1abyoga 1

The theft of yoga
Author: Aseem Shukla

Publication: News Week
Date: April 18, 2010
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/nearly_twenty
_million_people_in.html
Nearly 20 million people in the United States gather together routinely, fold their hands and
utter the Hindu greeting of Namaste -- the Divine in me bows to the same Divine in you.
Then they close their eyes and focus their minds with chants of "Om," the Hindu
representation of the first and eternal vibration of creation. Arrayed in linear patterns, they
stretch, bend, contort and control their respirations as a mentor calls out names of Hindu
divinity linked to various postures: Natarajaasana (Lord Shiva) or Hanumanasana (Lord
Hanuman) among many others. They chant their assigned "mantra of the month," taken as
they are from lines directly from the Vedas, Hinduism's holiest scripture. Welcome to the
practice of yoga in today's western world.
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, agnostics and atheists they may be, but they partake in the
spiritual heritage of a faith tradition with a vigor often unmatched by even among the two-
and-a half-million Hindu Americans here. The Yoga Journal found that the industry generates
more than $6 billion each year and continues on an incredible trajectory of popularity. It
would seem that yoga's mother tradition, Hinduism, would be shining in the brilliant
glow of dedicated disciples seeking more from the very font of their passion.
Yet the reality is very different. Hinduism in common parlance is identified more with
holy cows than Gomukhasana, the notoriously arduous twisting posture; with millions
of warring gods rather than the unity of divinity of Hindu tradition--that God may
manifest and be worshiped in infinite ways; as a tradition of colorful and harrowing
wandering ascetics more than the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali, the second century
BCE commentator and composer of the Yoga Sutras, that form the philosophical basis
of Yoga practice today.
Why is yoga severed in America's collective consciousness from Hinduism? Yoga,

meditation, ayurvedic natural healing, self-realization--they are today's syntax for New Age,
Eastern, mystical, even Buddhist, but nary an appreciation of their Hindu origins. It is not
surprising, then, that Hindu schoolchildren complain that Hinduism is conflated only with
caste, cows, exoticism and polytheism--the salutary contributions and philosophical
underpinnings lost and ignored. The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises
millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a legacy in which they can take
pride.
Hinduism, as a faith tradition, stands at this pass a victim of overt intellectual property theft,
absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu yogis,
gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass
commercialism. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, under whose tutelage the Beatles steadied
their mind and made sense of their insane fame, packaged the wonders of meditation as
Transcendental Meditation (TM) just as an entrepreneur from here in Minneapolis
applied the principles of Ayurveda to drive a commercial enterprise he coined as Aveda.
TM and Aveda are trademarked brands--a protection not available to the originator of their
brand--Hinduism itself. And certainly these masters benefited millions with their
contributions, but in agreeing to ditch Hinduism as the source, they left these gifts orphaned
and unanchored.
The Los Angeles Times last week chronicled this steady disembodying of yoga from
Hinduism. "Christ is my guru. Yoga is a spiritual discipline much like prayer, meditation and
fasting [and] no one religion can claim ownership," says a vocal proponent of "Christian
themed" yoga practices. Some Jews practice Torah yoga, Kabbalah yoga and aleph bet yoga,
and even some Muslims are joining the act. They are appropriating the collective wisdom
of millenia of yogis without a whisper of acknowledgment of yoga's spiritual roots.
Not surprisingly, the most popular yoga journals and magazines are also in the act. Once
yoga was no longer intertwined with its Hindu roots, it became up for grabs and easy to sell.
These journals abundantly refer to yoga as "ancient Indian," "Eastern" or "Sanskritic," but
seem to assiduously avoid the term "Hindu" out of fear, we can only assume, that ascribing
honestly the origins of their passion would spell disaster for what has become a lucrative
commercial enterprise. The American Yoga Association, on its Web site, completes this
delinking of yoga from Hinduism thusly:
"The common belief that Yoga derives from Hinduism is a misconception. Yoga actually
predates Hinduism by many centuries...The techniques of Yoga have been adopted by
Hinduism as well as by other world religions."
So Hinduism, the religion that has no known origins or beginnings is now younger than
yoga? What a ludicrous contention when the Yoga Sutras weren't even composed until the
2nd Century BCE. These deniers seem to posit that Hinduism appropriated yoga so other
religions may as well too! Hindus can only sadly shake their heads, as by this measure, soon
we will read as to how karma, dharma and reincarnation--the very foundations of Hindu
philosophy--are only ancient precepts that early Hindus of some era made their own.
The Hindu American Foundation (Disclosure: I sit on the Foundation's Board) released a
position paper on this issue earlier this year. The brief condemns yoga's appropriation, but
also argues that yoga today is wholly misunderstood. Yoga is identified today only with
Hatha Yoga, the aspect of yoga focused on postures and breathing techniques. But this is
only one part of the practice of Raja Yoga that is actually an eightfold path designed to lead
the practitioner to moksha, or salvation. Indeed, yogis believe that to focus on the physicality
of yoga without the spirituality is utterly rudimentary and deficient. Sure, practicing postures
alone with a focus on breathing techniques will quiet the mind, tone the body, increase
flexibility--even help children with Attention Deficit Disorder--but will miss the mark on
holistic healing and wellness.
All of this is not to contend, of course, that yoga is only for Hindus. Yoga is Hinduism's
gift to humanity to follow, practice and experience. No one can ever be asked to leave their
own religion or reject their own theologies or to convert to a pluralistic tradition such as
Hinduism. Yoga asks only that one follow the path of yoga for it will necessarily lead one to
become a better Hindu, Christian, Jew or Muslim. Yoga, like its Hindu origins, does not offer
ways to believe in God; it offer ways to know God.
But be forewarned. Yogis say that the dedicated practice of yoga will subdue the restless
mind, lessen one's cravings for the mundane material world and put one on the path of
self-realization--that each individual is a spark of the Divine. Expect conflicts if you are
sold on the exclusivist claims of Abrahamic faiths--that their God awaits the arrival of only
His chosen few at heaven's gate--since yoga shows its own path to spiritual enlightenment to
all seekers regardless of affiliation.
Hindus must take back yoga and reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual heritage--
not sell out for the expediency of winning more clients for the yoga studio down the street.
Sorry, your patent on yoga has run out
Author: Deepak Chopra
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/deepak_chopra/2010/04/sorry_your_p
atent_on_yoga_has_run_out.html
In his recent article for On Faith, Aseem Shukla laments the disconnect between yoga and its
origins in Hinduism. He's certainly right that the practice of Yoga has become a "spiritual
discipline" that is open to anyone of any faith. But it's strange to find him disapproving of this
fact, for several reasons.
First, yoga is a spiritual discipline in India, and always has been. The aim of the practice is
liberation. When liberation occurs, the yogi is freed from the religious trappings that enclose
Yoga. Those trappings have always been incidental to the deeper aim of enlightenment.
Secondly, yoga did not originate in Hinduism as Prof. Shukla claims. Perhaps he has a
fundamentalist agenda in mind, but he must know very well that the rise of Hinduism as a
religion came centuries after the foundation of yoga in consciousness and consciousness
alone. Religious rites and the worship of gods has always been seen as being in service to a
higher cause, knowing the self.
Beneath Shukla's complaints one detects the resentment of an inventor who discovered
Coca-Cola or Teflon but neglected to patent it. Isn't that a rather petty basis for drawing
such a negative picture? 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. Shukla regards the same scene with a withering frown.
If you strip away his sour mood and questionable assumptions, I think Shukla's real lament is
like that of Jews who see the young fleeing from the old ways and Christians sitting in half-
empty churches. To him it could be said what is often said to these other religionists. Maybe
it's you who haven't found a way to keep the temples, synagogues, and churches full. That's a
very different matter form the millions who are finding a spiritual path on their own, outside
organized religion. If yoga serves them, we should be celebrating any step of progress being
made, through whatever means.
Dr. Chopra: Honor thy heritage
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/dr_chopra_ho
nor_thy_heritage.html
Deepak Chopra's rejoinder to my column on the appropriation of yoga presents a veritable

feast of delicious irony. Indeed, Chopra is the perfect emissary to fire a salvo against my
assertion that delinking Hinduism from its celebrated contributions to contemporary spiritual
dialogue--yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic healing, the science of self-realization--renders a rich
tradition barren and unrecognizable to its adherents.
The right messenger because Chopra is a principal purveyor of the very usurpation I
sought to expose. And we cannot discount his self-interest in this issue, considering the
empire of wellness he has built on the foundations of what else, essential knowledge passed
on by generations of Hindu masters---yoga, ayurveda and Vedanta.
A prolific writer and gifted communicator, Chopra is perhaps the most prominent exponent of
the art of "How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it
Hindu!" To Larry King, he has described himself as an "Advaita Vedantin"--one of the major
philosophical schools of Hinduism. Yet none of the plethora of his book titles, that include
several devoted to Jesus and one entire book devoted to the Buddha, even skirt the word
"Hindu." His Web site is devoted to selling products and literature related to yoga, meditation
and ayurveda, but Hinduism, of course, bears no mention.
The contention that yoga's foundation is "in consciousness alone," thereby preceding
Hinduism, is a sad demonstration of the extent Chopra and other Hindu philosophical
profiteers will go to disassociate themselves from Hinduism. But Hindus are on to this
tactic now. For Hinduism's most sacred scripture, the Vedas, are deeply believed to be the
accumulation and transcription of the existential contemplations, and experiences, of rishis--
the primordial yogis. The rishis did not call themselves Hindu, but would Chopra claim that
the Vedas they composed are not Hindu? The moniker "Hinduism" is of relatively recent
origin, but it is accepted today as a handy substitute for the perhaps more accurate but
difficult to pronounce name, Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion. That reality does not
separate yoga from Hinduism any more than it separates the Vedas or Bhagawad Gita from
Hinduism. The Vedas and yoga are synonymous and as eternal as they are contemporaneous.
Chopra will know very well that Hinduism has six schools of thought: sankhya, nyaya,
vaisheshika, mimasa, vedanta and yes, yoga. Hinduism and yoga are inextricably intertwined,
and the dedicated practice of yoga is absolutely a Hindu practice. As I have written,
Hinduism being avowedly pluralistic, requires no membership, affiliation or oath of loyalty to
borrow, and yes, benefit, from its sacred wisdom. All Hindus are asking today is that the
wellspring of yoga and other practices that Chopra and others appropriate wildly, should be
acknowledged and honored. Chopra's platform gave him an opportunity to honor the spiritual
tradition that informs his message, but it seems clear that he would rather take the ripe
transcendent fruits of Hinduism leaving it with the detritus of perceived social evils.
Frustratingly, also, Chopra takes the disingenuous path of impugning a
"fundamentalist" agenda to my contentions. Chopra knows well that eliciting the bogey of
communalism is a ploy to drag the narratives of polarizing politics from India into this
conversation. I reject the insincere and cynical ploy. If advocacy of a tradition is
fundamentalism, every one of my co-panelists on this site are guilty.
I do not begrudge Chopra his runaway success, but an occasional nod to his spiritual
heritage would be much appreciated. Hindus are thrilled that all of humanity is now
benefiting from the accumulated wisdom of the ancients--Chopra and others are doing their
part to make that happen--but the guilt of plagiarism carries no statute of limitations, and
Hindus are wise to the machinations of the pretenders.
Views expressed here are the personal views of Dr. Aseem Shukla, and do not necessarily
represent those of the University of Minnesota or Hindu American Foundation.
Yoga belongs to all of us
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/deepak_chopra/2010/04/yoga_belong
s_to_all_of_us.html
Although Prof. Aseem Shukla has got the bit between his teeth, I doubt that there's much
enthusiasm for his ideas. If there is a movement to return yoga to its Hindu roots, it speaks in
a whisper. I've never encountered it in India. Having loaded his quiver, what target is Shukla
firing at? Nobody is stopping Hindus from claiming yoga as their own. Christians can claim
prayer as their invention if they want to. It wouldn't make the claim less false -- sensible
people accept that prayer is universal.
Shukla didn't refute my basic argument, which is that yoga is a practice rooted in
consciousness, not proprietary religion. The great seers of India didn't simply precede the
term "Hindu," as Shukla likes to imagine. They preceded dogmatic religion itself, which is
why the ideal of yoga is to leave dogma and ritual behind. In the state of liberation (Moksha),
why would anyone feel more tied to Hinduism? That's like feeling tied to catechism when
you've reached Heaven. Shukla wants Hinduism to be self-serving, which is why he is so
intent on keeping the membership roster strong. Thank goodness Hinduism's real interest is to
open the way to a higher reality. The true success of Hinduism is measured by how many
members transcend it, not by how many slavishly follow it.
Of course, being an organization of sorts, and a highly fallible one, Hinduism falls short of its
ideal of Sanatana Dharma. It becomes tribal, self-enclosed, and one-eyed about being the
only way to God. Shukla is proud of promoting those parochial ends when he shouldn't be.
The fact that yoga belongs to the whole world represents a great gift from Hinduism, not a
loss.
I must repeat, that yoga did not originate in Hinduism. This isn't a debating point, since no
one to my knowledge has ever claimed that Hinduism came before yoga. Shukla's notion
that the Vedas are a Hindu product also comes out of left field. Editions of the Vedic texts
have authors that have given rise to Hindu lineages, but that doesn't make those rishis Hindu
as such. Just as it doesn't make sense to call Jesus and the writers of the Christian Gospels,
followers of the Southern Baptist or Lutheran faith.
I'm sure that our readers have zero interest in the scholarly niceties of this subject, but
even a cursory knowledge of ancient India reveals that before what we call Hinduism,
there was a Vedic civilization that upheld the principles of Sanatana Dharma through
the knowledge of yoga and self-realization, yet did not have the orthodox trappings of
Hinduism.
I'm happy that Prof. Shukla isn't the most strident of fundamentalists. He seems rather
bemused where most of his kind are zealous. I forgive the potshots taken at me. Other than
bandying about a few rumors, half-truths, and nonsense related to my career, he seems
unaware of my deep involvement in reawakening of Vedanta, Ayurveda, and many other
aspects of India's spiritual tradition, or the recognition this has earned me in my homeland.
In the spirit of friendliness, I would like to find common ground with Prof. Shukla in the term
Sanatana Dharma-the eternal wisdom of life. Whether he calls it Hinduism or I call it Vedic
knowledge, I believe ultimately we are both referencing the same body of universal
knowledge that has always stood for benefiting the whole human family. Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam -the world is one single family.
Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma: One and the same
Publication: The Washington Post
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/hinduism_and
_sanatana_dharma_one_and_the_same.html
I will take Dr. Deepak Chopra at his word where he seeks to find common ground in our
virtual debate as to the origins of yoga. Not willing to identify himself as a Hindu, Chopra is
content to accept the term, Sanatana Dharma, as the source of yoga and the Vedantic wisdom
he propagates. "Yoga belongs to the whole world [and] represents a great gift from
Hinduism...," he writes.
This is indeed a momentous step in our exchange, as Chopra now agrees that all the eternal
wisdom--including yoga!--that he cherishes, packages and distributes may have come out of
the "consciousness" of Hindu saints and masters of yesterday and today.
Chopra is hardly the first to find it hard to openly identify himself a Hindu--perhaps
cannot at the cost of compromising a solipsistic empire--just as Eckhart Tolle eschews
the term "Hindu" while he admittedly parlays the copious works of the towering
contemporary Advaita Vedanta Hindu master, Sri Ramana Maharshi. But readers here
may know well that the term "Hindu" is simply the 12th century Persian abstraction referring
to the people they found espousing Sanatana Dharma--the eternal way of life lived since time
immemorial by the Indic civilization extant on the banks of the Indus (therefore Hindu) river.
And over the ensuing years, the diverse followers of Sanatana Dharma that believed, as their
progenitors always had, in the scriptural sanctity of the Vedas, in one all-pervasive Supreme
Being which manifests and is worshiped in infinite forms or no form, the laws of karma,
dharma, reincarnation and the ultimate goal of liberation, moksha, accepted the moniker of
Hinduism.
Today, Sanatana Dharma and Hinduism are synonymous, and Chopra and I both agree that
yoga is both part of and beyond this tradition. Indeed, we also agree that dharma is the means
to the goal of self-realization, a transcendent state where ego, names, religion and identity are
all superfluous. But therein lies the greatest point of contention between myself and Chopra.
For Chopra incomprehensibly condemns Hinduism as "tribal" and "one-eyed about

being the only way to God," while I celebrate Hinduism as the original paragon of
pluralism whose Vedas recognized eons ago that "Ekam Sat Viprah Bahudha Vadanti,"
or Truth is One, the wise call it by many names.
I am left stunned that Chopra would consider Hinduism to be "dogmatic" or "proprietary."

Take not my words to define Hindu pluralism, but accept, the words of Swami Vivekananda's
translation of a Vedic hymn that he delivered at the first World Parliament of Religions in
1893 as a self-described Hindu monk, "As the different streams having their sources in
different places all reach the sea, so also paths which men take through different tendencies,
various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."
Chopra conflates Hinduism with "orthodox trappings" when I see a tradition of infinite
possibilities, indeed yogas, suited to the inclinations of the seeker: bhakti yoga, or devotion,
for those passionate in their love for God; gyana yoga, or the path of knowledge for the
contemplative and karma yoga for the active and industrious.
Chopra and I share an affinity to Sanatana Dharma, or Hinduism, but our narratives clearly
diverge. An immigrant from India, he was not born and raised in the United States as was I.
He never faced the innocently cruel queries of classmates that I faced and my children still
answer today. "Do you speak Hindu too?"; "I saw on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
that you Hindus eat monkey brains"; "You don't pray, you're not Christian"; "My father told
me you're going to hell because you believe in millions of gods."
My work now, at the Hindu American Foundation for example, is simply to answer such
questions on a national stage and provide the perspectives of those who claim Hinduism as
their own. Chopra can talk of faith in the intellectual gobbledygook of New Age platitudes,
but I would caution that such manifest evasion endangers credibility when readers seek
wisdom from a guru who is authentic, sincere and engaged in their daily reality.
Our argument should not be defined over parsing of the terms "Sanatana Dharma" and
"Hindu", or treating the latter as some sort of dreaded "H-word," but recognizing,
perpetuating and sharing the sublime contributions--like yoga--of our common progenitors.
There are no Sanatana Dharmists or Vedantins in today's world, but only a billion people
around the globe and 2 million in the U.S. who call themselves Hindu. So the movement to
claim yoga's Hindus roots does not merely speak in a whisper -- it is a silent majority finally
beginning to find its voice. And in doing so, if Hinduism is better understood and appreciated
along the way, children facing those questions I faced, may just answer a bit more clearly
and, yes, proudly, adding another important layer to America's pluralism.
Views expressed here are the personal views of Dr. Aseem Shukla, and do not necessarily
represent those of the University of Minnesota or Hindu American Foundation.
The Clash of the Yogis
*Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?*
http://www.newsweek.com/id/237910
Lisa Miller
From the magazine issue dated May 31, 2010
I don't care much for bland spirituality, so at yoga class I generally tune out the prelude, when
the teacher reads aloud-as is the custom-an inspirational passage on which to meditate.
Recently, though, I was startled to attention when the teacher chose a paragraph on
compassion from the Dalai Lama's bestseller The Art of Happiness. Hold on a minute, I
thought. Isn't the Dalai Lama a Tibetan Buddhist? And isn't yoga a Hindu practice? And
haven't Buddhists and Hindus been at war over land and gods for thousands of years? The
Dalai Lama may be regarded throughout the world as a holy man, but downward dog is not
his expertise.
Sixteen million Americans practice yoga, according to Yoga Journal, and in 2008 we spent
nearly $6 billion on classes and stretch pants. Yet aside from "om" and the occasional
"namaste," Americans rarely acknowledge that yoga is, at its foundation, an ancient Hindu
religious practice, the goal of which is to achieve spiritual liberation by joining one's soul to
the essence of the divine. In its American version, yoga is a mishmash: Zen and Tibetan
Buddhism, 12-step rhetoric, self-help philosophies, cleansing diets, exercise, physical
therapy, and massage. Its Hindu roots are obliterated by the modern infatuation with all
things Eastern-and by our growing predilection for spiritual practices stripped of the sectarian
burdens of religion. Americans' naive but characteristic conflation of Eastern religions isn't
new; in 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Bhagavad-Gita (which is Hindu scripture)
"the much renowned book of Buddhism."
Lately, though, that muddle is less innocent. Some of yoga's best-known-and most
entrepreneurial-purveyors concede they've consciously separated Hinduism from yoga to
make it more palatable. "The reason I sanitized it is there's a lot of junk in [Hinduism],"
explains Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru whose latest book, co-written with Marianne
Williamson and Debbie Ford, is The Shadow Effect. "We've got to evolve to a secular
spirituality that still addresses our deepest longings . Most religion is culture and mythology.
Read any religious text, and there's a lot of nonsense there. Yet the religious experience is
beautiful."
Generically spiritual yoga may be fine for most Americans-preferable, even, for those who
desire the benefits of meditative exercise without any apparent conflict with their own
religious beliefs. But for some American Hindus, it amounts to a kind of ethnic cleansing. In
The Washington Post's On Faith blog (to which I contribute), the pediatric urologist Aseem
Shukla last month tangled with Chopra over the whitewashing of yoga. Shukla, who is also
the head of the Hindu American Foundation, believes that if he doesn't help his American-
born children feel good about their religion, no one will. And so he says, loudly and often and
to anyone who will listen: "Yoga originated in Hinduism. It's disingenuous to say otherwise.
A little bit of credit wouldn't be a bad thing, and it would help Hindu Americans feel
proud of their heritage."
In all religions, heartbreak and enmity lie in this struggle between those who want to unify
and transcend, like Chopra, and those who want to protect their tradition's unique identity and
character, like Shukla. My friend the Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero
has just written a book called God Is Not One, which argues that the good in any religion
(e.g., yoga) necessarily comes with the bad (caste systems). By seeing religion as a single,
happy universal force, we blind ourselves to tensions of great consequence to individuals and
to history. "America," he says, "has this amazing capacity to make everything banal. That's
what we do. We make things banal and then we sell them. If you're a Hindu, you see this
beautiful, ancient tradition of yoga being turned into this ugly materialistic vehicle for
selling clothes. It makes sense to me that you would be upset."
But, Prothero points out, Chopra has a point. The American creative, materialistic, pluralistic
impulse allows religion here to grow and change, taking on new and unimagined shapes.
"You can't stop people from appropriating elements in your religion," Prothero adds. "You
can't stop people from using and transforming yoga. But you have to honor and credit the
source." Prothero's bottom line is also my own. You can read from the Dalai Lama in yoga
class. You can even read from the Sermon on the Mount. But know where yoga came from
and respect those origins. Then, when you chant "om," it will resonate not only in the room
but down through the ages.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of Heaven: Our Enduring
Fascination With the Afterlife. Become a fan of Lisa on Facebook.
Message by Vijaya Rajiva
----- Forwarded Message ----

