grown, Hinduism has not. Despite, yoga having it’s roots in Hinduism, he said.

“The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a legacy in which they can take pride,” he wrote.

Earlier this year, the foundation released a position paper on this striving to explain that yoga is more than postures, called asanas.

Hindu gods, he said, cannot trademark their religion while people have taken its properties to trademark Transcendental Meditation and Aveda, which was born from ayurveda.

Two LA Yoga articles this month also delved into the issue.

One article provided the 37 definitions of “yoga” from the common, to join or put a yolk on horses, to a spy.

Another article was titled “Who owns Yoga?” and looked at how yoga teachers should educate students on the heritage of yoga. The article included an interview with Bikram Choudhury, founder of the Bikram style of yoga, who got a copyright for his style of yoga.

That move by Bikram sent India to create a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. Such a library allows copyright offices to determine if something is original or has actually been practiced in India for centuries, according to a USA Today article.

But how did we get to this point to begin with. A few new books are looking at yoga and its roots in American society, according to The New York Times.

“The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America” by Robert Love reveals the life of Pierre Bernard who encouraged Americans to practice hatha yoga during the turn of the last century and lived in New York with elephants.

In June, “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,” by Stefanie Syman is scheduled to be released but I doubt it will douse the debate.

April is full of stressors. Taxes are due today and the pressure is building for end-of-school projects and wrapping up the fiscal year.

Historically, it is a month of violence that includes the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and President Abraham Lincoln as well as the Columbine attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Virginia Tech shootings.

This year adds the extra bonuses of high unemployment, on going wars and earthquakes rattling my brain.

Fortunately, and maybe because of this history, April is also National Stress Awareness Month and April 16 is Stress Awareness Day.

Americans spend $14 billion annually on stress-fighting products, according to a Fast Company article. But they only spent $5.7 billion on yoga, according to the Yoga in America study.

Maybe that’s because yoga can be a cheap stress reliever.

So how are you going to celebrate Stress Awareness Day?

I can think of several ways.

Try out a yoga class, take a walk, hit the gym or meditate.

It’s not a bad thing to step back for a second and ask “How is stress affecting me?” and “What is making me stressed?”

As good yoga instructors say in class, “Can you release whatever is not serving you now?”

That may include some organization or someone who is taking up too much of your time. Or some struggle in your mind that needs to be confronted.

Yes, it would be great if we could all do a yoga weekend when we needed to get away.

That’s not possible so make up a little stress release weekend for your self.

Get back to nature and head to a park or your own backyard. Humans have not yet evolved into cubicle-loving beings.

Sit still.

Really you can do it.

Listen to the birds chirping, kids playing, the hum of the freeway. Whatever is in the air.

Enjoy the beautiful spring weather and breath it in. Feel every sensation from the tip of your nose to the bottom of your belly.

And breathe out all that stress. Before we know it, May will arrive and we’ll forget until next year that we need to pay attention to stress. Or maybe not.

Like a TV talent show winner, yoga’s quick rise to popularity in the West has caused a bit of an identity crisis.

While many people seek out yoga for the who-am-I questions, yogis and scholars are asking that of what yoga has become.

One session at the University of Southern California’s South Asia Conference, highlighted this discourse.

After University of California-Davis graduate student Amy Champ discussed her research into how yoga has affected American women and society, a dialogue erupted into how the West has influenced yoga.

“Yoga means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” Champ said.

Yoga currently includes a range of interpretations from a workout to ancient texts and seeking a state of being without thought.

Champ’s research includes how those ends connect with predominantly white, middle-aged women becoming involved with this Indian tradition. She is looking at various aspects of yoga’s influence on individual women such as how a physical practice has a different healing affect than seeing a psychologist as well as why women chose yoga to recover from trauma. Champ is coupling this with looking at how women’s identifying with yoga affects families and communities through service projects and beliefs on global issues and politics.

The current political campaigns in California provide some evidence of that influence. LA-based Bikram’s Yoga College of India donated $25,900 to California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign and Senator Barbara Boxer has benefited from a yoga fundraiser and a Yogis for Boxer group.

Westerners on a quest for spiritual guidance have also helped India’s tourism business. While other forms of tourism have dropped in India, medical tourism, which includes ayurveda and yoga, has not, according to recent data.