From: Vijay Rajiva <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sun, May 2, 2010 7:00:45 AM
Subject: Deepak Chopra on Hindu Yoga
The Editor
Washington Post
Dear Editor,
Re: Deepak Chopra's article 'Sorry,your patent has run out' (Washington Post,April 23, 2010).
I am an admirer of Dr.Deepak Chopra's work as a neurologist and and a medical doctor. He

has intelligently incorporated Hindu yogic practice and meditational methods in his clinical
practice. However, he cannot be considered a yoga master or a spiritual guru. He himself
would not wish it to be so, I am sure !
I was therefore surprised at his somewhat hasty, ill timed and unneccessary entry into
polemical disputes concerning Hindu Yoga. As an Indian he surely must know some of the
historical facts about the origins of Yoga in the philosophies of Sankhya and Yoga and its
steady evolution in Hindu thought.
Both Professor Aseem Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation and the HAF have
provided thoughtful articles on the subject of Hindu Yoga.
Dr.Shukla's article 'The theft of yoga' April 18,2010, outlines some of the errors in detaching
yoga from its Hindu background, because of the spiritual loss sustained by practitioners in
viewing yoga as merely a callisthenics and health exercise.
Hindu India has developed a system by which the practitioner can choose to remain at a
purely worldly level, but can also be advised that this is only the beginning. Hinduism has an
enormous fund of both theoretical and practical knowledge concerning Yoga. The classical
texts and as well as the many gurus and sants who practise Yoga have sustained a high level
of Yoga which younger religions which have adopted Yoga may not have acquired.
HAF's position paper 'Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice' is also a learned and
timely article.
Both HAF and Professor Shukla have done a great service both to Hinduism and to Yoga.
They should be thanked for this. Instead, unfortunately, Dr.Chopra tried to trivialise the issue
and make it an ad hominem attack on Professor Shukla and the Hindu American Foundation.
Perhaps his enormous worldly success in North America has led him into a type of hubris.
This is a well known phenomenon, where some practitioners of Yoga who have acquired
special powers, then fall by the wayside on their path because of a lack of spiritual direction.
As an Indian and as a Hindu Dr. Chopra is well advised to maintain silence on topics that are
not in his domain. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said at the conclusion of his famous
philosophical tract :
'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'

(Tractatus Philosophicus).
Sincerely,
Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

615 Westluke Ave.
Cote St. Luc
Quebec H4X 1P9
Canada
Tel: (514)488-4552
Identity and the Future of Yoga
Kanchan Banerjee
I’m a Hindu, I’m a yoga practitioner and also I teach. I

agree with two the key points of Dr. Chopra:
1. ‘Yoga is universal’. And, yes it is for all.
2. It is not necessarily a property of any particular group of
people or religion.
In support of the first point I would like to quote Sri

Aurobindo, the authority on yoga and a seer in recent times: “Yoga is not modern invention
of
the human mind, but our ancient and prehistoric possession.”
A first reading of Dr. Chopra’s comments

made me feel good and I agreed with the main point: the universal nature of
Yoga. Then I read it again and I could sense that there is guilt, an agenda and
arrogance in the denial of the identity and roots and a separatist attempt. One
may not like to call oneself a Hindu, fine. You may not label your spiritual practice
Hinduism that’s fine too. But no one has right to condemn others for having a
Hindu identity! Hindus are not seeking for converts, nor do they have plans to
increase their numbers in the temples – they have too many of them already!
Hinduism is as universal as one can imagine! Like Yoga, which is an

integral part of it, its origins are placed in consciousness and in the cosmic
mind, not in human revelation. That is why Hinduism has no historical beginning
or founder and is called Sanatana Dharma or the eternal Dharma. No one needs to
give universality to Yoga and not to Hinduism or to deny the vast Hindu roots
and connections of Yoga. Some sort of Yoga can be found in all Hindu rituals,
music, dance, prayer, devotion and philosophy. Yoga is not some outside thing
added to Hinduism but part of its very fabric.
Dr. Chopra, like a number of modern thinkers, appears to reduce Hinduism

to its outer ritual dimension and prefer to give its inner practices of Yoga,
Veda and Vedanta another name. However, that greater tradition continues to be
known and recognized by its modern adherents as a religion as Hinduism. If he
prefers Vedic wisdom or Sanatana Dharma for it, he should recognize that millions
of people do use the term Hinduism in this broader sense. Yet the Chopra Center itself does at
times recommend Hindu rituals or yajnas and does regard them of
value and so benefits even from that aspect of Hinduism.
I agree that no particular

country or population or religion has ‘copyright’ on Yoga. True. The ancient
Rishis never wanted to ‘patent’ anything in any case; this is their greatness,
because they wanted knowledge to be free, and weakness to those who are in the
business of selling knowledge. Should this be the reason one has to shy away
from our social or religious identity?
Name matters. Though laws of gravity and theory of
relativity were in existence before and after Newton or Einstein was born, they were given
due credit by recognizing their contributions as ‘discoverers’. Similarly, even
though most Hindu/Vedic/Vedantic Rishis did not even leave their names on their
‘darshanas’ or discoveries, a token ‘thank you’ to the Rishis and Gurus
would go a long way (in true spirit of Yoga – Guru-krupa-hi-kebalam).
The population which today is called the Hindus, about a
billion in number; the cultural and religious heritage which is called Hinduism
today is rooted in Sanatana Dharma, the Vedic Dharma, the Vedantic Dharma. Even
if one wants to disown it, to abuse it, one cannot give it up, because it is
the reality!
‘Yoga is a spiritual discipline in India’, after this admission it is absolutely
ludicrous to deny its Hindu identity. Because, after all the people of India were
called Hindus by others any way, and 85% of its population today are officially
called Hindus, who in their own way, preserve and pass on the knowledge of the
same spiritual discipline from generation to generation! And Hinduism - again
it is a foreign term, perhaps early Indian leaders (such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy and
even Vivekananda) during their encounters with the West had no choice but to
use it with their communications with the foreigners, because that is the word
they could relate to! On the other hand, Hindus themselves called their faith Dharma (not
religion) and their path was Sanatana (or eternal) and their
tradition ‘Hindu’ about which Dr. Chopra notes: ‘Religious rites and the
worship of gods has always been seen as being in service to a higher cause,
knowing the self.’ A quick reminder is also needed here that these ‘people’
experimented with many different methods and came to the conclusion: ‘Truth is
one, paths are many’! Unlike the modern ‘religions’ they did not say that ‘only
my book contains the revelation’, ‘my prophet is the only or last son of God’. Therefore,
I see a major goof-up here! The Vedantins and the Hindus are same.
If one calls himself ‘Advaita
Vedantin’ or ‘Vedantin’ or even ‘Vedi’ (as in ‘Chaturvedi’)
is a great thing. However it is part of history that the first person who came
and taught ‘yoga’ to the Americans was Swami Vivekananda (1893). He wrote his
famous book Raj Yoga in New York!
Guess what, America and the world knew him as the ‘Hindoo Monk’! Swami Vivekananda
too identified
himself to be a Vedantin, but he had no problem calling himself a Hindu
as well, though he faced ridicule of the highest order!
But we have a bigger issue than identity; the freedom of

knowledge.
It is clear that
Dr. Shukla is pointing out to the practice of popular yoga which is basically
Raja or Hatha Yoga having roots in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and also Hatha Yoga
Pradipika. But one must not forget that
the popular Yoga is only asana (and may be some breathing) which is the subject
of only two of the 200 Sutras of the Yoga Sutras and ¼ of the verses of the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which emphasize meditation. Yoga Sutras is one of the six
schools of Hindu or Vedic philosophy, which accept the authority of the Vedas.
Hatha Yoga Pradipika is a Shaivite text whose original guru is Lord Shiva.
Dr. Chopra’s comments have a great chance to confuse people
instead of educating. I feel that it is adding to the darkness/ignorance than
removing it (the definition of a Guru). A true Guru’s task is to shed
lights on the real concept of yoga, than a petty reaction! On one hand it is
argued that ‘yoga’ is beyond any creed and religion, but the same arguments
fall into the trap proposing that the popular aspect of yoga practiced in the
West is the real ‘Yoga’!
Sri Aurobindo, a figure that Deepak Chopra has also spoken
highly of, says again: “The Veda is our oldest extant
human document and the Veda, from one point of view, is a great compilation of
practical hints about yoga. All religion is a flower of which Yoga is the root;
all philosophy, poetry and the works of genius use it, consciously or
unconsciously, as an instrument. We believe that God created the world by Yoga
and by Yoga He will draw it into Himself again…….These are (Patanajali’s asthanga
yoga) merely details of particular systems. The systems are not the thing
itself, any more than the water of an irrigation canal is the river Ganges.”” [P. 18 Psychology
of Yoga, the complete
works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume 12, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1997. Essays
Divine and Human]
The Vedas and the Upanishads and finally the essence of all
the Bhagwad Geeta – where you can find aspects of Yoga which are not even
covered by Patanjali – he was talking about one aspect of the many-faceted term
Yoga!! Remember all the different yogas discussed in the Geeta? Sankhya Yog, Karma Yog,
Jnana Yog, Karma
Sannyas Yog, Atmasanmyam Yog, VijnanaYog, Aksharaparabrahmayog,
Aksharaparabrahmayog, Rajavidyarajaguhyayog, VibhutiYog, Bhakityog,
Kshetrakshetrajnavibhagayogo, Gunatrayavibhagayog, Purushottamapraptiyogo,
Daivasarasaupadwibhagayog, Sraddhatrayavibhagayog, Mokshasanyasayog ?
Which Yoga are we talking about here? For the ‘Ganga’ of the Yoga, we have to go back to
the roots, the
Vedas and the Upanishads, and that is firmly preserved by the so called
‘Hindus’ till today!
Dr. Shukla notes: ‘The severance of yoga from Hinduism
disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans from their spiritual heritage and a
legacy in which they can take pride.’ I disagree with that, rather I think this
effort disenfranchises all human beings, not just Hindus but the humanity
altogether from its origin and roots. The moment you severe the origin from the
offspring, it creates environment to breed dogmas, cults, sects and promotes
sectarianism, cultism and sometimes fundamentalism – as we see among many so
called yoga Gurus and their branding and patenting ‘xxx’ techniques! Hindus
never patented knowledge; hence there is no reason for ‘running out of patent’
either!
But wait, if yoga is for everyone, and we all are open
minded and not ‘fundamentalists’ in our own way, then where is the hesitation
to give it the due credit – the Rishis of India? Don’t want to call them Hindus
– no problem. But call them by some name – Sanatani, Vedic, and Vedantic - please!
No matter what name we give, the world knows them as Hindus; who are we
fooling?
It does not matter if I’m a Hindu American or a Christian
American or even an atheist American – if yoga is great, then I should be
thankful to those who gave this gift to me. Should the origin matter? And as an
American, I’m happy to say ‘yes, I’m also part of that ancient tradition called
Hinduism’! If I don’t acknowledge this, don’t I look like a fundamentalist
myself or at least a selfish opportunist?
A Hindu as an inheritor of the Vedic and Vedantic
traditions has few special debts or duties, one is called the Rishi rina – the duty to remember
and pay respect to the Rishis/Gurus by
propagating their thoughts further.
Is not it a great idea that after an ‘intro’ to yoga, let
the typical practitioner of yoga become a ‘seeker’ and we allow him/her to go
for further understanding and knowledge of it by studying other forms and aspects
of yoga? For that to happen, one has to go to the original sources, such as the
Vedas and the Upanishads? Are the ‘separatist’, brand-conscious and cultist gurus
today afraid of losing the ‘business secret’ which is the root, if discovered
by common men, will find out that after all, where these Gurus borrow their
ideas from? Is it any different than the totalitarians keeping the masses
illiterate? Or is it part of the old dilemma of the people in business that if
you make it ‘secular’ looking to the practitioners of other cultures would be
more acceptable and sellable?
When we say that yoga has nothing
to do with Hinduism, in our ignorance we are depriving people, or rather
creating walls to bar them from the perennial source - the Vedas and the Upanishads,
because today
the same ‘Hindus’ have saved them for the humanity after tremendous sacrifices
made on their part. The invaders tried their best to annihilate this people, to
destroy all their knowledge. If not for these ‘Hindu infidels’, the system and
the knowledge would be gone for ever from the world. Don’t agree? Go to Afghanistan, think
of Pakistan and preach Vedanta!
Yoga is not an entity by itself –

it is in a way a carrier, a liberator, a system, discovered and prescribed and
primarily used by the ancestors of those who are called ‘Hindus’ today! Indian
spiritual traditions have created practical technologies to make use of the
knowledge of the Yogic science and has become a pillar, along with the
knowledge of the Rishis and the concept of Dharma. Yes, the Jains have saved
much of Yoga, the Buddhists and the Sikhs took some and they all do have much
in common, but aren’t they all Sanatanis in any case? They
also use Ayurvedic medicine, which is not to deny the Vedic origins of that
system.
What I find most illogical in these comments is this: ‘the
rise of Hinduism as a religion came centuries after the foundation of yoga in
consciousness and consciousness alone.’ Sorry Dr, Chopra it did not ‘come’ but
‘it’ was ‘called’ by that name! Does not matter who called you by what name at
what time of your life, you are still that ‘thing’ your mother gave birth to, called
Deepak Chopra today! Hinduism also has
its origin in consciousness and the cosmic mind, not in human revelation like
other religions. If Hinduism came later than Yoga who were its founders and
what are its texts apart from Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras?
Sri
Krishna (read the last shloka of Geeta – ‘Yatra Yogeshwara Krishna..’) the
Yogeshwarah (the Lord of Yoga) - worshipped by whom? The people, who are called
Hindus.
A great Universalist personality
like Rabindranath Tagore had no problem identifying with ‘Hinduism’ either: “In Hinduism,
in our everyday meditation, we try to realize God’s
cosmic manifestation and thus free our soul from the bondage of the limitedness
of the immediate; but for us he is also an individual for the individual,
working out through our evolution in time, our ultimate destiny.” [In a
letter to English painter, Sir William Rothenstein , April 2, 1927]
So what is the relationship

between Sanatan Dharma and Hinduism? Hear from the mouth of the Rishi: “The meaning
of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in
the ceaseless realization of yoga, of union...We have one standard
that is at once universal and particular, the eternal religion, which is the
basis, permanent and always inherent in India, of the shifting, mutable and
multiform thing we call Hinduism. Sticking fast where you are like a limpet is
not the dharma, neither is leaping without looking the dharma. The eternal
religion is to realize God in our inner life and our outer existence, in
society not less than in the individual. Esha dharmah sanatanah.” [Social Reform, P 53,
Essays
Divine and Human.]
In these comments of Dr. Chopra one finds admission the

following, but it missed the whole point by raising a wall of ‘accusation’:
"The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and

wide air far above the lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious
form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even when it
admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal
religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at the
highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he would
never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he
asks for some scaffolding of dogma, worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some
indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand
while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is
completed, can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The
religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled
this purpose, but, unlike certain creedal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself no name,
because it set itself
no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole
infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was
less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the God ward
endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many staged provision
for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of
itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Santana Dharma." [Indian spirituality
and life - 1 P 179, The Renaissance, India and other essays on Indian
Culture.]
And finally, the great Maharishi Aurobindo had to say this

(1913) about the deeper meaning, purpose and future of Yoga:
“As the Indian mind, emerging from its narrow mediaeval

entrenchments, advances westward towards inevitable conquest, it must
inevitably carry with it Yoga and Vedanta for its banners wherever it goes. Brahmajnana,
Yoga and Dharma are the three essentialities of Hinduism; wherever it travels
and find harborage and resting place, these three must spread. All else may
help or hinder. …..What Science could not provide India offers, Brahman for the
eternal goal, Yoga for the means of perfection, Dharma (swabhavaniyatam
karma) for the rational yet binding law of conduct. Therefore, because it
has something by which humanity can be satisfied and on which it can found
itself, the victory of the Indian mind is assured.” [Psychology of Yoga,
the complete works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume 12, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust
1997. Essays Divine and Human]
Shall we call Rishi Aurobindo a fundamentalist? Certainly there needs to be a greater

education about Hinduism and its true essence, which is not apart from Yoga,
and is the subject of many distortions, but one need not deny the yogic
connection with Hinduism in order to do that.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2010/04/shukla_and_chopra_the_gre
at_yoga_debate.html
Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?
Author:
Publication: The Huffington Post
Date: November 27, 2008
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-haimoff/deepak-chopra-on-mumbai-
t_b_146837.html
A CNN journalist interviewed Deepak Chopra last night about his take on the Mumbai
attacks and how to prevent similar attacks in the future, but it looked like producers cut
Chopra off when he started to get too controversial.
Chopra: What we have seen in Mumbai has been brewing for a long time, and the war
on terrorism and the attack on Iraq compounded the situation. What we call "collateral
damage" and going after the wrong people actually turns moderates into extremists, and that
inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay. Now the worst
thing that could happen is there's a backlash on the Muslims from the fundamental Hindus in
India, which then will perpetuate the problem. Inflammation will create more inflammation.
CNN: Let me jump in on that because you're presuming something very important, which is
that it's Muslims who have carried out these attacks and, in some cases, with Washington in
their sights.
Chopra: Ultimately the message is always toward Washington because it's also the perception
that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror.
They fund our side, then our petrol dollars going to Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and
ultimately these terrorist groups, which are very organized. You know Jonathan, it takes a lot
of money to do this. It takes a lot of organization to do this. Where's the money coming from,
you know? The money is coming from the vested interests. I'm not talking about conspiracy
theories, but what happens is, our policies, our foreign policies, actually perpetuate this
problem. Because, you know, 25% of the world's population is Muslim and they're the fastest
growing segment of the population of the world. The more we alienate the Muslim
population, the more the moderates are likely to become extremists.
CNN: I hope you're - you've - (CNN edits out the rest and inserts him concluding the
interview saying "Indian physician and philosopher Deepak Chopra.")
I don't know why CNN wrapped the Chopra interview so hastily, but perhaps it was because
the network had a Chevrolet ad to run. Chevrolet. Which is a manufacturer of automobiles.
Which are propelled by gasoline. Which comes from oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia.
Which fund Islamic fundamentalists. Which do things like attack hotels in India.
As Thomas L. Friedman has been saying for years, "the price of oil and the pace of freedom
are inversely correlated." When oil prices are high, anti-democratic regimes become richer
and more powerful, terrorists get funding and the world is unsafe. When oil prices are low,
the "petroauthoritarian regimes [have] to open themselves to foreign investment and educate
and empower their people more in order to earn income." When there is no demand for oil at
all, there is simply no money with which to fund terrorists.
I hope that CNN producers didn't edit the end of the Chopra interview in deference to their
car company advertisers. Chopra touched on similar topics with Larry King earlier in the day,
so perhaps cutting the interview off was just a formatting decision. I'm going to pretend that
it's that. Because if I thought that a news network in a democratic country was censoring the
connection between oil dependence and terrorism for fear of upsetting advertisers I wouldn't
be able to sleep at night.
Why Islam Needs an Apology
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/deepak_chopra/2009/04/why_islam_n
eeds_an_apology.html
What's your reaction to President Obama's recent statements to the Muslim world that "the
United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam" and that "we do not consider
ourselves a Christian nation"?
Enough Americans feel bad about the Iraq war that they didn't become upset over President
Obama's apology to the Islamic world. Call it a mea culpa or a sign of more openness, but
clearly Obama wants to make amends for the Bush era. His base on the left is ashamed of the
war, an incursion that had no justification in fighting against terrorism. Up to 300,000
innocent civilians may have died there. We will never know, given the chaos of the situation
after March, 2003, and the absence of official death counts.
Recently Obama has gone even further, telling the Turkish parliament that he considers Islam
a great culture that has contributed much to the world. In a daring reference to his family
background (daring for a politician who needs public approval, that is), he pointed out that
Muslim-American families like his have contributed to our society and will continue to. For
some observers -- and the entire right wing -- these remarks went too far. But when
everything is considered, they were necessary.
This President owes his election to the power of words, and the words applied to Islam after
9/11 fill a toxic dump site. The war makers paid lip service to the notion that not all Muslims
are terrorists, but they spent their whole energy painting the picture of an Islamic bogeyman,
a frightening specter implacably opposed to the U.S., filled with fanatical hatred, and capable
of springing appalling attacks anywhere, anytime.
His critics believe that Obama is giving aid and comfort to the enemy no doubt, by
apologizing to the Islamic world, but from his perspective he's beginning to treat Muslims
like normal human beings. There was a long period known as the Red Scare in American
politics, preceding WW II, when the same tactics were used against anarchists and
Communists. Then as now, everyone remotely associated with the Soviet Union was
demonized, and the Russians themselves were given all but supernatural powers to infiltrate
American society and bring it down. That the McCarthy witch hunts of the Fifties brought to
light not a single traitor hasn't quenched the right wing's xenophobia, which simply shifted to
illegal immigrants and all Muslims.
So while we encourage moderate Muslims to stand up for themselves and speak out against
the jihadis (a long-term project that, sadly, shows few signs of succeeding), here at home we
have to revive the tradition of tolerance that the Bushies undermined. They seemed incapable
of realizing that tolerance, and the civil rights that go with it, are more important by far than
raw patriotism. (Notice that no one has ever said that toleration was the last refuge of
scoundrels.) Obama walks a fine line, trying to preserve both patriotism and tolerance, a
mission we should all support. Does the Islamic world, as the source of so much trouble and
turmoil, not to mention so much backwardness in women's rights and democratic freedom,
deserve anyone's apology? In their own eyes they do, and America should be strong enough
to offer one. There's error and wrongdoing on both sides. It's no shame to be the first to admit
it.
- Chopra is the author of more than fifty books translated into over thirty-five languages. His
latest books are the "Ultimate Happiness Prescription" and "Reinventing the Body,
Resurrecting the Soul."
Deepak Blames America
Author: Dorothy Rabinowitz
Publication: Wall Street Journal
Date: December 1, 2008
URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122809544395968075.html
The media look within to explain the sick delusions of the Mumbai killers.
If the Mumbai terror assault seemed exceptional, and shocking in its targets, it was clear from
the Thanksgiving Day reports that we weren't going to be deprived of the familiar, either.
Namely, ruminations, hints, charges of American culpability that regularly accompany
catastrophes of this kind.
Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru,
advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the
attacks.
How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains
something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in
the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending
him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make
matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If
you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."
In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the
interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign
policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and
inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this
disaster in Bombay."
All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted
to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India
struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not
Washington's fault," he pointed out.
Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not
Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning
soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on
terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's
fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better
heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting
to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not
so offensive, perhaps?
Two subsequent interviews with Larry King brought much of the same -- a litany of
suggestions about the role the U.S. had played in fueling assaults by Muslim terrorists,
reminders of the numbers of Muslims in the world and their grievances. A faithful
adherent of the root-causes theory of crime -- mass murder, in the case at hand -- Dr. Chopra
pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that most of the terrorism in the world came from Muslims.
It was mandatory, then, to address their grievances -- "humiliation," "poverty," "lack of
education." The U.S., he recommended, should undertake a Marshall Plan for Muslims.
Nowhere in this citation of the root causes of Muslim terrorism was there any mention of
Islamic fundamentalism -- the religious fanaticism that has sent fevered mobs rioting, burning
and killing over alleged slights to the Quran or the prophet. Not to mention the countless
others enlisted to blow themselves and others up in the name of God.
Nor did we hear, in these media meditations, any particular expression of sorrow from the
New Delhi-born Dr. Chopra for the anguish of Mumbai's victims: a striking lack, no doubt
unintentional, but not surprising, either. For advocates of the root-causes theory of crime, the
central story is, ever, the sorrows and grievances of the perpetrators. For those prone to the
belief that most eruptions of evil in the world can be traced to American influence and power
there is only one subject of consequence.
Accustomed as we are by now to this view of the U.S., it's impossible not to marvel at its
varied guises -- its capacity to emerge even in journalism ostensibly concerning the absurd
beliefs about the 9/11 attacks held by so many Muslims. It's conventional wisdom in the
region -- according to a New York Times dispatch from Cairo, Egypt, last fall by Michael
Slackman -- that the U.S. and Israel had to have been involved in the planning, if not the
actual execution of the assaults. No news there. Neither was the information that there was
virtually universal belief in the area that Jews, tipped off, didn't go to work at the World
Trade Center that day. Or that the U.S. had organized the plot in order to attack Arab
Muslims and gain access to their oil.
The noteworthy point here was the writer's conclusion that the U.S. itself was to blame for
the power of these beliefs. "It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre," Mr.
Slackman allowed. But that would miss the point that the persistence of these ideas represents
the "first failure in the fight against terrorism." A U.S. failure? Nowhere in the extended list
of root causes here was there any mention of the fanaticism and sheer mindless gullibility that
is the prerequisite for the holding of such beliefs.
Its very ordinariness speaks volumes about this report. A piece written with evident serenity,
the perversity of its conclusions notwithstanding, it's one emblem among many of the
adversarial view of the nation that is today entrenched in the culture. So unworthy is the U.S.
-- an attitude solidly established in our media culture long before the war on terror -- that only
it can be held responsible for the deranged fantasies cherished in large quarters of the Arab
world. So natural does it feel, now, to hold such views that their expression has become
second nature.
Which is how it happens also that the U.S. is linked to the bloodletting in Mumbai, with
scarcely anyone batting an eye, and Larry King -- awash perhaps, in happy molecules --
thanking guest Dr. Chopra for his extraordinary enlightenment.
- Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

A time to rally
Author: Subhash C Sharma
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 1, 2010
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/252805/A-time-to-rally.html
Our complacency over the impregnability of our ancient heritage has claimed its greatest
victim -- Yoga. The distortion and trivialisation of this science should be a matter of national
concern. A Saturday Special focus. A Saturday Special focus
The Washington Post this week brought out an article by an indefatigable campaigner for
Hindu cultural rights in America, Dr Aseem Shukla, in which the abuse of Yoga before 20
million innocent Americans by a small but well-organised racket was highlighted.
It is possibly the first time that a leading media house of the West has reflected the deep
anguish of not only the Indian American community but Hindus at large at the culture of
denigrating one of the greatest scientific achievements of humankind which originated in
India.
In April 2008, The New York Times published a highly shocking article on "Doga" in which
dog owners were reported to be putting their pets through chaturanga asana. The helpless
animals were made to sit with their front paws in the air while their human partners forced
them to do "upward-paw pose", something NYT mindlessly described as "sun salutation".
The paper went on to reveal that the human companions "…reclines, with legs slightly bent
over the dog's torso, bolster-style, to relieve pressure on the spine."
At one level, this is an issue for animal rights activists. There are numerous websites
describing how not only dogs, but cats and pigs are also being tortured by self-styled 'yogis.'
What extreme damage must be inflicted on the poor creatures can easily be imagined. But
that is but unavoidable in a land where anybody with half-knowledge of some yogic asanas
and pranayams, but blessed with the gift of the gab, can go around separating foolish
Americans from their money. There are monstrosities called 'Disco Yoga', 'Nude Yoga' and
Yoga named after quacks who have no idea about the science behind Yoga.
America abounds with operators who have become billionaires by running Yoga studios,
designing "Yoga suits" and "Yoga accessories". One of those who have made it especially
good not only goes around claiming to be 'founder' of some form of "Yoga", but is also
reportedly lobbying for its inclusion as an Olympic sport. This has left me crestfallen and I
am sure many people will object to the vilification of our heritage by reducing it to a 'sport'.
This is against the basic tenets of Yoga.
From Dr Shukla's article we are also horrified to learn that there are things called 'Christian
Yoga' and 'Muslim Yoga'. This is the straw to break the camel's back. I challenge the
claimants to produce the theoretical basis of these so-called 'variants'. Not many people are
aware that Yoga is nothing but the practical manifestation of something much higher called
Shankhya. Tradition has it that Lord Shiva had gifted this highest form of wisdom to the
Shankyis or Shankya sadhus. The Bhagawad Gita says Shankhya "loosens the bonds of
karma", i.e. its possession through disciplined learning permits one to break free from the
cycle of life.
How can a person get there? Here, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras become important. Actually, there
are 18 types of practical Yoga, including Patanjali. But the root is always Shankhya. Does the
so-called 'Christian Yoga' have such a reservoir of wisdom? Each of the 18 Yogas are
designed for a particular kind of person. For instance, intellectually oriented people have
Gyan Yoga. Soldiers have Karma Yoga. People into matters of State have Raj Yoga. For
better sex, there is Kok Shastra Yoga. And so on.
In this context, it is impossible to imagine how western man, with his low spiritual quotient,
materialism, individualism and fondness for meat and alcohol, can utilise Yoga in its true
form. Shankhya was not designed for men and women with such tendencies. I am not making
a value judgment on their way of life, but it is enough to state that it is impossible to live the
American dream and be a Yogi. There is much dualism in the material way of life. Complete
a-dualism or non-dualism must be achieved before attempting to learn meditation poses. Only
after that will it be possible to learn the bandhas, or techniques to 'lock' the body. Therefore,
mass 'meditation sessions' are nothing but a joke.
There is an exclusive side to Yoga as well as an inclusive one. There is a sutra which states
that all yogic texts in the original began and ended with the words "ati gupta", or secret. The
dissemination of knowledge was not those without a certain level of intellectual attainment.
But now exactly that is happening in the United States.
But practical Yoga is accessible to all. In my own lifetime I have seen how widespread was
the embrace of Yoga in daily life. Before western aspiration models swept people's minds,
most people in India sat on the floor for taking their meals. Unconsciously, they folded their
legs into padmasana posture, which is very good for digesting food. Then, people rose from
their sleep just before the crack of dawn to perform their ablutions. There was a scientific
basis to this habit. The atmospheric pressure is highest at this time and this facilitates the
passing of bowels without external aids like tea, tobacco, etc. The richer we Indians get, the
more we tend to abandon the yoga-prescribed way of life. Imitating western lifestyles is seen
as upward mobility.
I hear that in America, some Indian-born quacks have become millionaires by teaching rich
Americans "Hatha Yoga". Now, "Ha" means the Sun, and "Tha", the moon. Hatha Yoga
means union of sun and moon, or opposites. Now, there is widespread misinformation about
what this "Sun" or "Moon" stands for. Ask any American what they understand to be
suryanamashkar and they are likely shoot "sun salutation", a concept reaffirmed by
photographs of people performing asanas against the rising sun. Actually, ‘surya’ in the Yoga
context means the navel, the centre of energy in the human body. Hatha Yoga was prescribed
to correct nadi doshas. It focuses on postures and breath control to energise the subtle
channels, or nadis.
It is time the learned people of India rose in unison to protest the gimmickry and hype over
Yoga as exported by the West. We Hindus are the natural custodians of this ancient science
which belongs to all humanity and it is our duty to preserve it.
The writer, a qualified doctor who is based in New Delhi, is learned in the metaphysics of
Yoga and applies Yoga to cure complicated ailments
This exacerbates the confusion of the Desi GenNext
Author: Somanjana C. Bhattacharya
Date: May 1, 2010
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/252796/This-exacerbates-the-confusion-of-the-Desi-
GenNext.html
The misrepresentation of Yoga in the West as just another weight loss, stress-busting regime
burdens the young Hindu American with more stereotypes about India and forces him to
wander rootless through life
Last year, I conducted a session on religious studies, on perception of world religion to a

group of budding sophomores at Meridien, Connecticut. While students from various
religious affiliations participated in passionate discussions on rituals, symbols and ideology,
there was this one Hindu boy of Indian origin-I knew he was Hindu from the student bio-sat
quietly with utter disdain. Was it contempt of one's own creed? Or was it an overt act of
agnosticism I do not know. But his pathos detachment from his faith by birth made me a little
perplexed.
Hinduism is perhaps the most misunderstood way of life in the world, by both the
contemplative practitioner and the speculative trailblazer. The myriad of customs or rituals
encompassing the average 'believer' of today is a severe divergence from the core Hindu
philosophy of the 'seeker' from the ancient time. In antithesis to the Abrahamic faiths
(Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that exemplify monotheism, the polytheism of Indian
philosophies comprising various schools of thoughts and denomination amalgamate to form
Hinduism. The very intensity of the Hindu doctrines shaped through many centuries besides
being overwhelming could be challenging to one's cognitive capacity. It takes a lifetime to be
a Hindu, if at all.
The popular stab at Hinduism in recent times often involve propagation of Yoga centers and
"meditation camps" to entice guileless audiences who would embrace Yogic practices as
something en vogue and make it a contrived lifestyle issue rather than delving into the ethos
of the Yogic penchant for the sublime. No wonder this massive lack of understanding the
ancient Vedic dogmas personify a state of perpetual confusion to a novice. The misfortune is
most acute among Hindu children growing up in the West.
The Graeco-Roman world caught a glimpse of indigenous Indian philosophies through the
accounts of Alexander the Great and his associates that included little more than
contemporary rhetoric on myths, black-magic and the esoteric knowledge of the Hindus. Due
to lack of direct communication between India and the West till about the end of the 15th
century, western scholars mostly subscribed to eastern legends. Though some of the journals
of the Christian missionaries in the later periods provided a more realistic narrative of the
Hindu way of life, the West mostly stuck to classical folklore. Hindu writers did little to alter
that mindset. In fact, in the opinion of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Hindu writers catered to the
demands of the western world in presenting Hinduism today. He writes in his book,
Hinduism-- a religion to live by : " One ladles out Vedanta to the intellectually debilitated,
another Yoga to the physically degenerate, and a third tantra to the erotomaniac who has not
the courage of his lechery." Additionally, as Hindus hardly harbour an affinity to perpetuate
their religion by 'conversion', Hindu people see no incentive in promoting their faith to the
world.
At the same time one might think, of what good is self-resigning spiritual quest of the Hindus
in the context of today's value-infringed materialistic society?
Yet, when we look at the world today, the Hindu way of life seem to be of utmost necessity
to bring about harmonious coexistence. As stated by eminent scholar Samuel P. Huntington:
"In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be
between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between
peoples belonging to different cultural entities." Thus, the all-encompassing pluralistic
approach of the Hindu pundits advocating tolerance, compassion and righteousness might be
the key element in restoring social equilibrium and world peace. The mantra that resonates
with peripheral chastity and inner bliss may ultimately cease the clash of civilizations that
bruise the geo-political scenario today.
On a more personal note, can one truly achieve inner contentment by resigning one's roots?
The quintessential aspects of our existence that bind us inherently like the family, society and
cultural heritage play an important role in composing and cultivating our consciousness,
influencing the very fabric of our character. Denouncing one's traditional framework and
adopting extrinsic rational often results in a recurring loss of self-esteem, immersing one's
self in an overwhelming state of confusion.
Hinduism has never demanded exclusivity. It rather adhered to simple acts of everyday
living. It hardly nurtures the idea that incites quest for a transcendental world after death or
salvation through meeting the Divine. The Vedantic philosophy essentially enforces the
pursuit of power. Inner power: by the Way of Knowledge- the Jnana Marga and by the Way
of Action - Karma Marga. Hindu spirituality is much more than the worldly notion of ascetic
order or mystic charms. I vouched myself to make an ardent attempt in following the path of
my forebearers. A very difficult path of austerity and philanthropy. But in the end the sojourn
at self-realisation and retrospection might tantamount to a life worth living. I unleash the
prying of my buoyant mind today as tomorrow my growing son would want to know some
answers.
- The writer is Social activist, Communication & Behavioral Trainer

A Yoga Manifesto
Author: Mary Billard
Publication: The New York Times
ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set
Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats,
favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version.
Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly
adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40
initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.
You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in
December, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with
classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and
Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077.
And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of
a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing
locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual
calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell
Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.
Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal,
concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to
15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on
yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7
billion.
“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate
commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture
Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’
yoga teachers are the style gurus.”
Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that.
There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At
the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in
the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee
structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There
will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers ...
No ego no script no pedestals.”
One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who
is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly
the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.
LATE on an overcast Saturday earlier this month, just a little before sundown, Mr. Gumucio,
the founder of Yoga to the People, was sitting on the rooftop of his East Village studio,
surprisingly refreshed after a birthday party downstairs for his son, who had just turned 5.
Propped on the ledge on a round pillow, his wavy, shoulder-length hair framed by the urban
jungle backdrop of tar-covered roofs, Mr. Gumucio recounted his biography, and how it was
linked with that of Bikram Choudhury, perhaps the most famous name in yoga today.
“The idea for Yoga for the People came to me because of Bikram,” Mr. Gumucio said,
explaining that he worked for Mr. Choudhury for six years, from 1996 to 2002, sometimes
running teacher training for Bikram Yoga in Los Angeles, commuting from Seattle, where he
was living. He channels Mr. Choudhury, one suspects not for the first time, talking with a
raspy, slightly accented voice: “Boss, do me a favor, take everybody’s class and tell me what
you think.” Mr. Gumucio obliged, and when reporting back, mentioned one teacher whom he
didn’t like. Mr. Choudhury was not sympathetic. Just the opposite, telling Mr. Gumucio to, in
essence, suck it up and go back to the class — that the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but
with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told.
“You are responsible for your own experience.”
It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the
teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors? Too often, Mr.
Gumucio saw students stop doing yoga because they couldn’t practice with a favorite teacher.
Why not jettison that system? Why not just assign students to the next available teacher?
A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult
position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking
about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was
almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What
is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”
Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions
were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being
told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.”
Message learned. Yoga isn’t about a pristine environment — yogis can work downward dog
to downward dog, no matter where they are, even if in a crowded, unadorned studio. “Being
able to do yoga with a foot in your face, that is a really powerful practice,” Mr. Gumucio
said. He would take that no-frills philosophy with him when he left Bikram in 2002, and a
few years later (after a stint as a mediator in small claims court), in 2006, moved to New
York to open his own studio. “The first few months there were four or five people, but within
three months, it really took off,” he said.
Today. Mr. Gumucio has three studios in New York (including two hot-yoga studios that
charge $8 a class), one in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, Calif., and one to open later this
year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has just signed a lease in Chelsea and is considering
expanding to Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles. (But his philosophy of keeping a low profile
seems to be working: a question to many students about what they think of Mr. Gumucio
usually provokes little more than a blank stare and “Who?”)
High volume is the key to his business model — he says up to 900 people may go to a Yoga
to the People studio in a single day, with perhaps half of them paying at least something in
the form of a donation — as well as an important part of his overall philosophy. “I truly
believe if more people were doing yoga, the world would be a better place,” he said.
LAST Sunday morning, the sun streamed through the windows of the clean airy loft on the
second floor as the teacher, Haven Melynn, stood at the buzzer letting in students from the
street. On a metal stand sat an empty tissue box. Some students dropped a donation into the
box, others didn’t. The students fit in one studio, and at prime times, the teacher will send any
overflow up to the studio above, and then the studio above that.
Mats are rolled out, a few inches apart, with no one under the illusion that it may be an empty
class. The classroom holds about 60 students, and people are socializing, chatting about their
late nights, where to get falafels, and upcoming art exhibitions. Music plays quietly in the
background. No opening “Oms.” (“I like that there isn’t any chanting, or big spiritual
message,” Layan Fuleihan, a college student, said afterward. “I like that you make the class
what you want.”) Instead, Ms. Melynn started off with slow movements to warm up, sun
salutations, then quickly picked up the pace. Jammed, yes, but the yogis stuck to their own
mats, boundaries defined, during a sweat-producing vinyasa class, flowing and moving, as
the teacher cajoled people to make cathartic exhales of HAA-sss — all to the sounds of a play
list that includes Michael Jackson and the Dave Matthews Band.
Yoga to the People isn’t the only entity raging against the yoga machine. In New York, other
studios are popping up, offering affordable, if not entirely donation-based, yoga. Do Yoga
and Pilates, in TriBeCa, is donation-based; Tara Stiles, who has an iPhone app with Deepak
Chopra, has opened Strala Yoga in NoHo, offering multiple class levels for $10 each. Yoga
Vida NYC on University Place opened in January. Classes are small and it costs $10 drop in,
$5 for students. “Our studio isn’t better or worse, it’s just different,” says Hilaria Thomas,
yoga director of Yoga Vida NYC and a former instructor at Yoga to the People. “Different
energies.”
Better-known rivals in the yoga world don’t seem to take offense at this back-to-basic
movement. “I think the donation model is awesome,” says Baron Baptiste. “It’s a balancing
act. If someone has the means for what I’ll call ‘high end yoga,’ like going on exotic retreats,
they should enjoy it.” He adds, laughing, “I never know what the term rock star yoga teacher
means. Someone like Iyengar, one of the most famous teachers in the world, is he a rock star?
Is Iyengar the Bono of yoga?”
Mr. Gumucio knows his niche — “the ABC’s of yoga” — and that Yoga to the People has its
critics. Its detractors say that classes are too big, that there isn’t a lot of advanced alignment
breakdowns, that the exclamation HAA-sss isn’t the way you are supposed to breathe. He
mimics a naysayer, sniffing: “Oh, that’s not yoga!” He laughs and shrugs, a wordless: Who’s
to say what is yoga?
Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice
Author:
Publication: Hinduamericanfoundation.org
Date:
URL: http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/media/pr/yoga-hindu-origins
“There is no physical yoga and spiritual yoga. If it is exclusively physical, it won’t be yoga.
Yoga is dealing with the entirety; it is a union.” – Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S Iyengar
Yoga, from the word “yuj” (Sanskrit, “to yoke” or “to unite”), refers to spiritual practices that
are essential to the understanding and practice of Hinduism. Yoga and yogic practices date
back more than 5,000 years — the Indus Valley seals depict figures in yoga poses. The term
covers a wide array of practices, embodied in eight “limbs,” which range from ethical and
moral guidelines to meditation on the Ultimate Reality. Yoga is a combination of both
physical and spiritual exercises, entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and
transcendence of desire. The ultimate goal is moksha, the attainment of liberation from
worldly suffering and the cycle of birth and rebirth.
With the popularity of Yoga skyrocketing throughout the world, particularly in the West,
there arise two main points in need of clarification. First, that which is practiced as “Hatha
Yoga” - a form of Raja Yoga - in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a
single limb of Yoga: asana (posture). From Yoga studios that recommend room temperatures
to be maintained at 105 degrees to 90 minute Vinyasa flow classes that prescribe one
Suryanamaskar (Sun Salutation) sequence after another, this “asana heavy” form of Yoga –
sometimes complimented with pranayama (breathing) – is only a form of exercise to control,
tone and stretch muscles. Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate
spiritual goal.
Second, there is the concerning trend of disassociating Yoga from its Hindu roots. Both
Yoga magazines and studios assiduously present Yoga as an ancient practice independent and
disembodied from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity. With
the intense focus on asana, magazines and studios have seemingly "gotten away" with this
mischaracterization. Yet, even when Yoga is practiced solely in the form of an exercise, it
cannot be completely delinked from its Hindu roots. As the legendary Yoga guru B.K.S
Iyengar aptly points out in his famous Light on Yoga, "Some asanas are also called after
Gods of the Hindu pantheon and some recall the Avataras, or incarnations of Divine Power."
It is disappointing to know that many of the yogis regularly practicing Hanumanasana or
Natarajasana continue to deny the Hindu roots of their Yoga practice.
In a time where Hindus around the globe face discrimination and hate because of their
religious identity, and Hindu belief and practice continues to be widely misunderstood due to
exoticized portrayals of it being caricaturized in “caste, cows and curry” fashion, recognition
of Yoga as a tremendous contribution of ancient Hindus to the world is imperative. Yoga is
inextricable from Hindu traditions, and a better awareness of this fact is reached only if one
understands that “Yoga” and “Asana” are not interchangeable terms.
Asana aka Yoga