But can that all be “yoga?”

Kundan Singh, adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, says no. The West, he says, has altered yoga so much that it should no longer be called yoga.

Does it need a different name?

Have the incarnations of Yogaletics – athletic yoga, doga – dog yoga disrespected the 5,000-year-old roots of yoga?

Does a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showing 23 percent of Americans consider yoga a spiritual practice change that?

This isn’t just a Western issues. Yoga is also transforming in India. The esteem of yoga in the West has also given rise to the popularity of yoga in India, said Surekha Acharya, associate professor at Riverside City College. Historically, yoga was only for men and the elite but is now seen as a chic thing to do.

News out of India reflects this changing landscape. Gurus recently have faced controversy from Baba Ramdev entering politics to some popular gurus being accused of crimes.

“Actually that tells something about our society. We are so insecure because of the miserable situation of our life that we sometimes end up seeking reassurances of the charlatans,” Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, president, Ram Janmabhoomi Trust, said in a Gulf News article. “At the same time, a few people exploiting the society in the garb of godmen do not represent the religious gurus of India rendering spiritual guidance to the masses.”

For those of us who know when we’ve gone too many days with out a few downward dogs the benefits of yoga appear obvious.

But doctors like results and data.

Yoga becoming more mainstream has allowed doctors greater opportunities to study why we like it so much.

This week, studies were released showing these benefits. One from Arizona State University found yogic breathing, known as pranayama, can help with pain conditions.

“Compared to normal breathing, slow breathing reduced ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness as well as negative emotion,” stated an article on ASU’s Web site. “The benefit of slow breathing in relieving pain was greatest in the healthy women.”

Another study in the UK confirmed previous evidence that meditation can help with depression.

A column in The Guardian gives a good primer on new research and the skepticism surrounding the ancient practice.

“Meditation isn’t a miracle cure for anything – in fact, if you approach it as the latest fad that will solve all your problems, you’re probably missing the point,” the writer states. “Mindfulness meditation, for example, is a way of ‘being with’ the human condition (and all its difficulties) without reacting against it – its power in dealing with health problems lies in changing our relationship to those issues, rather than in getting rid of them.”

I think the real results of yoga catching on will be measured down the road.

These days yoga seems to be offered at almost every senior center and YMCA with increasing popularity. If that keeps up, will incorporating all facets of yoga, not just working out, lead to less depression, better heart health and a less obese society?

On an interesting side note, the growth in yoga popularity has led to innovation in yoga gear with a new mat coming out to assist the visually impaired. The three-dimensional mat has markings allowing yogis to feel proper placement for the hands, feet and head. Alignment is crucial for all the muscles and bones to work correctly together so this probably isn’t such a bad idea for yogis who see well either.

The notion that yogis can practice anywhere with little or no equipment is one of the selling points.

So much so that the Sporting Goods Manufactures Association annual study showed yoga participation grew by 13.2 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to an Associated Press article about the report.

Technology now may be making it even easier to get your downward-dog fix. Or making it more difficult to leave technology behind.

Yoga companies and magazines have been keeping pace with technology offering podcasts and online videos for some time.

As smartphones have grown more popular, all sorts of applications have been developed. Take a yoga class, look up a pose or guide your meditation with a variety of aps reviewed here.

At least one application has also been released for the iPad, which made its way to stores last weekend. The Namaste Yoga ap is based on the Discovery Channel show of the same name, according to a company press release.

Now when you’re in one of these hotel rooms with a free yoga mat you can tune into your favorite teacher wherever you are.

At the beginning of many yoga classes, the teacher will ask you to set an intention for your practice.

Purple Lupine at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California

This does not include becoming a bendy straw. It’s more about forgiving yourself, releasing anxiety or overcoming fear. Whatever you feel you need at that moment, can focus on in class and carry with you afterward.

Right now, two of the world’s major religions have celebrations that focus on another key intention – gratitude.

Most associated with Thanksgiving, spring holidays including Easter and Passover also involve gratitude. Both mark freedom – freedom from sins, freedom from slavery.

Studies have shown that being grateful is up there with having meaningful relationships and living in the present in determining how happy you are.

As you participate in Holy Week, Passover or spring activities, release whatever is keeping you a mental slave, do some sun salutations and be grateful for the flowers blooming and the clouds in the sky.