A perusal of a few of the best known Yoga texts, such as Swami Svatmarama’s Hatha Yoga
Pradipika or Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, will quickly demonstrate that asana (posture) is only
one component of Yoga. The Pradipika is divided into four main sections, of which 25% of
only the first section focuses on asana. The Yoga Sutras are also divided into four parts, with
a total of 196 sutras. The second part, composed of 55 sutras, briefly mentions asana as one
of the eight limbs [1] of Raja Yoga.
In his forward to an English translation of Pradipika [2], Iyengar aptly describes, “Hatha
yoga…[to be] commonly misunderstood and misrepresented as being simply a physical
culture, divorced from spiritual goals…Asanas are not just physical exercises: they have
biochemical, psycho-physiological and psycho-spiritual effects.”
In a 2005 interview published in Namarupa magazine [3], Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S.
Iyengar, clearly espouses a similar view when he said, “We cannot expect that millions are
practicing real yoga just because millions of people claim to be doing yoga all over the globe.
What has spread all over the world is not yoga. It is not even non-yoga; it is un-yoga.” The
undue emphasis, particularly in the West, on asana as the crux of Yoga dilutes the essence of
the spiritual practice and its ultimate goal of moksha.
B.K.S. Iyengar again reminds readers of the purpose of asanas in his Light on Yoga, when he
states, "Their [Asanas] real importance lies in the way they train and discipline the
mind...The yogi conquers the body by the practice of asanas and make it a fit vehicle for the
spirit...He does not consider it [the body] his property...The yogi realizes that his life and all
its activities are part of the divine action in nature" [4].
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) concludes from its research that Yoga, as an integral
part of Hindu philosophy, is not simply physical exercise in the form of various asanas and
pranayama, but is in fact a Hindu way of life. The ubiquitous use of the word “Yoga” to
describe what in fact is simply an asana exercise is not only misleading, but has lead to and is
fueling a problematic delinking of Yoga and Hinduism, as described further in the section
below.
This attempt to clarify Yoga as far more complex than just asanas is not intended to discount
the array of health benefits gained by practicing asanas alone. Beyond increasing muscle
tone and flexibility, regular practice of asana has been associated with lower blood pressure,
relief of back pain and arthritis, and boosting of the immune system [5]. Increasingly, many
believe asana practice to reduce Attention Deficit Disorder (AD/HD) [6] in children, and
recent studies have shown it improves general behavior and grades [7]. But the Foundation
argues that the full potential of the physiological, intellectual and spiritual benefits of asana
would be increased manifold if practiced as a component of the holistic practice of Yoga.
Reversing the Efforts to Decouple Yoga from Hinduism
Although the Western Yoga community fully acknowledges Yoga’s Indian roots, and even
requires study of Hindu philosophy and scripture in most of its teacher certification programs,
much of it openly disassociates Yoga’s Hindu roots [8]. While HAF affirms that one does not
have to profess faith in Hinduism in order to practice Yoga or asana, it firmly holds that Yoga
is an essential part of Hindu philosophy and the two cannot be delinked, despite efforts to do
so.
Shyam Ranganathan's [9] analysis gets to the crux of the issue when he writes, “Though
some modern atheistic minds and aspiring yogis may disagree, textually there is no getting
around the fact that Patanjali uses words, that in the context of Hindu culture, have obvious
theological implications” [10]. Patanjali describes the goal of Yoga as chitta-vritti-nirodha or
“the cessation of mental fluctuations”, a core concept also expounded in Hinduism’s
Bhagavad Gita: “Thus always absorbing one’s self in yoga, the yogi, whose mind is subdued,
achieves peace that culminates in the highest state of Nirvana, which rests in me [Lord
Krishna/Brahman/Supreme Reality]” [11].
Similarly, Swami Svatmarama’s opening line in the Pradipika is in honor of the Hindu God
Shiva (Siva): “Reverence to Siva the Lord of Yoga, who taught Parvati hatha wisdom as the
first step to the pinnacle of raja yoga.”
In the same 2005 interview cited previously, Prashant Iyengar expounds upon Yoga with
references to both Hindu epics and Hindu philosophy: “Mahabharat has so many aspects of
yoga like yama (restraint), niyama (observance), sama (calmness)…Ramayana gives us so
many beautiful aspects of bhakti yoga and karma yoga. Essential yoga starts with karma
yoga…Without karma-consciousness, there will be no progress in yoga.”
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) reaffirms that Yoga, “an inward journey, where you
explore your mind, your awareness, your consciousness, your conscience” [12], is an
essential part of Hindu belief and practice. But the science of yoga and the immense benefits
its practice affords are for the benefit of all of humanity regardless of personal faith.
Hinduism itself is a family of pluralistic doctrines and ways of life that acknowledge the
existence of other spiritual and religious traditions. Hinduism, as a non-proselytizing
religion, never compels practitioners of yoga to profess allegiance to the faith or convert.
Yoga is a means of spiritual attainment for any and all seekers.
[1] The remaining seven limbs are Yama, Niyama, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana,
and Samadhi.
[2] http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/HathaYogaPradipika.pdf
[3] http://www.namarupa.org/magazine/nr04.php
[4] Iyengar, B.K.S. Light on Yoga. p.40-1
[5] http://www.webmd.com/balance/the-health-benefits-of-yoga?page=2
[6] http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/04/news/adme-yoga4
[7] http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/04/news/adme-yoga4?pg=1
[8] Interestingly enough, one of, if not the most common argument used by Christian
organizations to oppose the practice of Yoga in public schools is that Yoga’s roots in
Hinduism violate the separation of church and state.
[9] Author of Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy and translator of Patanjali’s Yoga
Sutras
[11] The Bhagavad Gita 6.15
Yoga - Hinduism's gift to the world -- Letter to Yoga +
Posted by: "sri venkat" [email protected] viji123
Date: Sun Aug 15, 2010 6:03 pm ((PDT))
Forwarded Mail
May 16, 2010
Ms. Natalya Podgorny

Editor, Yoga +
Dear Madam,
I have been subscribing to your magazine for many years and have enjoyed
reading articles on yoga and spirituality.
The founder of this magazine, Swami Rama was a Hindu by birth and followed
the path of spiritual enlightenment based on the knowledge derived from the
ancient Hindu/Vedic scriptures of more than five thousand years
old. I presume that one of the learned scholars, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait
who is born as a Hindu, has taken over the mantle of Swami Rama in spreading
the knowledge and spirituality including Yoga rooted in the scriptures
of Hinduism/Sanatan Dharma for the benefit of the mankind, of course by
commercializing them which have been given to the world by the Hindu saints
and sages free of charge.
The Himalayan Institute and your magazine have grown over the years and have
become a part of the multi-billion dollar business in the U.S. While one may
not pass a value judgement on the practice of turning spirituality into
a money making business, it is indeed unethical and immoral to sell the
spiritual product/s without acknowledging its origin and roots. Like other
Yoga journals circulating in the country, Yoga+ has followed the
same commercial path of deceptively and subtly de-linking Yoga from its
mother, Hinduism/Sanatan Dharma. I have yet to see any article in your
magazine which openly talks about Hinduism/Sanatan Dharma and gives credit
to it for bequeathing the wonderful science of yoga to the world
civilization. Yoga + writes and mentions often about Buddhism,
Christianity, Islam and Judaism but never about Hinduism. Why?
Pandit Rajmani Tigunait has been writing a series of articles on the Sage
Patanjli's Yoga Sutra but no where he ever acknowledges its roots to
Hinduism. I am sure that Pandit Tigunait, a Sanskrit scholar, is fully aware
that one of the main limbs of Yoga as mentioned by Sage Patanjli is Yamas
(Restraints) which requires the practitioner and the preacher to speak
'Satya' ('Truthfulness'), refrain from lying. The denial of the Hindu origin
of Yoga by the manipulative and deceptive scholarship is nothing but
negation of the ethical codes laid down in the Yogic traditions.
I am also sure that Pandit Tigunait knows that Yoga is one of the six
schools of Hindu philosophy. May be that he like many other Hindu business
gurus/yogis of modern time are willing to sell their souls by rejecting
their own heritage and roots for fame and financial gains.
In the similar fashion, your magazine talks about 'Chakras', 'Puranas',

Ayurveda and Vedantic philosophy without acknowledging their roots in
Hinduism. We are aware that the Western Indologists and their supporters
have made a big business to project Hinduism in the most negative and
denigrating manner. They are portraying Hinduism in terms of 'Caste, cow
and curry' and thereby distorting its history, culture and traditions to
suite their personal agenda. While trashing Hinduism, they are
simultaneously busy in appropriating its knowledge. It seems that the Yoga
magazines including your magazine and Yoga schools operating in this
country are also following the same Adharmic path of these Indologists of
denying the credit to Hinduism for its valuable contributions to the world
civilization.
I'll appreciate if you and Pandit Tigunait could please let me know as
to your reason for denying the credit to Hinduism/Sanatan Dharma for
the Yogic and spiritual knowledge that you are using to make money out of
it. After all, you are benefiting out of the knowledge gifted to you by
Hinduism free of charge. I hope you, your institute and Pandit Tiganait are
left with some moral and Dharmic values which you preach in your magazine.
Please remember that all these adharmic Karmas will bear their fruits one
day from which there is no escape.
I would also like to state categorically that if your magazine and Institute
continue to de-link Hinduism from Yoga and its other spiritual traditions,
I'll discontinue its subscription and advise others to follow it.
Regards,
Dhiru Shah
India Awareness Foundation
Lisa Miller
I don't care much for bland spirituality, so at yoga class I generally tune out the prelude, when
the teacher reads aloud-as is the custom-an inspirational passage on which to meditate.
Recently, though, I was startled to attention when the teacher chose a paragraph on
compassion from the Dalai Lama's bestseller The Art of Happiness. Hold on a minute, I
thought. Isn't the Dalai Lama a Tibetan Buddhist? And isn't yoga a Hindu practice? And
haven't Buddhists and Hindus been at war over land and gods for thousands of years? The
Dalai Lama may be regarded throughout the world as a holy man, but downward dog is not
his expertise.
Sixteen million Americans practice yoga, according to Yoga Journal, and in 2008 we spent
nearly $6 billion on classes and stretch pants. Yet aside from "om" and the occasional
"namaste," Americans rarely acknowledge that yoga is, at its foundation, an ancient Hindu
religious practice, the goal of which is to achieve spiritual liberation by joining one's soul to
the essence of the divine. In its American version, yoga is a mishmash: Zen and Tibetan
Buddhism, 12-step rhetoric, self-help philosophies, cleansing diets, exercise, physical
therapy, and massage. Its Hindu roots are obliterated by the modern infatuation with all
things Eastern-and by our growing predilection for spiritual practices stripped of the sectarian
burdens of religion. Americans' naive but characteristic conflation of Eastern religions isn't
new; in 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Bhagavad-Gita (which is Hindu scripture)
"the much renowned book of Buddhism."
Lately, though, that muddle is less innocent. Some of yoga's best-known-and most
entrepreneurial-purveyors concede they've consciously separated Hinduism from yoga to
make it more palatable. "The reason I sanitized it is there's a lot of junk in [Hinduism],"
explains Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru whose latest book, co-written with Marianne
Williamson and Debbie Ford, is The Shadow Effect. "We've got to evolve to a secular
spirituality that still addresses our deepest longings . Most religion is culture and mythology.
Read any religious text, and there's a lot of nonsense there. Yet the religious experience is
beautiful."
Generically spiritual yoga may be fine for most Americans-preferable, even, for those who
desire the benefits of meditative exercise without any apparent conflict with their own
religious beliefs. But for some American Hindus, it amounts to a kind of ethnic cleansing. In
The Washington Post's On Faith blog (to which I contribute), the pediatric urologist Aseem
Shukla last month tangled with Chopra over the whitewashing of yoga. Shukla, who is also
the head of the Hindu American Foundation, believes that if he doesn't help his American-
born children feel good about their religion, no one will. And so he says, loudly and often and
to anyone who will listen: "Yoga originated in Hinduism. It's disingenuous to say otherwise.
A little bit of credit wouldn't be a bad thing, and it would help Hindu Americans feel
proud of their heritage."
In all religions, heartbreak and enmity lie in this struggle between those who want to unify
and transcend, like Chopra, and those who want to protect their tradition's unique identity and
character, like Shukla. My friend the Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero
has just written a book called God Is Not One, which argues that the good in any religion
(e.g., yoga) necessarily comes with the bad (caste systems). By seeing religion as a single,
happy universal force, we blind ourselves to tensions of great consequence to individuals and
to history. "America," he says, "has this amazing capacity to make everything banal. That's
what we do. We make things banal and then we sell them. If you're a Hindu, you see this
beautiful, ancient tradition of yoga being turned into this ugly materialistic vehicle for
selling clothes. It makes sense to me that you would be upset."
But, Prothero points out, Chopra has a point. The American creative, materialistic, pluralistic
impulse allows religion here to grow and change, taking on new and unimagined shapes.
"You can't stop people from appropriating elements in your religion," Prothero adds. "You
can't stop people from using and transforming yoga. But you have to honor and credit the
source." Prothero's bottom line is also my own. You can read from the Dalai Lama in yoga
class. You can even read from the Sermon on the Mount. But know where yoga came from
and respect those origins. Then, when you chant "om," it will resonate not only in the room
but down through the ages.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of Heaven: Our Enduring
Fascination With the Afterlife. Become a fan of Lisa on Facebook.
The Yoga Mogul
Author: Mimi Swartz
Date: July 21, 2010
There is so much going on in John Friend’s life right now that an assistant once teased him
about waking just before dawn and calling to ask for coffee, only to be reminded that he,
Friend, was in Quito, Munich or Seoul, while the assistant was back at home base in the
Woodlands, a cushy suburb north of Houston. That Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the
world’s fastest-growing styles of yoga, has an assistant is itself significant; many people still
picture yogis as serene guys who live in respectable deprivation in places like Mysore or
Pune, India, and wait for disciples to find them. Not Friend.
Consider one afternoon in early June when he had just left a meeting with potential investors
in Seattle, having flown to the West Coast after several months of giving Anusara workshops
in Tokyo, Taipei, Bali and Morrisville, N.C., and was making a brief stopover in the
Woodlands on his way to teach more workshops in Copenhagen, Munich, Paris and Park
City, Utah — stops on his “Melt Your Heart, Blow Your Mind Tour.” Friend’s modest, two-
story faux Tudor home (filled with statues of Hindu gods, prayer flags and other souvenirs of
his myriad travels) was a semimaelstrom of recently washed clothes, piled-up mail and stacks
of unread publications with headlines like “Nine Life-Altering Lessons” — a reflection of the
semimaelstrom that is his life.
When Friend wasn’t off leading workshops, he was helping plan the yoga-and-music
Wanderlust festival to be held this week in Squaw Valley and the Anusara Grand Gathering
in Estes Park, Colo., in September, the lead-in to Yoga Journal’s annual weeklong conference
featuring major American yoga teachers. “John brings in huge numbers,” says Elana Maggal,
conference director for Yoga Journal, the bible for practitioners. “In 2008, his was the largest
yoga class ever held at our conference. We had 800 people all in one room. We had a waiting
list of 200. Needless to say, we want to replicate that.”
On the road and at home, Friend also keeps tabs on all the ancillary businesses he has created
in the last 13 years, since Anusara was born: his global Anusara expansion (Studio Yoggy,
one of the biggest yoga-school chains in Japan, will be offering Anusara yoga classes); his
Anusara publishing ventures (he has commissioned a history of yoga and continues to work
on his own book, albeit sporadically); and his Anusara yoga-wear business (Friend has his
own line, but also works with Adidas, which is using Anusara yoga trainers in its worldwide
yoga push). He is also financing historical yoga research in Nepal and Kashmir.
Simultaneously, Friend is trying to raise money for his most ambitious project to date, the
Center, which he is planning to locate in meta-crunchy Encinitas, Calif. Friend expects the
Center, with art, music and theater, in addition to yoga, to expand the Anusara “community”
— his word — which currently includes 200,000 students in 70 countries and about 1,200
licensed-by-John-Friend teachers. In his downtime, Friend regularly sends Twitter messages
to his 5,000 followers and to his 8,000 Facebook fans. But there is always more to do: during
the 36 hours he spent at home, he taped his portion of a DVD titled “Titans of Yoga,” in
which he will appear with other American yogis like Shiva Rea and David Swenson.
(“Namaste,” he said, relaxed before the camera in a white linen shirt and khakis. “I’m John
Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga. I’ve been practicing for 40 years. . . . Yoga is my life.
It’s not just something I practice on a sticky mat.”)
Friend, buoyantly serene, settled himself into an overstuffed leather chair in his living room,
while his assistant du jour, a willowy woman named Margaret, padded in and out, dispensing
water and taking notes. “We were up till 3 a.m. last night,” he said, capping a recitation of all
his on-the-fly planning. Friend rubbed his eyes and abandoned attempts to stifle yawns. It’s
tiring being one of the most famous — and one of the most entrepreneurial — yogis on the
planet. Friend, who is 51, has close-cropped curls that are snowy white; there is a significant
crease between his slate blue eyes; and he is just a little doughy. Though he is frequently
described as charismatic, he is a bit distracted in repose. But once he starts talking about
Anusara, his boyish energy returns. You almost expect him to levitate.
Friend is not so much a conversationalist as a monologuist, an occupational hazard of

someone who urges hundreds of people at a time to bend, stretch and connect with “the
extremely intelligent spirit within that is mind-blowingly revealing.” As he tried to sum up
his creation, his eyes slipped out of focus as he zigged into tantric philosophy and zagged into
Anusara’s metaphysical underpinnings — but that didn’t really get him where he wanted to
go. He cited the “top scholars” who have helped him refine Anusara’s message. Then he
talked about the freedom of Anusara; it’s nothing like the more rigid schools that demand
students repeat the same poses in the same way at every single class, nor is it the kind of
practice in which teachers withhold praise, lest students become too egocentric. “Anusara is
positive,” Friend said, resting his head on the back of his chair and absently caressing one of
many highly polished orbs on an adjacent table. “It’s accessible. Easily applicable. And yet it
has depth and sophistication.”
Consider those religions that focus on sin and damnation, on discipline instead of joy.
“Fundamentally they say no,” he told me. “While Anusara is a yes.”
Friend’s world was coming back into focus. His eyes became brighter, and his jet lag fell
away, dissolved by this insight.
“We are,” Friend said, beaming, “the Yoga of Yes.”
The first time I encountered John Friend was at a workshop at a Woodlands community
college nearly 10 years ago. At the time I was practicing a stricter form of yoga, and Friend’s
joke-cracking and mind-boggling acrobatics — he is famous for his handstands — were
something of a revelation. Yoga could be . . . fun? Friend’s assistants then were mostly
middle-aged suburban women who had once been his students, and if the yoga was no easier
than what I had been practicing, their touch and encouragement was both comforting and
inspiring. Failing to execute a pose meant nothing more than that you might succeed next
time. As Friend led us through the poses, he spoke in a soft voice, insisting that we contain
divinity within ourselves and must discover and express our inner goodness to fulfill our
obligation to better our world. How to do so was never expressly stated — except for
practicing yoga, of course — but I left the workshop feeling better physically, mentally and
emotionally.
I didn’t know at the time that this was my introduction to what others call “the cult of John.”
If Friend could be compared with anyone outside the yoga world — and I am not sure he
would like this comparison — it would be Joel Osteen, the magnetic evangelical megachurch
minister with the feel-good message and a book-and-television empire. Osteen’s God is
loving and forgiving. Osteen doesn’t get hung up on dogma, and thus everybody is welcome.
Similarly, Friend’s yoga is based on classic hatha-yoga postures — he has refined them using
what he calls “universal principles of alignment” — but it can be as challenging as a student
wants it to be. His classes are less about toned abs than about self-expression and enjoyment.
(Adjustments don’t make the poses “right,” for instance, they make them “more beautiful.”)
You don’t have to be a vegan to become an Anusaran, and unless you want to be an Anusara
teacher, you don’t have to master complex texts. He uses just enough Sanskrit to be exotic
without being incomprehensible. Friend’s “dharma talks” — short sermons — are based
largely on simplified tantric principles (not, he stresses, the ones relating to tantric sex):
students learn that they are divine beings, that goodness always lies within, that by opening to
God’s will — opening to grace, Friend calls it — “you actually become vastly more powerful
than the limited person that you usually identify with.” Instead of joining a megachurch, you
join the Anusara kula, Sanskrit for family. Like Osteen, Friend has found a way to attract
large numbers of people by softening the hard edges of a rigid ideal and by applying the full
force of his personality to achieving that goal.
“He has created his own community very self-consciously,” says Stefanie Syman, the author
of “The Subtle Body,” a new history of American yoga. “Most charismatic teachers do that.
What happens is if you are successful deliberately or inadvertently, a lot of students
evangelize on your behalf and spread the word.” Friend’s success also speaks to the
dissolution of traditional communities. “People used to find community at their church or
synagogue or club or league,” Syman notes. For some, yoga now serves that function.
“Especially if you have an intense physical practice and are interested in transformation, you
feel like you’ve lived through something with someone. You have an intimacy with them that
you don’t have with anyone else.”
Certainly the fan letters I asked to see bore that idea out: “My experience at your conference
altered my being,” wrote one student. “I drove through the mountains and stopped every few
minutes to write about the dancing rivers and the aspen paving my way with liquid gold.”
Another wrote, “This was the first time in a room of 200 people that I did not feel
overwhelmed, out of place or somehow in the wrong room.”
Friend’s timing could not be better. Some 16 million Americans now practice yoga, a 5,000-
year-old mental, physical and spiritual discipline brought to us by Indian gurus. Nowadays
there aren’t just hourly classes in major American cities but also in places like Deephaven,
Minn., and Hattiesburg, Miss. “Namaste,” the traditional end-of-class blessing, has become a
punch line. A school in Houston even offers “jello shots” after class. If yoga began as a
meditation technique for people all too familiar with physical as well as mental suffering
— with poses, or asanas, devised to assist in reaching a transcendentally blissful state —
it has taken on a distinctly American cast. It has become much more about doing than
being. More about happiness than meaning. It’s a weight-loss technique and a stress-
management tool, a gateway to an exploding market for workout clothes and equipment.
Spending on yoga classes, books, clothes, Om amulets, mats and more has increased 87
percent since 2004, to $5.7 billion a year. As yoga has developed a vigorous capitalistic side,
traditionalists have expressed their dismay. “We need introspection, and this yoga” —
commercialized yoga — “is not about introspection,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, an author
of eight yoga books and a founder of Yoga Journal. “We have a whole country full of restive
people who are not contemplative. The idea of the asana is to calm you to prepare you to
move at a human pace, not the pace of electrons on the computer.”
Like many other small-stakes subcultures — the world of poetry, or academia, say — yoga
has become embroiled in head-of-a-pin type arguments. In yoga’s case it centers on
authenticity. The fight over whether it is a spiritual or a physical practice has raged virtually
since its inception, but now in the United States this question has been tinted with issues of
competition, status and sweat. People who favor the demanding flow of Ashtanga yoga, for
instance, might scoff at those who practice Iyengar yoga, which is slow-moving but stresses
proper placement of the body in the poses. (Think of boot camp versus a classical ballet
lesson.) Then again, serious meditators — those who revel in stillness and make pilgrimages
to ashrams in India in search of yoga masters — disdain the spandex-clad 20-somethings who
dash to hot-yoga class to burn off yesterday’s cheeseburgers. For a yoga teacher, these
debates spell opportunity: anyone whose technique takes off — or promises some sort of
transformation, spiritual, physical or both — can become a star, supplementing the average
yoga teacher’s meager $35,000 annual income with cash generated from workshops, lectures,
books, clothing, DVDs.
Friend set out to build his brand by straddling yoga’s two poles: he is trying to enhance
yoga’s spiritual aspects by training teachers to speak inspirationally as they teach their
students to master the postures. In his teacher-training manual, Friend spends a great deal of
time on philosophy and writes that the spiritual effects of yoga are more important than the
physical ones. He expresses this aim in language that draws as much from Dale Carnegie and
the American idiom of self-improvement as from Hindu philosophy. Teachers, he writes,
should “lead the students to that magical place where everyone’s heart opens naturally and
where everyone feels empowered and filled with self love.”
Friend, who has a degree in finance and accounting, has also corporatized the practice. Like
all yoga stars, he’s a road warrior, giving workshops as a way to drum up business. But
Friend’s niche is to be less exotic than some yogis while being more spiritual than the most
commercial ones. He calls himself Anusara’s general manager, as opposed to its guru. He
doesn’t wear a turban like some Kundalini yoga teachers, or his hair exceedingly long, like
David Life, a founder of Jivamukti yoga. Nor does he define the spiritual aspects of yoga the
way some schools do — he doesn’t press students to embrace animal rights or to chant for
extended periods. And he doesn’t stick to the same sequence each time in class. On the other
hand, Friend brings in enough spirituality and gentleness to differentiate himself from the hot
and heavy yoga types, like the bandanna-wearing power-yoga creator, Baron Baptiste. Friend
also would not be confused with the Indian master Bikram Choudhury, who created and
franchised a kind of hot yoga, which stresses transformation through a rigid workout in a
100-plus-degree room, not through happy sermonettes. Friend’s persona is that of an
easygoing guy with an easygoing yoga — except when it comes to business. Friend is not
above a little intrayoga competitive trash talk to make his point: People know about
physically oriented yoga, he said, “but as we grow they are going to learn about Anusara.
Then people can choose — either they are going to go to a fast-food joint or a fine
restaurant.”
Not surprisingly, Friend’s detractors — and there are at least as many as admirers — claim
that he has watered down and commercialized a hallowed tradition for his own gain. Anusara
Inc. currently has about $2 million a year in revenue, though Friend says, “We spend as much
as we bring in, so we have little profit.” An Anusara prospectus from the spring predicted that
revenue could double by 2012. Friend is the sole stockholder in the company and pays
himself a salary that is just under $100,000 — a fortune in the yoga world. Friend, of course,
is not ashamed to sell this new American cocktail of spirituality and exercise. How can
people get the word unless he spreads it? “There’s no differentiation between yoga
philosophy and business philosophy,” he said of Anusara. “We honor spirit, based on our
vision that life is good.”
He was in fine form last spring at a Melt Your Heart, Blow Your Mind workshop in
Hollywood, where about 500 people, mostly young, mostly women and most of them
spectacularly fit, paid around $150 for three days of nonstop Anusara. The event was held in
the ballroom of an Armenian cultural center on Vine Street, complete with a 5,000-square-
foot stained-glass ceiling, which the hyperbolic Friend could not resist calling “the biggest,
most beautiful stained-glass window in the world.” The stage featured pots of multicolored
zinnias, along with statues of the Hindu gods Americans tend to favor: the elephant-trunked
Ganesh, remover of obstacles; and Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and beauty. In an adjacent
hallway, yoga books, Anusara T-shirts and DVDS, Hindu statuettes and Om refrigerator
magnets were on sale.
Friend entered the room almost imperceptibly but was soon surrounded by his students, who
giggled at his responses and were eager for his touch. (One sign that Friend, who is divorced,
has reached rock-star yogi status: men and women press hotel-room keys into his hands at
workshops.) Unlike many, more severe yoga masters, Friend worked the crowd like a
contestant on “Last Comic Standing”: “Cool color!” he said, inspecting a student’s polished
toenails, or “Pray for him,” when he guided a student into a difficult pose. And for hours on
end, he never stopped talking, seemingly without drawing breath, about the light that always
follows the darkness, about being a better person than you were a year ago and about always,
always, giving your all, on the mat and elsewhere. “Whatever you’ve got, you’ve got to rock
it out fully,” he said in Los Angeles. “You’ve got to work the edge. The edge is so cool.”
No one could ever accuse Friend of holding back. The final event of the Hollywood
workshop was a laser light show. Everyone locked eyes on a far wall, oohing and ahhing to
undulating beams of bright green, yellow, red, orange and blue that supposedly reflected the
flow of energy, or chakras, in our bodies. “Hey, John,” someone finally cracked. “Are you
gonna put some Pink Floyd on?”
As much as Friend preaches the gospel of openness, he’s relatively guarded about the story of
his own life. Like a lot of celebrities, he tells a version of his history from which he never
deviates: his father, a former sportscaster and marketing executive, had economic troubles
and so moved the family from the Rust Belt to Texas; his mother was an intellectually gifted
Southern belle and a Juilliard graduate with a theatrical flair. Colleagues told me, and Friend
concurred, that when his mother was ill — she died of cancer in 2002 — Friend, the older of
two boys, strived to cheer her up with his wisecracks. It was she who introduced Friend to
yoga. He wore braces as a child to correct his pigeon toes; after the braces came off, his
mother started him on the practice, and he never stopped. His mother gave him books about
yogis too, and soon Superman and Batman had little allure. “I wanted to be a yogi
because they knew the mysteries of life,” he told me. “They could dematerialize.” He was
obsessed with magic (the word is on the vanity plate of his silver BMW, which he inherited
from his mother) — and followed raptly the tales of miraculous transformations he heard in
the different churches his mother insisted they visit every Sunday. As he grew older, Friend
played drums in a rock band, a portal to another kind of transformation to be sure, but one
that still spoke to a desire for a very public life.
Friend may not have known it at the time, but he connected with yoga at a critical point in its
history in America. As Syman notes in “The Subtle Body,” yoga in the United States dates to
the late 19th century, when it was first propagated by Indian yogis like Swami Vivekananda
and Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote “Autobiography of a Yogi.” But the yoga that
ultimately prevailed here was not the stringent, meditative practice supposedly leading to
spiritual bliss that was more common in India; its health and beauty benefits were always a
better sell. (A nice yoga-fan through line runs from Gloria Swanson to Ali MacGraw to
Christy Turlington.) By 1976, five million Americans had signed on.
Friend was never content to be just another yoga enthusiast. Horatio Alger could have been
one of his swamis. He bought himself a car when he turned 16 with money he made working
after school. In 1983, he graduated from Texas A&M University — no bastion of any
counterculture — and paid his dues as a financial analyst until he took the leap and began
teaching yoga full time. By 1987 he was teaching Houston housewives and, he likes to joke,
the occasional farmer in overalls. He also began traveling to workshops all over the country,
including one with Judith Hanson Lasater, who introduced him to Iyengar yoga. Within a few
years, Friend had taken workshop with B.K.S. Iyengar himself and with Pattabhi Jois, the
creator of Ashtanga.
In other words, Friend was aligning himself with the greats of contemporary yoga,
Indians whose teachings were then shaping the yoga world. (Lineage is as important in
yoga as it is to Boston bluebloods.) By 1989 he was in Pune, for a month of study with
Iyengar. That year, at age 30, he gave a confounding performance on a rickety wooden
platform at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India (the same one Elizabeth Gilbert
described in “Eat, Pray, Love”). In videos taken that day, Friend looks barely beyond his
teens: his brown hair and beard were scraggly, and he was so slight from a bad intestinal
virus that he seemed incapable of moving, much less contorting into a lotus position while
balancing in handstand. But that is what he did. Friend’s skill was impressive — he was then
practicing for a minimum of three hours every day — but what really set him apart was his
style, which conveyed both bravado and vulnerability. The hundreds of Indians and
Americans present that day gave him a standing ovation, and from then on, the story goes,
John Friend was not just the Iyengar teacher for the ashram but a bona fide yoga star, with
invitations to teach around the world. “There was a lot of grace involved,” he told me.
As Friend rose to higher positions in the Iyengar organization — he spent four years on the
board in the 1990s — he also observed and absorbed Iyengar’s exacting standards of teacher
certification, which require the study of anatomy, physiology, philosophy and ethics, as well
as teaching a demonstration class and passing a written exam. From the leader of the
Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — no stranger herself to American celebrity
— Friend learned how to give intimate, inspirational talks to crowds of thousands. He also
befriended American scholars of Eastern spirituality studying in India. In each of these
encounters, Friend was the yogic equivalent of a sponge, or as one associate recalled, “He
was a man with a mission.” The mission then was to reclaim yoga from the many U.S
.teachers who were so consumed with the physical practice — it was all about the workout —
that they sweated out any trace of spirituality.
Equally important, Friend wanted to create a new yoga school that wasn’t just accessible but
commercially sustainable. In the ensuing years, Friend, restless, eager and supremely
confident, broke with Iyengar and distanced himself from Chidvilasananda as he began
to refine what he saw as his own yoga technique. As he wrote in 1995, “Finally I realized
that I was not fully aligned with Mr. Iyengar’s philosophy and method, so it was not dharmic
of me to continue to use his name to describe my teaching style.” Their philosophical
differences — the kind of intrayogic argument best left to the professionals — were
compounded by mentor-disciple issues. In essence, Friend wanted a kinder, gentler yoga
school — though his critics say he simply wanted to build his own empire, and grafted a
touchy-feely teaching method onto what remains, essentially, Iyengar yoga. (Whether you
believe Friend felt constricted or Iyengar felt betrayed, a residue of bad feeling remains.) By
1997 Friend had come up with a name, Anusara, and a mission statement. “Anusara yoga is a
hatha-yoga system that unites universal principles of alignment with a philosophy that is
epitomized by what I call ‘celebration of the heart,’ ” he wrote.
He merged his entrepreneurial nature with his yogic one. Friend wrote his own teacher-
training manual, which is about as detailed as an oil-refinery operations handbook. Like
Iyengar, he created a teacher-certification program; his students must complete a minimum of
200 hours of training at workshops — an expense that can require extensive travel — buy his
training manual ($30) and pass his 30-hour take-home test. A $195 training DVD is also
recommended. There are licensing fees of around $100 that must be renewed annually. In this
way, Friend maintains quality control and an income stream, but this standardization has cost
him the loyalty of older teachers who find the new rules somewhat unyogic. Friend also
discourages Anusara studio owners from including other forms of yoga at their schools, lest
they dilute his brand. As one former associate, Douglas Keller, put it, “If a particular
McDonald’s store chooses to start serving spaghetti, McDonald’s can decide to revoke its
franchise.”
On a brilliant day last April, Friend was in a celebratory mood. He took his small, young staff
to an especially nice Woodlands restaurant, where they sat in a private room with fresh
flowers, white tablecloths and Champagne. The occasion was Anusara’s 13th birthday and a
promising meeting with some investors about the Center, the latest plan to extend
Anusaraworld. “Our little company is expanding,” Friend told the group, in between
checking texts and e-mail. Friend was, then as always, between tours — he’d been in Detroit
and was heading for Japan but already seemed in three places at once.
“What is the company? Anusara!” he declared. “We do yoga lifestyle, helping people to be
happy. How do you like that?” The staff looked happy but slightly wary, like kids taken to a
nice restaurant by a demanding parent.
Before anyone ordered food, Friend started in on another dharma talk/monologue about the
Center, or as he put it, “the home of the kula.” There would be a soundstage and theater for
yoga events, along with editing facilities for live streaming video, the better to teach in India
as well as Peoria. There would be a 1,000-square-foot retail boutique too. In his prospectus,
Friend described the Center as the main artistic training venue for Anusara yoga globally,
which would also serve as a place to “make living art, to turn every day into an art project.
Shri is the lustrous beauty which turns your mind to the Divine.” Along with Anusara
students, there would be filmmakers, musicians, poets, acrobats, dancers and rock climbers.
It sounded like an awful lot, and it was a little hard to tell how Friend was going to make so
many activities yogic, life-expanding and restorative all at once. I had a similar feeling when
Friend invited me to a private “happening” one night after the Hollywood workshop. The
party was held at a loft in a warehouse district near downtown Los Angeles. The music was
loud, and the lights were bright and pulsating, and some of the people were in costume. There
may have been a smoke machine.
At a certain point, Friend, in black jeans and a spangled black shirt, called for quiet and
introduced the entertainment. A young woman danced with flaming torches, and another
danced with flaming hula hoops. A pair did a Cirque du Soleil tribute by performing
acrobatics while hanging from the 30-foot ceiling on muslin swags. Friend’s contribution was
an ode to creativity he recited, while a young woman with flowing curls and a face painted to
match her tiger costume danced and writhed on the floor.
We ride the tiger. . . .

I taste her hunger
In the burning of my desire
There is no hotter fire.
The event resembled Ringling Brothers crossed with an Allen Ginsberg reading, what the
yogi Judith Hanson Lasater might call “yoga and . . .” — yoga and Pilates, yoga and
shopping. Eventually you wind up a long way from sitting in a quiet room, focused on the
breath as it flows in and out.
Friend, of course, wouldn’t see it that way. “For me, any artistic expression that is performed
and expressed with an intention of awakening to the essential nature of one’s Being (Spirit)
and with the intention of glorifying the intrinsic Goodness and Shri (Divine Beauty) of that
spirit is considered Yoga,” he wrote me in an e-mail message from South Korea. “Therefore,
yoga can be expanded to include dance, music and other forms of Art.”
In other words, it’s all good. Back at the Woodlands restaurant, Friend called for a toast. “To
the next level,” he said, raising his glass. “Keep dreaming, keep dreaming. Never stop
dreaming.”
- Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly.

Yoga protects the brain from depression
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
The Telegraph, UK
Friday, August 20, 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7956508/Yoga-protects-the-brain-from-
depression.html
Practising yoga really does relax your mind as well as your body more than other types of
exercise, a new study claims.
Researchers have found that three sessions of the exercise a week can help fight off
depression as it boosts levels of a chemical in the brain which is essential for a sound and
relaxed mind.
Scientists found that the levels of the amino acid GABA are much higher in those that carry
out yoga than those do the equivalent of a similarly strenuous exercise such as walking.
The chemical, GABA, is essential to the function of brain and central nervous system and
which helps promote a state of calm within the body.
Low GABA levels are associated with depression and other widespread anxiety disorders.
Scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine, USA, spent 12 weeks monitoring
two groups of healthy individuals, half of whom walked for three hours each week, while the
other half spent the same time doing yoga.
Participants brains were scanned before and after the study using magnetic resonance
spectroscopic (MRS) imaging to measure GABA levels, while they were also asked questions
about their psychological wellbeing throughout the study.
Those who did yoga reported lower levels of anxiety and increases in their mood than the
walkers.
Professor Chris Streeter said yoga participants increased feeling of wellbeing was associated
with GABA levels.
He said: "Over time, positive changes in these reports were associated with climbing GABA
levels."
Prof Streeter called for further research into using yoga as a treatment for other forms of
mental illness.
The research was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Katie Prior, of mental health charity Mind, welcomed the study.
She said: "Any kind of exercise is good for improving a person's mood and self esteem. It
makes you feel good and look good, both of which help with mental wellbeing.
"Yoga is a relaxing, low impact activity for people who don't like the thought of walking or
running.
"It can be done in the privacy of a person's own home, or people can join a class where they
can meet others – this is a great way to meet people, especially for those who may suffer
from isolation and loneliness."
The research is good news for yoga which along with pilates was criticised earlier this month
for not pushing the body as hard as other exercises.
The University of Wisconsin said that it fell short of what was considered an all-round
workout.
They found that while yoga did improve strength, endurance, balance and flexibility, they
burned very few calories -- suggesting they had not pushed their bodies hard enough to gain
substantial aerobic improvements.
In fact, researchers found that a typical class used 144 calories in 55 minutes-- the same
amount burned during a slow walk.
Even power yoga, which requires participants to perform poses in quick succession, was
found to burn only about 237 calories per class and to boost the heart rate to only 62 per cent
of the maximum that constitutes a light aerobic workout.
A heart rate of 64-94 per cent maximum is the level needed to work the heart and lungs
effectively.
On average, a 50-minute Pilates session burned 174 calories (beginner) and 254 (advanced) --
half the amount you might burn on a run of similar duration.
Related Articles
o India moves to 'patent' yoga

o Cool enough for competitive yoga?
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o Yoga cuts depression by half in women with breast cancer
India moves to 'patent' hundreds of yoga postures
Author:
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: June 8, 2010
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7809883/India-moves-to-
patent-hundreds-of-yoga-postures.html
An Indian government body is filming hundreds of yoga poses in an attempt to patent the
popular exercise and stop interlopers from claiming they have created new types of yoga.
The images are intended to provide irrefutable evidence that Indians created the yoga asanas -
or postures.
Yoga has been taken up by millions of people arcross the world and several new styles of
practice, such as naked yoga, have been developed. But India is jealously guarding its yogic
heritage.
"It's like soccer and Britain," Suneel Singh, one of India's leading yoga gurus, told the
Guardian. "You have given it to the world which is wonderful and generous. But imagine that
people started saying they had invented the sport. That would be annoying."
The authorities decided to film the poses after a project based on describing them in words
failed.
Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who heads the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a Delhi-based
government organisation set up jointly by the ministries of health and science, told the
Guardian: "Simple text isn't adequate. People are claiming they are doing something different
from the original yoga when they are not."
"Yoga originated in India. People cannot claim to invent a new yoga when they have not."
There are tens – if not hundreds – of millions of practitioners and hundreds of different
schools ranging from naked yoga through to Christian yoga, developed in faith schools and
churches in America.
"There is no intention to stop people practising yoga but nobody should misappropriate yoga
and start charging franchise money," said Mr Gupta.
Are you cool enough for competitive yoga?
Author: Melissa Whitworth
Date: June 7, 2010
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/7803435/Are-you-cool-enough-for-
competitive-yoga.html
Yoga is not just a spiritual pursuit, but fiercely competitive, finds Melissa Whitworth.
“I am not the most flexible guy out there, nor am I the strongest,” says Luke Strandquist, 33,
a Bikram yoga instructor in New York, as he bends himself into a position that looks hardly
human. “It’s about overall attitude and demeanour.”
The pose – or asana – he demonstrates is called The Guillotine and involves standing with his
feet hip-width apart, bending over to touch the floor, and then threading his arms, shoulders
and torso through his legs to look upwards towards his bottom. Despite his protestations to
the contrary, Strandquist has the body of a muscular string bean. There isn’t an ounce of fat
on him. As he moves through each pose – he is running me through his routine from a recent
yoga competition – he hardly breaks a sweat.
Hang on. Yoga competition? Surely competition is the very antithesis to the philosophy of
the practice, which is about spiritual and physical wellbeing attained through a personal
journey? Can you 'win’ at yoga when it’s supposed to be spiritual, not competitive?
Apparently, yes. Strandquist is one of a growing number of yogis who believe that yoga can
indeed be a competitive sport. After all, yoga competitions have been going on in India for
hundreds of years, with yogis striking tortuous poses and being awarded points for their
pains.
Yoga championship also take place regularly around the world, in which yogis are scored for
the physical perfection of their practice, rather than their enlightenment or inner peace. An
international championship, known at the Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup, is held in Los Angeles
every February. Strandquist, who ranked third among the men this year, is now campaigning
for competitive yoga to be accepted into the 2020 Olympic Games.
In America, the campaign – which was started by Bikram Choudhury, the Californian-based
founder of Bikram, or “hot yoga”, and his wife Rajashree – is being spearheaded by two
women, Donna Rubin and Jennifer Lobo, who founded Bikram Yoga NYC in 1999. The
Bikram style is more commonly known as “hot yoga” because practices take place in a room
heated to 100°F. Andy Murray, our current tennis hero, swears by the workout – “until you
do it, you can’t comment on how difficult it is,” he has told reporters. “I did some tough
fitness work in the off-season, but that’s one of the hardest things to do.” Famous fans – of
Bikram, not Murray – are said to include Madonna, George Clooney and Brooke Shields.
According to the International Olympic Committee, there is only one undesignated spot open
for the 2020 Olympic Games. In order to be considered, an international yoga federation
would have to be recognised by the IOC by 2011. For that consideration, a sport needs active
federations in 50 countries.
At each yoga competition, contestants perform a three-minute routine which includes five
compulsory poses and two optional ones. Competitors are judged on strength, flexibility,
alignment, difficulty of the optional poses, overall demeanour and execution.
“In India, kids start training when they are three years-old,” says Lobo. “Donna and I have
always been interested in getting yoga into schools and would love to see it become a part of
all schools’ physical education programmes. The only way to really make that happen is to
create a goal to inspire the children.”
When Lobo and Rubin staged their first competition in the studio, there were just ten people
watching. Seven years on, the last competition had 34 competitors and 400 spectators.
Matt Farci, 24, from Richmond, is the current UK champion. A dancer by profession, he has
been practicing yoga for three years. He came fifth in the world championships last year,
which saw contestants from India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico and the Netherlands
compete.
“Yoga is something that suits my needs in terms of maintaining strength and flexibility of
both my body and my mind,” says Farci. “Being very physical with my body is something
that I’m used to, but it always seems to challenge me and push my body to its extremes, with
the postures as well as figuring myself out in the heat of the room. It seemed like a natural
progressing to go from class to enter the competition – and a chance to show people what I
have been working on.
“After seeing some of the guys at the competition in LA, I became very nervous and had to
mentally take a step backwards. I realised that there was no point in comparing myself to the
other competitors. The only thing I could do was show the judges what my body could do. I
was happy with that.”
Michele Pernetta, arguably the UK’s foremost yoga teacher, introduced Bikram to the UK in
1994. She teaches at her three London studios, has been a judge at the international yoga
championship and at competitions across Europe. She is also head coach for the UK
contestants in international yoga competitions.
“Having yoga in the Olympics is not going to change anything in our local yoga studios, or in
our private yoga practise at home,” she says. “It will create an arena for small numbers of
people, and especially for children – who need some kind of format to their physical activities
– to bring this ancient form of physical discipline to the rest of society and allow them to see
its beauty. Would so many children want to take up gymnastics, skating or tennis, if they
couldn’t watch it on TV?”
Pernetta does not feel that showing the physical aspects to the world in any way denigrates
the more spiritual aspects. “Yoga competition has been a way of life in Indian ashrams for
hundreds of years. It’s a western thing to associate yoga with hushed tones and meditation.
Perhaps it is time yoga was demystified for the general population and that it was shown to
be a user-friendly and beneficial practise for everyone: the more people take up yoga the
healthier we will become as a society, both physically, mentally and spiritually.”
But one of the biggest problems the pioneers of competitive yoga may have, is resistance
within the yoga community itself. “To me, competitive yoga is an oxymoron,” says Maja
Sidebaeck, a Swedish yoga instructor based in New York.
“Yoga is a journey inwards, a practice of self-exploration without specific goals. We practice

'being’ rather than 'doing’. It’s the inner experience that is important not the outer shape. So
to turn it into a competitive sport is counterproductive. It sends the wrong message to
practitioners everywhere and is a recipe for injury when people push themselves into
positions in order to be 'the best’. “When you reduce yoga to just the physical shapes, it
becomes gymnastics. I do enjoy watching gymnastics,” she admits, “just don’t call it yoga.”
Yoga cuts depression by half in women with breast cancer
Author: Richard Alleyne
Date: February 25, 2009
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/dietandfitness/4798846/Yoga-cuts-depression-by-
half-in-women-with-breast-cancer.html
Yoga provides emotional benefits to women with breast cancer and reduces their chances of
depression by half, study claims.
Researchers found that patients on a 10 week course of Restorative Yoga, a mild form of the
exercise, were much more positive, were less tired and less likely to be depressed.
Restorative Yoga is a gentle type of yoga which is similar to other types of yoga classes, but
uses props such as cushions, bolsters, and blankets so people in differing levels of health can
practice yoga more easily.
The study, published in Psycho-Oncology, found the women had a 50 per cent reduction in
depression and a 12 per cent increase in feelings of peace and meaning after the yoga
sessions.
Of the 44 women who took part in the study, 22 undertook the yoga classes.
All of the women had breast cancer with 34 per cent actively undergoing cancer treatment
while the majority had already completed treatment.
All participants completed a questionnaire at the beginning and end of the 10 week course,
asking them to evaluate their quality of life through various measures.
The results clearly showed that the women who had been given the RY classes experienced a
wide range of benefits compared to the control group.
"Evidence from systematic reviews of randomised trials is quite strong that mind-body
therapies improve mood, quality of life, and treatment-related symptoms in people with
cancer," said the lead researcher Suzanne Danhauer of Wake Forest University School of
Medicine, North Carolina.
"Yoga is one mind-body therapy that is widely available and involves relatively reasonable
costs. Given the high levels of stress and distress that many women with breast cancer
experience, the opportunity to experience feeling more peaceful and calm in the midst of
breast cancer is a significant benefit."
The study found that women who started with higher negative emotions and lower emotional
wellbeing derived greater benefit from the yoga compared to the control group.
'Yoga wars' spoil spirit of ancient practice, Indian agency says
Author: Emily Wax
Date: August 23, 2010
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/08/22/AR2010082203071_pf.html
Heard of Naked Yoga? Kosher Yoga? Yoga for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?
More than 30 million Americans practice some sort of yoga in an ever-expanding industry
generating an estimated $6 billion in the United States alone.
But in the birthplace of yoga, an Indian government agency is fighting what it calls "yoga
theft" after several U.S. companies said they wanted to copyright or patent their versions.
Yoga is a part of humanity's shared knowledge, the agency says, and any business claiming
the postures as its own is violating the very spirit of the ancient practice.
India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has gathered a team of yogis from nine schools
and 200 scientists to scan ancient texts, including the writings of Patanjali, thought to be the
original compiler of yoga sutras. The group is documenting more than 900 yoga postures and
making a video catalogue of 250 of the most popular ones, from sun salutation to downward-
facing dog.
The catalogue will be released next month and given to the international patent system, which
yoga gurus in India say is essential in an age when cultural traditions can cross borders
instantaneously.
"Yoga is collective knowledge and is available for use by everybody no matter what the
interpretation," said V.K. Gupta, head of the digital library, which was set up by the
ministries of health and science. "It would be very inappropriate if some companies try to
prevent others from any yoga practice, even if they call it some other name. So we
wanted to ensure that, in the future, nobody will be able to claim that he has created a yoga
posture which was actually already created in 2500 B.C. in India."
The library has documented other traditional Indian knowledge, including ayurvedic
treatments and homeopathy. Tens of thousands of yoga postures have been compiled, but
many are not widely practiced.
"This collection is very successful in preventing wrong patent information, but it is

available in 34 million pages," Gupta said with a chuckle. "We are trying to shorten the
yoga catalogue to make it very easy for the world to understand."
The poses, now listed in Sanskrit, will be translated into English, German, French, Spanish
and Japanese. Gupta's library has agreements with U.S. and European patent offices, and
Gupta said he hopes that U.S. patent officers will refer yoga studios directly to his
information.
Popularized in the United States by Beatles guitarist George Harrison, yoga has moved into
the mainstream and now includes yoga vacations, children's camps, retreats, books,
magazines, CDs, trendy clothing, pricey jewelry, cookbooks and even dating services.
Yoga wars, as they are known, started in 2004 in Beverly Hills when Calcutta-born yoga
master Bikram Choudhury claimed as his intellectual property a sequence of 26 postures that
his students performed in a room heated to 105 degrees. He attempted to collect money from
smaller studios offering "Hot Yoga" classes.
Open Source Yoga Unity, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group of yoga enthusiasts, filed a
federal lawsuit against Choudhury's patent. The lawsuit resulted in a confidential settlement
agreement.
Today, Choudhury's form of yoga is taught at more than 400 centers from Washington to
Paris. His net worth is unofficially estimated at $7 million.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted at least 131 patents on the subject of yoga,
most for books and yoga mats. The database of registered and pending trademarks lists 3,700
trademarks but no specific patents on postures or variations of postures, the government
agency said.
In India, yoga used to be free, practiced in public parks and ashrams. It was typically part of
a Hindu religious commitment to an austere life and seen as a practice for ash-smeared
holy men in loincloths who were vegetarians, abstained from alcohol, and prayed,
meditated and chanted for more than four hours a day.
But yoga has entered the mainstream in India, and millions of people practice in studios. The
government has encouraged the army to teach supple poses to stressed-out officers in the
disputed region of Kashmir. Hundreds of Mumbai residents practiced outside in a show of
unity after the 2008 terrorist attack. Prisoners in the state of Madhya Pradesh can receive an
early release if they complete a meditative breathing and stretching yoga course, which is
said to be excellent for anger management.
At her popular Iyengar yoga class at her home in New Delhi, instructor Nischint Singh,
42, said that yoga was originally meant to soothe shattered souls and teach breathing
known as pranayama, and that she always thought it should be open to everyone.
"Yoga is for developing a connection with yourself. It's meant to be meditative," she said
before a recent class. "But today it's being sold as a way of weight loss and a way to look
younger. The actual originators of yoga are not even alive. Everything people are doing today
is just following them."
- Special correspondent Ayesha Manocha contributed to this report.

Maryland football players, coaches hope yoga will help team strike
a balance
Author: Steve Yanda
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080203527_pf.html
For nearly an hour twice a week over the past two months, members of the Maryland football
team have gathered in a sparsely lit defensive meeting room at the Gossett Team House and
were asked to release from their minds the numbers that have defined them ever since they
concluded a dismal 2009 campaign.
Sure, the YogaChai exercises the players endured were meant to increase their functional
flexibility -- which in turn, Maryland coaches hope, will improve speed and agility, not to
mention help prevent injury -- but the various poses they've practiced are meant to discipline
their awareness as much as stretch their bodies.
And so, one by one, the players walked barefoot into Room 1114 on a recent Wednesday
afternoon, grabbed a rolled-up foam mat off the cart in the middle of the floor and found a
vacant spot against the wall to lay it out. That day's class centered on hip flexibility and
gratitude, a juxta position made even odder by the massive bodies trying to grasp the lessons.
The desks were pushed to one end of the room, which left just enough space for two dozen
offensive and defensive linemen to lie with their backs flat against their respective mats. A
wiry man wearing an army green tank top and black cloth shorts provided continuous
instruction.
Legs up the wall, join your ankles, join your knees, feet flat, close your eyes, make the back
of your neck long, draw the shoulder blades toward the wall, press your inner thighs to the
wall, press up through the heels, join the big toes. . . . At some point you'll start feeling
tingling in your legs. It's not loss of sensation. It's hormones. It's healing. . . . I want you to
think about one word: gratitude. What does it mean to you? Bring the soles of the feet
together. Think about gratitude.
"Out on the field, it's intense; you get to it," said redshirt sophomore Justin Gilbert, a 6-foot-
6, 300-pound tackle. "Even in the weight room, you throw the weight up and get going. But
in there, we're kind of working on our minds as much as our bodies. We're trying to focus in
and get the workout done, as opposed to just all-out working out."
The messages -- mental and physical -- were not always so well understood or received.
Maryland head strength and conditioning coach Dwight Galt incorporated yoga into the
football team's offseason training program four years ago, but until January it had been an
optional supplement. Sessions were held early in the morning and class sizes remained small.
When the team's seven-week winter training period began Jan. 26, each player was required
to participate in 55-minute yoga workouts twice a week. The yoga program resumed during
June and July.
"I just felt that we were lacking something," Galt said. "I felt that all the training that we were
doing, we were getting pretty good transfer to the field, but I didn't feel it was optimal. And I
really wanted to optimize every aspect of our training."
Through assistant strength coach Barry Kagan, Galt found Alex Paraskevas, a Washington-
based instructor, and hired him to lead the team's yoga training. Paraskevas previously had
attempted to teach yoga to the Maryland women's lacrosse team, but he said "it wasn't very
effective. They weren't responsive to it." Initially, the football players displayed a similar
reaction.
"I had heard of NFL players doing [yoga], but when I heard we were doing it, I was like,
'That's kind of weird,' " said sophomore Zach Kerr, a 6-2, 320-pound defensive tackle. "I
didn't know what to think about it. The only thing I knew was that it's not fun. Yoga's not fun
at all. But it definitely helps you out."
Gilbert said none of the players liked the yoga sessions at first, but most have since come
around to its virtues. He noted the added hip flexibility has enabled him to get lower in his
stance on the offensive line and make more explosive pushes off the snap of the ball.
Kerr said being more flexible in the lower body has made the team faster. The defense could
start as many as 10 players who ran the 40-yard dash in less than five seconds during spring
testing, according to Kerr.
"That's one of the things that's been plaguing us as a football team is our speed," Kerr said.
"We've been able to compete strength-wise with the best of 'em, but we haven't been as fast
as we've been in the past."
A matrix drawn on a dry-erase board hangs on one of the walls in the room where the yoga
sessions take place. The 11 goals the defense set for itself for each game during the 2009
season take up the vertical strip on the far left. The top horizontal strip contains a square for
each game.
The top goal listed is "WIN!!!" and to its right on the matrix are 10 boxes marked with "NO"
and two marked with "YES." Maryland went 2-10 last season and is looking to claim any
edge that might help prevent a similar performance this fall, even if that means adopting a
practice completely foreign to the players' inner wiring.
"Football is very much a sport that is goal-oriented," Paraskevas said. "How much can you
push in how much time? And we track it all, and I see them practicing, and it's all
scientifically done. And in here I'm asking them not to be goal-oriented. Be present. Be here.
"I'm teaching them to engage this muscle while stretching this one. Hips, hamstrings, inner
thigh, outer hip flexor, quads. You can basically prevent injury. Everything's connected, man.
You don't think about it, but it's all connected. And the focus that's required of them to do all
these things, it focuses their mind so they're not thinking about their girlfriend, food, this,
that. You're focused, which is a good thing to have on the field. If you're present here, you're
going to be present on the field."
Yogathon: stretching bodies, stretching minds across America
Author: Dipka Bhambhani
URL:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/08/yogathon_stretching_bodi
es_stretching_minds_across_america.html
One small yoga stretch in Washington became one large Yogathon across America.
While society seems largely secular these days, there is a sign that religion and even interfaith
activity is making a comeback--the yoga mat.
Only the people that schlep their rolled up rubber mats to gyms and studios all over town may
not know their downward dog or cobra poses are subtle movements toward the divine.
That's why Anju Bhargava, the White House Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
Council's first Hindu member, launched the country's first Yogathon on Sunday.
The Yogathon was created in the spirit of President Obama's United We Serve
campaign and Active Lifestyle Challenge, by Bhargava's Hindu American Seva
Charities (HASC).
HASC, along with many volunteers, mobilized the Hindu faith-based organizations to
respond to the president and First Lady's call to United We Serve: Let's Read, Let's Move -
using yoga as a tool to promote physical activity, healthy living and peace of mind.
Yoga is the life force of the Hindu philosophy, uniting spirituality with awareness of
mind and body.
"The essence of Hindu culture is based on yoga," said Bhargava, a member of President's
Advisory Council on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. "Yoga helps us to get in
touch with ourselves and what's healthy for us. By introducing yoga to children we hope it
will help them acquire healthy habits at an early age."
The Yogathon introduced youth to yoga as a means to reduce obesity and to promote healthy
living for all - adults and youth - while bridging cultures in an interfaith environment.
Bhargava said if all faiths come together to strengthen ourselves through yoga, we can, in
turn, position ourselves better to reach out and help each other.
Thousands of children and adults participated in the free national Yogathon through one of
the 106 sites across 23 states that volunteered to participate.
Bhargava twisted into her yoga poses at a Baptist church's community center in New Jersey
on Sunday. I went to the Art of Living in Washington. I must admit, it all made sense to me,
the nexus between community service and practicing yoga.
Before we can build, we must ensure we have a strong foundation. That begins with
strengthening ourselves--mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. That strength
leads to the will and ability to do service or "seva", in the Sanskrit vernacular.
Bhargava said impoverishment occurs in different ways - economic, spiritual, etal. Perhaps
this Yogathon will nourish us and we'll go on and join the movement of seva and continue on
this path of community service, with grounded roots.
The fact that more than 100 centers attracted thousands of yoga doers together for this
one event gave some indication that the country is going through a metamorphosis, a
spiritual reconstruction and awakening.
The basis of life is breath. This Yogathon, and Hindu American Seva Charities' work towards
it, is breathing new life into this metamorphosis.
Several Yogathon participants at Iskon Temple in New Orleans said participating in

Yogathon was their personal observance of the fifth anniversary of the devastating Hurricane
Katrina. One person remarked on the connection between healing oneself and healing one's
community.
Yoga teachers from large organizations like Art of Living, Patanjali Yoga Peeth as well as
many renowned independent teachers volunteered to conduct the classes as their way of
contributing their service.
Many centers plan to hold yoga classes through the month of September and hope to offer
yoga and other health oriented programs on an ongoing basis going forward. The one day
Yogathon is transforming into a regular YogaSeva for the long haul.
One of the long-term missions of the HASC is to accomplish short-term service goals that
will lead to Seva Centers where Americans, especially those of Dharmic (eastern) faiths, can
go to find mentors that will help them deal with the physical, emotional and spiritual wear
and tear of migration to this country while leveraging the talent of the community to serve the
community at large. The centers will be learning centers as well as coping centers and
clearinghouses for community service, resulting in sustainable infrastructures.
Bhargava said as the cultural foundation becomes stronger, the talented Dharmic community
can help the population at large even more.
The idea is: First turn outward to build the Seva Centers. Then turn inward to help our
communities and outward to help the population at large to eventually strengthen everyone
and give them a real sense of place and peace and service.
Healthy people make healthy societies which generally lead to healthy governments and
economies. It's a domino effect that starts with individual change or perhaps a pose.
Yoga bad for the soul, says Baptist Leader
(source : http://www.mid-day.com/news/2010/oct/091010-Mohler-yoga-Christianity-Baptist-
Leader.htm)
A feud over yoga and religion has left many Christians bent out of shape.
Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler unleashed a storm of controversy when
he penned a critical essay titled Should Christians Practice Yoga?
In the piece, Mohler cautions Christians against the practice of yoga, saying that despite its
evolution into a popular pastime, its spiritual basis violates the tenets of Christianity.
"Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at
odds with the Christian understanding," he wrote.
"Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of
connecting to and coming to know the divine."
The evangelical leader found himself in the hot seat post his essay went public. "My email
servers are exhausted," Mohler wrote on his website.
"Messages have been coming in at a rate of about a 100 an hour. The first lesson count the
cost when you talk about yoga," he said.
Many yoga enthusiasts don't see their love for the practice as being in conflict with their
belief in Christianity.
Stephanie Dillon, said that she credits yoga for reviving her connection with her faith.
"What I found is that it opened my spirit; it renewed my spirituality," she said.
Though Dillon feels she has integrated yoga and Christianity in her life, Mohler says the two
are fundamentally incompatible.
Southern Baptist leader nixes yoga for Christians
Author: Dylan Lovan
Publication: Msnbc.com
Date: September 7, 2010
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39553520/ns/us_news-life/?gt1=43001
Albert Mohler: The body is not a 'vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine'
A Southern Baptist leader who is calling for Christians to avoid yoga and its spiritual
attachments is getting plenty of pushback from enthusiasts who defend the ancient practice.
Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative
discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.
Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness
with the divine."
"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.
Mohler said feedback has come through e-mail and comments on blogs and other websites
since he wrote an essay to address questions about yoga he has heard for years.
"I'm really surprised by the depth of the commitment to yoga found on the part of
many who identify as Christians," Mohler said.
Yoga fans say their numbers have been growing in the U.S. A 2008 study by the Yoga
Journal put the number at 15.8 million, or nearly 7 percent of adults. About 6.7 percent of
American adults are Southern Baptists, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Research
Center Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Mohler argued in his online essay last month that Christians who practice yoga "must
either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between
their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga."
He said his view is "not an eccentric Christian position."
Other Christian leaders have said practicing yoga is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.
Pat Robertson has called the chanting and other spiritual components that go along with yoga
"really spooky." California megachurch pastor John MacArthur called yoga a "false religion."
Muslim clerics have banned Muslims from practicing yoga in Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia,
citing similar concerns.
Yoga proponents say the wide-ranging discipline, which originated in India, offers physical
and mental healing through stretching poses and concentration.
"Lots of people come to yoga because they are often in chronic pain. Others come because
they think it's a nice workout," said Allison Terracio, who runs the Infinite Bliss studio in
Louisville.
'Opened my spirit'
And some yoga studios have made the techniques more palatable for Christians by removing
the chanting and associations to eastern religions, namely Hinduism and its multiple deities.
Stephanie Dillon, who has injected Christian themes into her studio in Louisville, said yoga
brought her closer to her Christian faith, which had faded after college and service in the
Army.
"What I found is that it opened my spirit, it renewed my spirituality," Dillon said. "That
happened first and then I went back to church." Dillon attends Southeast Christian Church in
Louisville and says many evangelical Christians from the church attend her yoga classes.
She said she prayed on the question of whether to mix yoga and Christianity before opening
her studio, PM Yoga, where she discusses her relationship with Jesus during classes.
"My objection (to Mohler's view) personally is that I feel that yoga enhances a person's
spirituality," Dillon said. "I don't like to look at religion from a law standpoint but a
relationship standpoint, a relationship with Jesus Christ specifically."
Mohler wrote the essay after reading "The Subtle Body," where author Stefanie Syman traces
the history of yoga in America. Syman noted the growing popularity of yoga in the U.S. by
pointing out that first lady Michelle Obama has added it to the festivities at the annual White
House Easter Egg Roll on the front lawn.
Mohler said many people have written him to say they're simply doing exercises and forgoing
yoga's eastern mysticism and meditation.
"My response to that would be simple and straightforward: You're just not doing yoga,"
Mohler said.
Yoga 'demonic'? Critics call ministers' warning a stretch
Author: Janet I. Tu
Publication: Seattletimes.Nwsource.com
Date: October 8, 2010
URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013114169_yoga09m.html
The question of whether Christians should practice yoga is making the rounds once again
even as yoga has become one of the most mainstream forms of exercise and stress relief in
the United States.
Is the downward-facing dog somehow ... demonic?
A recent essay by the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Ky., warned Christians that yoga is contradictory to Christianity. And local megachurch
pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church went even further, saying earlier this year that yoga
is "absolute paganism."
"Should Christians stay away from yoga because of its demonic roots? Totally. Yoga is
demonic," Driscoll said. "If you just sign up for a little yoga class, you're signing up for a
little demon class."
Even as yoga has become a mainstream form of exercise and stress relief in the United States,
the question of whether Christians should practice it is making the rounds once again, raising
a stir among some Christians and yoga practitioners alike.
"Here we go again with fear-based, black-and-white thinking," said Jennifer Norling, of

Seattle, a 42-year-old mainline Protestant who has been practicing yoga for many years.
"It's not fair to say yoga is demonic. In fact, I find it insulting. There are many ways to
grow spiritually."
Nationwide, an estimated 15.8 million people practice yoga, with Seattle ranking among the
country's top yoga cities. Numerous yoga classes are taught daily in gyms and community
centers — largely removed from any religious context — while stores such as Walmart stock
yoga mats and videos.
It's not that Driscoll and R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, are anti-exercise. Rather, they believe the physical aspects of yoga can't be
separated from its historical roots in Hinduism and other Eastern religions.
"Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at
odds with the Christian understanding," Mohler wrote in an online essay last month.
"Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of
connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are called to meditate upon the Word
of God."
The Associated Press reported this week that Mohler has received plenty of pushback from
yoga enthusiasts, including Christians.
Driscoll, in a Q&A session with church members in February, issued a similar warning,
calling yoga a form of pantheism. "There's not creator and creation," he said. "All is
collapsed into what we call oneism. The result is that you don't go out to God, you go into
self. It's not about connecting to God through the mediatorship of Jesus. It's about connecting
to the universe through meditation. It's absolute paganism."
A Mars Hill Church spokesman this week declined to say what sort of feedback Driscoll has
received on his stance.
Mohler and Driscoll are not alone in believing that there are dangers in mixing Eastern
practices and Christianity.
The Catholic Church weighed in on the issue when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he
became Pope Benedict XVI, warned Catholic bishops in 1989 that attempts to harmonize
Christian meditation with Eastern techniques needed to be looked at closely to avoid the
danger of blending different religious beliefs.
Karma tradition
Yoga — a Sanskrit word that means to harness one's control — encompasses physical and
mental practices, some dating back thousands of years, that seek to control and quiet the mind
and to channel energy.
The underlying objective of yoga is related to a theology that says one can cleanse oneself of
karma — the fruits of a person's actions in a lifetime — and stop the cycle of rebirth so one's
spirit merges with the absolute, said Christian Lee Novetzke, University of Washington
associate professor of comparative religion and South Asian studies, who specializes in
Hinduism.
Yoga gained momentum in the United States in the 1960s when yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar
emphasized its health benefits rather than its religious components, Novetzke said.
These days, how religious or spiritual a yoga class is depends on the teacher.
Anne Phyfe Palmer, owner of 8 Limbs Yoga Centers in Seattle, said her understanding of
yoga is not based on religion but "on a science of practices that enhance an individual's
ability to connect to whatever spiritual practice they choose."
"Many people practice yoga for the amazing physical and mental benefits it offers," she
said. "Others choose to link it to faith."
Roy DeLeon is among those who incorporate yoga movements into a spiritual practice.
DeLeon, a lifelong Catholic, leads Blessed Movement prayer sessions at a local Catholic
church and a United Methodist church.
He doesn't use the word "yoga," instead calling it praying with the body. If the weekly Gospel
lesson is about opening one's heart, DeLeon leads the class in poses that open the chest area
or spread the arms as if welcoming someone wholeheartedly.
"I'm using yoga movements but not necessarily yoga philosophy," he said.
Gary Chamberlain, professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Seattle University, said in many
ways, yoga is similar to Christian forms of meditation.
"In fact, the only way in which Christians can know the divine is through the body," he said.
For instance, sounds — such a when people recite the rosary — produce a meditative state.
"The whole body becomes receptive to the divine," he said.
"I can do both"
Debi Raines, an evangelical Christian who lives in Redmond, said that for years, she loved
taking yoga classes at her gym. But she became uncomfortable one day when an instructor
had the class repeat phrases in Sanskrit.
"It made me feel like I was a hypocrite to Jesus, to God."
She quit yoga for several months, then came across a book about a Christian yoga movement
called Holy Yoga.
She called the author "and cried through the whole conversation," said Raines. "I felt God
was leading me to this: that I have a love for yoga and a love for God and I can do
both."
She now teaches Holy Yoga classes at the evangelical Washington Cathedral in Redmond.
Each class includes a Scripture reading, talk about how it relates to the lives of participants
and yoga poses with Christian music playing in the background.
"We empty ourselves to be filled by God," she said.

Should Christians practice yoga? Shouldn't everyone?
Author: David Waters
URL:
http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2010/09/should_christians_practice_yog
a_shouldnt_everyone.html
Yoga, the Hindu-inspired spiritual practice that bears a strong resemblance to stretching, is
said to relieve pain and lower blood pressure, boost mental (and spiritual) awareness and
reduce stress.
Ironically, it's having the inverse effect on some religious leaders.
Earlier this week, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
(and On Faith panelist), set off a bit of an interfaith fuss by suggesting that Christians should
not practice yoga. "Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with,
a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a 'post-Christian,
spiritually polyglot' reality."
Seems to me there are many more serious threats to the spiritual lives of Christians: Greed,
envy, lust, fear, hate, violence. But Mohler isn't the only religious leader stressed out by
yoga's growing popularity in America. He isn't even the only concerned On Faith panelist.
Earlier this year, On Faith panelists Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra created a bit of a
ruckus with their friendly debate about whether Americans had ripped yoga from its Hindu
roots. "The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans
from their spiritual heritage," Shukla wrote.
It would be easy to categorize these concerns as Y'all are Overreacting to God stuff Again.
(YOGA). But the concerns expressed by Shukla and Mohler, in particular, shouldn't be
summarily dismissed. In fact, from very different perspectives, these wise and learned men,
neither of them reactionaries, are raising important questions for an increasingly pluralistic
world.
Should we adopt, adapt or adjust the rituals and practices of other faiths for our own
purposes?
According to the Hindu American Foundation, "Yoga is a combination of both physical and
spiritual exercises, entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and transcendence
of desire. The ultimate goal is moksha, the attainment of liberation from worldly suffering
and the cycle of birth and rebirth."
Moksha. Is that why you take yoga classes?
"The form of yoga that is practiced in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a
single limb of yoga: asana (posture) . . . which is only a form of exercise to control, tone and
stretch muscles. Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate spiritual
goal.
Does your yoga instructor discuss the moral basis and spiritual goals of yoga?
"Even when Yoga is practiced solely in the form of an exercise, it cannot be completely
delinked from its Hindu roots...The Hindu American Foundation concludes from its research
that Yoga, as an integral part of Hindu philosophy, is not simply physical exercise . . . but is
in fact a Hindu way of life."
Some Hindus are concerned that yoga has been confiscated. Some Muslims are concerned
that Hindus are using yoga as a tool of conversion. Buddhists remain detached from the issue.
But some Christians are concerned that practicing yoga will lead to theological confusion.
Should Christians or Muslims or any non-Hindus practice yoga? If they practice the physical
aspects of the ancient spiritual discpline, should they call it yoga?
More importantly, if it reduces stress, why aren't we all praticing yoga?

Calm Down Christians, Yoga Is Not a Threat
Author: Philip Goldberg
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/calm-down-christians-
yoga_b_748644.html
In a widely circulated blog last week, Reverend Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, took aim at yoga. "When Christians practice yoga," he wrote,
"they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions
between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga." The essay got attention,
but it's really just the latest variation of an old story. In fact, Mohler is practically ecumenical
when compared to some of his predecessors.
Conservative Christians have been issuing lurid warnings about contamination from the East
for more than a century. Back in the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda, the first Hindu leader to
make a splash in the U.S., was mercilessly assailed on his Midwestern speaking tour. In
newspaper exchanges that would have made for great TV had the technology existed,
the erudite Vivekananda gave as good as he got, blasting Christian arrogance and
winning the hearts and minds of open-minded Americans in the process. Throughout the
first half of the 20th century, the gurus and yoga masters who trickled into the West were
greeted with alarm by xenophobes and self-appointed defenders of womanhood. Articles like
"American Women Going after Heathen Gods" stoked fears of innocent maidens being
seduced by dark-skinned pagans. In 1911 a broadside titled "The Heathen Invasion" claimed
that yoga "leads to domestic infelicity, and insanity and death." Come the late 1960s and
early 1970s, a tidal wave of popular gurus attracted followers and were accused of doing the
Devil's work. In 1975, for instance, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi appeared on Merv
Griffin's talk show (the Oprah of its day), protesters outside the studio carried signs like,
"Jesus Is the Lord, Not Maharishi."
Now the anxiety is directed at what has aptly been called modern postural yoga. Fifteen to 20
million Americans attend yoga classes each year, and naturally most of them are from
Christian backgrounds. On top of that, several varieties of Christian Yoga have cropped up.
This has caused consternation and sometimes alarm among certain clerics; Reverend Mohler
apparently is one of them.
I can't help thinking: What are they afraid of? Are they that insecure? Do they think so little
of their flock as to fear that they'll convert to Hinduism because they chant some
Sanskrit mantras, or say "Namaste" instead of goodnight, or hear some tidbits of Vedic
philosophy while stretching? Non-Christians absorb through osmosis countless doses of
Christian theology just by living in America. We sing Christmas carols like they're pop tunes.
Yet, despite the relentless exposure, there is no sign of mass conversion. One is tempted to
tell worried Christians to calm down with a few forward bends and some alternate nostril
breathing.
What makes the fear of stealth Hinduism especially bizarre is that the ancient tradition
has never even entertained the concept of conversion. Every Indian teacher who made a
mark in America has presented his or her teachings as more of a spiritual science than a
religion -- something students can try on for size and adapt to their own lives as they see fit,
whether for secular self-improvement or as a spiritual practice that need not interfere with
their own religions. This is, of course, especially true of contemporary yoga, which most
students see as a fitness or wellness regimen and many find compatible with their various
spiritual orientations.
Based on my research for my book, American Veda, the Christians and Jews who have
leaped body and soul into Hinduism or Buddhism were not seduced away from their ancestral
religions; they were already out the door and searching for alternatives. In fact, there is a far
more common trajectory among alienated seekers: they study Eastern ideas and then rethink,
reinterpret and reevaluate their own religions, and many of them return to active participation
on their own terms. The history of Americans whose Christianity was broadened and
deepened by exposure to Hinduism goes back to the days of Emerson and Thoreau and has
continued into modern times with millions of people, including leading thinkers such as
Joseph Campbell, a lifelong Catholic, and Huston Smith, the son of Methodist missionaries.
In fact, the current revival of Christian and Jewish mystical practices was triggered by the
popularity of Eastern meditation forms in the 1970s. (Centering Prayer is probably the best-
known example of that phenomenon.)
This should comfort most Christians, although it might alarm fundamentalists all the more.
The truth is, Christians who believe that theirs is the one true religion, that Jesus is the one
and only savior of all humankind and that the Bible is to be taken literally as God's only
revealed word, will always feel threatened by a spiritual tradition that recognizes many
pathways to the divine and many ways to engage in any particular religion. Old-fashioned
religious supremacists are under threat not from yoga but from the currents of history itself.
Reverend Mohler and his brethren may lament that, but those of us who welcome the rise of
genuine pluralism and the advent of a rational spirituality can only say Amen.
Yoga Is Not What You Think
Author: Ed and Deb Shapiro
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-and-deb-shapiro/yoga-is-not-what-you-
thin_b_739518.html
Many years ago Ed lived at the renowned Bihar School of Yoga in India where he became a
Swami, a yogic monk. He spent time in silence and trained in many various aspects of yoga.
He soon realized that yoga is far more than just a series of postures or mental exercises, but is
a system that guides every aspect of life, from the way we walk and talk to a state of inner
freedom.
In other words, yoga is not just learning how to stand on our head but is, as Swami
Satchidananda taught, actually learning how to stand on our feet. What was most profound
was seeing how, without love, yoga is dry; that unless we have an open heart and compassion
then there is no true yoga. We can know and read all the teachings, the sutras and the
Bhagavad Gita, but that is not enough to fully awaken.
When we complete the journey to our own heart, we will find ourselves in the hearts of
everyone else.
-- Father Thomas Keating, from our book, "Be The Change."
Last year we considered writing a book called "Can Yoga Save The World?" But when we
discussed it with other people many were quite puzzled and asked: how can physical postures
save the world? Which made us realize that modern-day yoga has, to a large extent, lost
touch with the magnificence and breadth of its original teachings. As a fellow Yogi said,
"Unfortunately in the West it does seem that yoga is forgetting its roots and becoming just
another cool new exercise."
Isaac, the manager at our local 24 Hour Fitness, told us that people think yoga is just sitting in
a room and humming and, more importantly, that men won't go to a class as they think it is a
woman's thing. This reminded Deb of when we were teaching in India and the participants
were all men. They were very surprised to find a woman teaching the class, as in India there
are far more men who practice.
There are various forms of yoga, just as there are different aspects to our nature, with a
wealth of teachings for each form. Here we describe the five main branches of yoga, as well
as Tantra yoga, which little is known about and is the most misunderstood. The purpose of all
the forms is to enable the practitioner to develop a balanced life through a healthy body and
mind, deep inner peace and, ultimately, to realize their true nature. For instance, through
Bhakti yoga we awaken universal love and compassion; Karma yoga is the path of selfless
action, where we surrender our own needs to the joy of service; and Jnana yoga is the path of
philosophy and reflection, where we use the intellect in order to transcend the intellect.
Raja yoga, also known as the King of Yoga, is the most comprehensive and experiential path,
and the one that can be most proven scientifically. Founded by the legendary Indian master
Patanjali, he outlined eight steps. In the first two steps are clear instructions on how to live an
ethical and caring life through practicing harmlessness (ahimsa), being truthful, not being
greedy nor indulging in addictions. It outlines the importance of having a healthy lifestyle,
and the need for self-reflection so that we become more aware of our own habits and mental
tendencies.
The third step is the practice of physical postures or asanas, which literally means seat. The
idea is to practice different postures so that our body is able to sit comfortably without
tension in meditation. In ancient times Hatha yoga was a separate science, with strenuous and
challenging postures and austere purification through cleansing techniques or hatha kriyas, as
well as the purification of the mind. Within the last 30 years many different types of Hatha
have appeared that mostly focus on asanas, with pranayama and relaxation, which are steps
three, four and five of Raja yoga.
The fourth step is pranayama, working with the life force or prana, with a variety of different
breathing techniques that calm the mind and body while increasing the inner energy. The fifth
step is the withdrawal of the mind from the senses, as practiced in deep inner conscious
relaxation (see Ed's CD, Yoga Nidra). Here we turn the mind within and do not identify with
the objects of the world, our desires or senses, but develop inner clarity.
Having gained some control over the body, released tension and developed calmness, the
sixth step teaches concentration, bringing our attention to the fluctuating mind with its
constant chatter, dramas and daydreams. By focusing on just one thing, such as a candle
flame (tratak), the mind is able to rest and become one-pointed. Next we can enter
meditation, where the mind becomes quiet and still. As the attachment to the ego lessons, so
our understanding of truth deepens.
Samadhi, or the highest happiness, is the final step of Raja yoga. This is a state of
consciousness where the individual self merges with the universal self, like a drop of water
merges with the ocean. The ultimate purpose of yoga is in order to awaken to this state.
Samadhi is the unconditional, omnipresent, omnipotent reality. It is our true, authentic nature.
Tantra yoga is a systematic way to make every aspect of life sacred, yet it is mistakenly
thought of as being primarily about sex. Sexuality is only a small part of tantric teachings, as
tantra also deals with very powerful and often negative emotions, such as fear and anger, that
are used to awaken the practitioner's dormant potential. What is being taught nowadays is not
traditional tantra. The original purpose, as with other forms of yoga, is to transcend the
individual ego to attain Self Realization.
We hope this has given a taste of the vastness and magnitude of this ancient teaching. Hatha
is certainly a fundamental part of yoga, but so also is meditation, doing good and being good!
May you enjoy this most wonderful gift handed down to us from the Yogi's and Yogini's of
ancient times.
What does yoga mean to you? Do comment below. You can receive notice of our blogs every
Tuesday by checking Become a Fan at the top.
The Subtle Body — Should Christians Practice Yoga?
Author:
Publication: Albertmohler.com
URL: http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/09/20/the-subtle-body-should-christians-practice-
yoga/?loc=interstitialskip
When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or
fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga.
The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral.
Some questions we ask today would simply baffle our ancestors. When Christians ask
whether believers should practice yoga, they are asking a question that betrays the
strangeness of our current cultural moment — a time in which yoga seems almost mainstream
in America.
It was not always so. No one tells the story of yoga in America better than Stefanie Syman,
whose recent book, The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, is a masterpiece of
cultural history. Syman, an engaging author who is also a fifteen-year devotee of yoga, tells
this story well.
Her book actually opens with a scene from this year’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
President Barack Obama made a few comments and then introduced First Lady Michelle
Obama, who said: “Our goal today is just to have fun. We want to focus on activity, healthy
eating. We’ve got yoga, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got Easter-egg
decorating.”
Syman describes the yoga on the White House lawn as “sanitized, sanctioned, and family-
friendly,” and she noted the rather amazing fact that a practice once seen as so exotic and
even dangerous was now included as an activity sufficiently safe and mainstream for
children.
In her words:
There certainly was no better proof that Americans had assimilated this spiritual
discipline. We had turned a technique for God realization that had, at various points in time,
enjoined its adherents to reduce their diet to rice, milk, and a few vegetables, fix their minds
on a set of, to us, incomprehensible syllables, and self-administer daily enemas (without the
benefit of equipment), to name just a few of its prerequisites, into an activity suitable for
children. Though yoga has no coherent tradition in India, being preserved instead by
thousands of gurus and hundreds of lineages, each of which makes a unique claim to
authenticity, we had managed to turn it into a singular thing: a way to stay healthy and
relaxed.
In her book, Syman tells the fascinating story of how yoga was transformed in the American
mind from a foreign and “even heathen” practice into a cultural reality that is widely admired
and practiced.
In telling this story, Syman documents the ties between yoga and groups or movements such
as the Transcendentalists and New Thought — movements that sought to provide a
spirituality that would be a clear alternative to biblical Christianity. She traces the influence
of leading figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Swami Prabhavananda, along with Pierre
Bernard and the now lesser-known Margaret Woodrow Wilson. Each of these figures played
a role in the growing acceptance of yoga in America, but most were controversial at the time
— some extremely so.
Syman describes yoga as a varied practice, but she makes clear that yoga cannot be fully
extricated from its spiritual roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. She is also straightforward in
explaining the role of sexual energy in virtually all forms of yoga and of ritualized sex in
some yoga traditions. She also explains that yoga “is one of the first and most successful
products of globalization, and it has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot
country.”
Reading The Subtle Body is an eye-opening and truly interesting experience. To a remarkable
degree, the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the
culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least,
at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see
the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are
called to meditate upon the Word of God — an external Word that comes to us by divine
revelation — not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.
Nevertheless, a significant number of American Christians either experiment with yoga or

become adherents of some yoga discipline. Most seem unaware that yoga cannot be neatly
separated into physical and spiritual dimensions. The physical is the spiritual in yoga, and the
exercises and disciplines of yoga are meant to connect with the divine.
Douglas R. Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and a respected specialist

on the New Age Movement, warns Christians that yoga is not merely about physical exercise
or health. “All forms of yoga involve occult assumptions,” he warns, “even hatha yoga,
which is often presented as a merely physical discipline.” While most adherents of yoga
avoid the more exotic forms of ritualized sex that are associated with tantric yoga, virtually
all forms of yoga involve an emphasis on channeling sexual energy throughout the body as a
means of spiritual enlightenment.
Stefanie Syman documents how yoga was transformed in American culture from an exotic
and heathen practice into a central component of our national cult of health. Of course, her
story would end differently if Americans still had cultural access to the notion of “heathen.”
The nation of India is almost manically syncretistic, blending worldviews over and over
again. But, in more recent times, America has developed its own obsession with syncretism,
mixing elements of worldviews with little or no attention to what each mix means. Americans
have turned yoga into an exercise ritual, a means of focusing attention, and an avenue to
longer life and greater health. Many Americans attempt to deny or minimize the spiritual
aspects of yoga — to the great consternation of many in India.
The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. The bare fact is that yoga is a spiritual
discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving
consciousness of the divine. Christians are called to look to Christ for all that we need and to
obey Christ through obeying his Word. We are not called to escape the consciousness of this
world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness, but to follow Christ in the way of
faithfulness.
There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the
main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose. Consider this
— if you have to meditate intensely in order to achieve or to maintain a physical posture, it is
no longer merely a physical posture.
The embrace of yoga is a symptom of our postmodern spiritual confusion, and, to our shame,
this confusion reaches into the church. Stefanie Syman is telling us something important
when she writes that yoga “has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country.”
Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice
that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually
polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?
A Yoga Manifesto
URL:
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ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set
Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats,
favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version.
Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly
adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40
initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.
You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in
December, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with
classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and
Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077.
And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of
a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing
locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual
calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell
Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.
Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal,
concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to
15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on
yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7
billion.
“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate
commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture
Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’
yoga teachers are the style gurus.”
Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that.
There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At
the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in
the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee
structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There
will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers ...
No ego no script no pedestals.”
One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who
is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly
the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.
LATE on an overcast Saturday earlier this month, just a little before sundown, Mr. Gumucio,
the founder of Yoga to the People, was sitting on the rooftop of his East Village studio,
surprisingly refreshed after a birthday party downstairs for his son, who had just turned 5.
Propped on the ledge on a round pillow, his wavy, shoulder-length hair framed by the urban
jungle backdrop of tar-covered roofs, Mr. Gumucio recounted his biography, and how it was
linked with that of Bikram Choudhury, perhaps the most famous name in yoga today.
“The idea for Yoga for the People came to me because of Bikram,” Mr. Gumucio said,
explaining that he worked for Mr. Choudhury for six years, from 1996 to 2002, sometimes
running teacher training for Bikram Yoga in Los Angeles, commuting from Seattle, where he
was living. He channels Mr. Choudhury, one suspects not for the first time, talking with a
raspy, slightly accented voice: “Boss, do me a favor, take everybody’s class and tell me what
you think.” Mr. Gumucio obliged, and when reporting back, mentioned one teacher whom he
didn’t like. Mr. Choudhury was not sympathetic. Just the opposite, telling Mr. Gumucio to, in
essence, suck it up and go back to the class — that the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but
with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told.
“You are responsible for your own experience.”
It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the
teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors? Too often, Mr.
Gumucio saw students stop doing yoga because they couldn’t practice with a favorite teacher.
Why not jettison that system? Why not just assign students to the next available teacher?
A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult
position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking
about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was
almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What
is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”
Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions
were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being
told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.”
Message learned. Yoga isn’t about a pristine environment — yogis can work downward dog
to downward dog, no matter where they are, even if in a crowded, unadorned studio. “Being
able to do yoga with a foot in your face, that is a really powerful practice,” Mr. Gumucio
said. He would take that no-frills philosophy with him when he left Bikram in 2002, and a
few years later (after a stint as a mediator in small claims court), in 2006, moved to New
York to open his own studio. “The first few months there were four or five people, but within
three months, it really took off,” he said.
Today. Mr. Gumucio has three studios in New York (including two hot-yoga studios that
charge $8 a class), one in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, Calif., and one to open later this
year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has just signed a lease in Chelsea and is considering
expanding to Austin, Chicago and Los Angeles. (But his philosophy of keeping a low profile
seems to be working: a question to many students about what they think of Mr. Gumucio
usually provokes little more than a blank stare and “Who?”)
High volume is the key to his business model — he says up to 900 people may go to a Yoga
to the People studio in a single day, with perhaps half of them paying at least something in
the form of a donation — as well as an important part of his overall philosophy. “I truly
believe if more people were doing yoga, the world would be a better place,” he said.
LAST Sunday morning, the sun streamed through the windows of the clean airy loft on the
second floor as the teacher, Haven Melynn, stood at the buzzer letting in students from the
street. On a metal stand sat an empty tissue box. Some students dropped a donation into the
box, others didn’t. The students fit in one studio, and at prime times, the teacher will send any
overflow up to the studio above, and then the studio above that.
Mats are rolled out, a few inches apart, with no one under the illusion that it may be an empty
class. The classroom holds about 60 students, and people are socializing, chatting about their
late nights, where to get falafels, and upcoming art exhibitions. Music plays quietly in the
background. No opening “Oms.” (“I like that there isn’t any chanting, or big spiritual
message,” Layan Fuleihan, a college student, said afterward. “I like that you make the class
what you want.”) Instead, Ms. Melynn started off with slow movements to warm up, sun
salutations, then quickly picked up the pace. Jammed, yes, but the yogis stuck to their own
mats, boundaries defined, during a sweat-producing vinyasa class, flowing and moving, as
the teacher cajoled people to make cathartic exhales of HAA-sss — all to the sounds of a play
list that includes Michael Jackson and the Dave Matthews Band.
Yoga to the People isn’t the only entity raging against the yoga machine. In New York, other
studios are popping up, offering affordable, if not entirely donation-based, yoga. Do Yoga
and Pilates, in TriBeCa, is donation-based; Tara Stiles, who has an iPhone app with Deepak
Chopra, has opened Strala Yoga in NoHo, offering multiple class levels for $10 each. Yoga
Vida NYC on University Place opened in January. Classes are small and it costs $10 drop in,
$5 for students. “Our studio isn’t better or worse, it’s just different,” says Hilaria Thomas,
yoga director of Yoga Vida NYC and a former instructor at Yoga to the People. “Different
energies.”
Better-known rivals in the yoga world don’t seem to take offense at this back-to-basic
movement. “I think the donation model is awesome,” says Baron Baptiste. “It’s a balancing
act. If someone has the means for what I’ll call ‘high end yoga,’ like going on exotic retreats,
they should enjoy it.” He adds, laughing, “I never know what the term rock star yoga teacher
means. Someone like Iyengar, one of the most famous teachers in the world, is he a rock star?
Is Iyengar the Bono of yoga?”
Mr. Gumucio knows his niche — “the ABC’s of yoga” — and that Yoga to the People has its
critics. Its detractors say that classes are too big, that there isn’t a lot of advanced alignment
breakdowns, that the exclamation HAA-sss isn’t the way you are supposed to breathe. He
mimics a naysayer, sniffing: “Oh, that’s not yoga!” He laughs and shrugs, a wordless: Who’s
to say what is yoga?
"Yoga has calmed Bebo": Payal Gidwani
Author: Sujata Chakrabarti
Publication: IBNlive.com
URL: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/yoga-has-calmed-bebo-payal-gidwani/134628-8-
66.html?from=rhs
Kareena and Saif do it together. And when Bebo’s best friend Amrita Arora joins in, it is a
fun threesome. We are talking about their common passion – yoga. The three friends credit
yoga expert Payal Gidwani for their state of happiness and physical well-being. In fact, Payal
was the one behind Kareena’s chiseled look in Tashan, Saif’s addiction to yoga and the once-
plump Rani Mukherji’s present svelte figure.
Payal has scooped together the best of her yoga training experiences and shaped them in the
form of her debut book titled XL to XS. In an intimate forward written by her most loyal
followers, Kareena mentioned, “‘Payal has helped me challenge my genes and transform my
body.” Saif wrote, “It is hard to be unhealthy once you start yoga.”
Her association with Kareena and her beau is so strong that Payal admits that when Kareena
was facing intense criticism for her size-zero image and reports of fainting on the film sets,
they decided to battle it together. She says, “Yoga has really helped to calm Bebo. It has
touched her soul and is her prayer. When the whole size zero debate started, it discredited my
work. Both, Bebo and I decided to take it in our stride and move on.” She adds emphatically,
“I just want to specify that Kareena was never on a juice diet. She must have been tired when
she fainted. That poor child had to enter the freezing waters wearing just a bikini. It can be
very tough.”
Payal however adds that training each of her Bollywood celeb clients is not as easy as
training Bebo and Saif. She laughs and says, “Amrita Arora just doesn’t like to work out. But
now, she has no choice. She has had a baby. She cries when I push her but she loves it in the
end.” The yoga expert adds, “Rani Mukherji used to cry too when I gave her leg workouts but
it sure has helped her.”
And Payal just isn’t popular with her celeb clients. Interestingly, she tells us that Sridevi’s
kids Jhanavi and Khushi were so enthusiastic about yoga that the actor now teaches them
yoga at home. In fact, Payal adds, “Maria Goretti’s five year-old can now do perfect
headstands. It’s just so beautiful.”
A Hindu View of 'Christian Yoga'
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/hindu-view-of-christian-
yoga_b_778501.html
While yoga is not a "religion" in the sense that the Abrahamic religions are, it is a well-
established spiritual path. Its physical postures are only the tip of an iceberg, beneath which is
a distinct metaphysics with profound depth and breadth. Its spiritual benefits are undoubtedly
available to anyone regardless of religion. However, the assumptions and consequences of
yoga do run counter to much of Christianity as understood today. This is why, as a Hindu
yoga practitioner and scholar, I agree with the Southern Baptist Seminary President, Albert
Mohler, when he speaks of the incompatibility between Christianity and yoga, arguing that
"the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine" is
fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching. This incompatibility runs much deeper.
Yoga's metaphysics center around the quest to attain liberation from one's conditioning
caused by past karma. Karma includes the baggage from prior lives, underscoring the
importance of reincarnation. While it is fashionable for many Westerners to say they believe
in karma and reincarnation, they have seldom worked out the contradictions with core
Biblical doctrines. For instance, according to karma theory, Adam and Eve's deeds would
produce effects only on their individual future lives, but not on all their progeny ad infinitum.
Karma is not a sexually transmitted problem flowing from ancestors. This view obviates the
doctrine of original sin and eternal damnation. An individual's karmic debts accrue by
personal action alone, in a separate and self-contained account. The view of an individual
having multiple births also contradicts Christian ideas of eternal heaven and hell seen as a
system of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Yogic liberation is here and now, in the
bodily state referred to and celebrated as jivanmukti, a concept unavailable in Christianity
and in an afterlife somewhere else. Ironically, the very same Christians who espouse
reincarnation also long to have family reunions in heaven.
Yogic liberation is therefore not contingent upon any unique historical event or intervention.
Every individual's ultimate essence is sat-chit-ananda, originally divine and not originally
sinful. All humans come equipped to recover their own innate divinity without recourse to
any historical person's suffering on their behalf. Karma dynamics and the spiritual practices
to deal with them, are strictly an individual enterprise, and there is no special "deal" given to
any chosen group, either by birth or by accepting a system of dogma franchised by an
institution. The Abrahamic religions posit an infinite gap between God and the cosmos,
bridged only in the distant past through unique prophetic revelations, making the exclusive
lineage of prophets indispensable. (I refer to this doctrine elsewhere in my work as history-
centrism.) Yoga, by contrast, has a non-dual cosmology, in which God is everything and
permeates everything, and is at the same time also transcendent.
The yogic path of embodied-knowing seeks to dissolve the historical ego, both individual and
collective, as false. It sees the Christian fixations on history and the associated guilt, as
bondage and illusions to be erased through spiritual practice. Yoga is a do-it-yourself path
that eliminates the need for intermediaries such as a priesthood or other institutional
authority. Its emphasis on the body runs contrary to Christian beliefs that the body will lead
humans astray. For example, the apostle Paul was troubled by the clash between body and
spirit, and wrote: "For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work
in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a
prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will
rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:22-24).
Most of the 20 million American yoga practitioners encounter these issues and find them
troubling. Some have responded by distorting yogic principles in order to domesticate it into
a Christian framework, i.e. the oxymoron, 'Christian Yoga.' Others simply avoid the issues or
deny the differences. Likewise, many Hindu gurus obscure differences, characterizing Jesus
as a great yogi and/or as one of several incarnations of God. These views belie the principles
stated in the Nicene Creed, to which members of mainstream Christian denominations must
adhere. They don't address the above underlying contradictions that might undermine their
popularity with Judeo-Christian Americans. This is reductionist and unhelpful both to yoga
and Christianity.
In my forthcoming book, The Audacity of Difference, I advocate that both sides adopt the
dharmic stance called purva-paksha, the practice of gazing directly at an opponent's
viewpoint in an honest manner. This stance involves a mastery of the ego and respect for
difference, and the hope is that it would usher in a whole new level of interfaith
colaborations.
God in America: The PBS Special and a Conversation With Stephen
Prothero
Author: Steve McSwain
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-mcswain/god-in-america-the-pbs-
sp_b_757098.html
"God is dead," said Nietzsche. Well, maybe somewhere, but not here, as the PBS special,
God in America makes abundantly clear.
I recently interviewed the chief editorial consultant to this PBS special, airing this week, Dr.
Stephen Prothero. As the distinguished professor of religion at Boston University, his
research and books have been widely read and respected, and perhaps none more so than
Religious Literacy. When I asked him about the point of the television series, Prothero
responded, "To entertain, of course. But, more importantly, to educate on the role God has
played in American history."
Given the recent survey that revealed that Atheists outperformed Protestants on their
knowledge of major world religions, including Christianity, more education can only be a
good thing. The cynic in me realizes that weary churchgoers might very well opt for Dancing
with the Stars or The Biggest Loser this week instead of God in America -- but hopefully
they'll join me in watching.
According to the PBS special, not only is God in America, but God, or belief in God, is
woven into the very fabric of American culture and politics. So much so, observes Prothero,
"we are no longer a country of two political parties but two political-religious parties." So, in
this, the Pope must be wrong, unless his recent remarks about the marginalization of religion
were meant to apply only to England or Europe. God is not becoming more marginalized in
America. If anything, it is the various religions, and their followers, that are marginalizing
themselves and none more so than Christians, Jews and Muslims.
The irony is this: America is religiously diverse. In Prothero's words, "In the supermarket of
religion, America has a bigger store." It's the Walmart of religion. Instead of a strength,
however, embraced by Americans as a distinction worth celebrating, many religious people in
America are threatened by it, even react against it. But, in the words of the Hans Kung,
"There will be no peace until there is peace among the religions." Nor will there be peace in
America. While most Americans believe in God and regard themselves as spiritual people,
my own feeling is millions of them are abandoning organized religion precisely because,
instead of embracing and cultivating the diversity that is America, the major religions want to
homogenize everyone and everything. It is this that causes division, even human destruction.
What is supposed to bring sanity to this world is itself the cause of most insanity. It is
madness.
If there's any one thing that's certain, God in America is a diverse God. And, if this
experiment we affectionately call "America" is to survive, this diversity must remain. It
cannot be otherwise. We've always had, in Prothero's words, "a prejudice against atheism."
Yet, the atheist has a home in America. To others, God will be a Cosmic Intelligence. To still
others, Messiah, or Savior, or Allah, or Yahweh, or Higher Power, and, yes, even a
Democrat, a Republican, a Socialist, and, perhaps now, a Tea Party Independent.
Stephen Prothero is right: "What this country needs more than anything else is religious
conversation that is civil and informed." But, listen to many religious leaders, and most
conversation is neither civil nor informed. To make statements, for example, as did Albert
Mohler, president of Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, that "yoga" -- and, by
implication, religions like Hinduism and Buddhism --"is a threat to Christianity," is not only
hurtful, but damaging. The bigger threat to all religions, including Christianity, is the
madness of such remarks.
Should religious diversity be something to fear? Not at all. Rather, it is a cause for
celebration, and as a very religious person myself I see this point in America history as a
momentous opportunity for dialogue, discussion and bridge-building.
Yoga Is Not What You Think
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-and-deb-shapiro/yoga-is-not-what-you-
thin_b_739518.html
Many years ago Ed lived at the renowned Bihar School of Yoga in India where he became a
Swami, a yogic monk. He spent time in silence and trained in many various aspects of yoga.
He soon realized that yoga is far more than just a series of postures or mental exercises, but is
a system that guides every aspect of life, from the way we walk and talk to a state of inner
freedom.
In other words, yoga is not just learning how to stand on our head but is, as Swami
Satchidananda taught, actually learning how to stand on our feet. What was most profound
was seeing how, without love, yoga is dry; that unless we have an open heart and compassion
then there is no true yoga. We can know and read all the teachings, the sutras and the
Bhagavad Gita, but that is not enough to fully awaken.
When we complete the journey to our own heart, we will find ourselves in the hearts of
everyone else.
-- Father Thomas Keating, from our book, "Be The Change."
Last year we considered writing a book called "Can Yoga Save The World?" But when we
discussed it with other people many were quite puzzled and asked: how can physical postures
save the world? Which made us realize that modern-day yoga has, to a large extent, lost touch
with the magnificence and breadth of its original teachings. As a fellow Yogi said,
"Unfortunately in the West it does seem that yoga is forgetting its roots and becoming just
another cool new exercise."
Isaac, the manager at our local 24 Hour Fitness, told us that people think yoga is just sitting in
a room and humming and, more importantly, that men won't go to a class as they think it is a
woman's thing. This reminded Deb of when we were teaching in India and the participants
were all men. They were very surprised to find a woman teaching the class, as in India there
are far more men who practice.
There are various forms of yoga, just as there are different aspects to our nature, with a
wealth of teachings for each form. Here we describe the five main branches of yoga, as well
as Tantra yoga, which little is known about and is the most misunderstood. The purpose of all
the forms is to enable the practitioner to develop a balanced life through a healthy body and
mind, deep inner peace and, ultimately, to realize their true nature. For instance, through
Bhakti yoga we awaken universal love and compassion; Karma yoga is the path of selfless
action, where we surrender our own needs to the joy of service; and Jnana yoga is the path of
philosophy and reflection, where we use the intellect in order to transcend the intellect.
Raja yoga, also known as the King of Yoga, is the most comprehensive and experiential path,
and the one that can be most proven scientifically. Founded by the legendary Indian master
Patanjali, he outlined eight steps. In the first two steps are clear instructions on how to live an
ethical and caring life through practicing harmlessness (ahimsa), being truthful, not being
greedy nor indulging in addictions. It outlines the importance of having a healthy lifestyle,
and the need for self-reflection so that we become more aware of our own habits and mental
tendencies.
The third step is the practice of physical postures or asanas, which literally means seat. The
idea is to practice different postures so that our body is able to sit comfortably without
tension in meditation. In ancient times Hatha yoga was a separate science, with strenuous and
challenging postures and austere purification through cleansing techniques or hatha kriyas, as
well as the purification of the mind. Within the last 30 years many different types of Hatha
have appeared that mostly focus on asanas, with pranayama and relaxation, which are steps
three, four and five of Raja yoga.
The fourth step is pranayama, working with the life force or prana, with a variety of different
breathing techniques that calm the mind and body while increasing the inner energy. The fifth
step is the withdrawal of the mind from the senses, as practiced in deep inner conscious
relaxation (see Ed's CD, Yoga Nidra). Here we turn the mind within and do not identify with
the objects of the world, our desires or senses, but develop inner clarity.
Having gained some control over the body, released tension and developed calmness, the
sixth step teaches concentration, bringing our attention to the fluctuating mind with its
constant chatter, dramas and daydreams. By focusing on just one thing, such as a candle
flame (tratak), the mind is able to rest and become one-pointed. Next we can enter
meditation, where the mind becomes quiet and still. As the attachment to the ego lessons, so
our understanding of truth deepens.
Samadhi, or the highest happiness, is the final step of Raja yoga. This is a state of
consciousness where the individual self merges with the universal self, like a drop of water
merges with the ocean. The ultimate purpose of yoga is in order to awaken to this state.
Samadhi is the unconditional, omnipresent, omnipotent reality. It is our true, authentic nature.
Tantra yoga is a systematic way to make every aspect of life sacred, yet it is mistakenly
thought of as being primarily about sex. Sexuality is only a small part of tantric teachings, as
tantra also deals with very powerful and often negative emotions, such as fear and anger, that
are used to awaken the practitioner's dormant potential. What is being taught nowadays is not
traditional tantra. The original purpose, as with other forms of yoga, is to transcend the
individual ego to attain Self Realization.
We hope this has given a taste of the vastness and magnitude of this ancient teaching. Hatha
is certainly a fundamental part of yoga, but so also is meditation, doing good and being good!
May you enjoy this most wonderful gift handed down to us from the Yogi's and Yogini's of
ancient times.
What does yoga mean to you? Do comment below. You can receive notice of our blogs every
Tuesday by checking Become a Fan at the top.
Yoga: A Dimension Beyond the Physical
Author: Sadhguru
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sadhguru/yoga-a-dimension-beyond-t_b_774489.html
The very fundamentals of spiritual longing are to transcend the limitations of the physical.
For an individual, the most intimate part of physical creation is his or her own body. So the
very basis of a spiritual process is to explore the possibilities of the body and to go beyond its
limitations.
Your physical body is designed and structured to function by itself without much of your
participation. You do not have to make your heart beat or your liver do all of its complex
chemistry. You do not even have to breathe; everything that is needed for your physical
existence to manifest itself is happening by itself.
The physical body is a self-contained, quite complete instrument. And if you keep it well, you
may go through your whole life without ever having a spiritual longing because the body is
so complete by itself. If you are fascinated by gadgets, there is no better gadget. Every little
thing you explore in the body is quite incredible. But it takes a certain amount of intelligence
and awareness for a person to see the limitations of this fantastic gadget. Gadgetry is fine,
sophistication of mechanism is fine, but still, the body does not take you anywhere, it just
springs out of the earth and flops back into the earth.
Can this be enough? If you look at it from the perspective of the body, it is quite enough. But
a dimension beyond the physical somehow got trapped in the physical. This dimension,
without which there is no life, has somehow been infused into the physical; life is one thing,
but the source of life is another. And the source of life is functioning in every plant, seed and
creature. In a human being, the source of life has taken on a higher presence. So for humans,
all the simple or even wonderful things that the physical offers at some point become
irrelevant.
Because the source of life has taken on a higher presence in a human being, one is in constant
struggle between the physical and that which is beyond the physical. Though you are
physical, you are also in contradiction with the physical. Though you have the
compulsiveness of the physical, you also have the consciousness of not being physical.
Any kind of method or spiritual process you employ to heighten the presence of that which is
the source of creation within you is referred to as "yoga." Such methods and processes
become necessary because of what seems to be a fundamental conflict between the instinct of
self-preservation and the longing to become boundless. These aspects are not against each
other, but when you look at it from the perspective of the physical, when your whole
perception is limited to the physical, they seem to be in conflict. One force belongs to the
physical; the other belongs to the dimension beyond the physical. If one has the necessary
awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if one does not have this awareness, if
one is identified with the physical, there appears to be a conflict between these two
fundamental forces.
If you go by the ways of the body, it knows only self-preservation and procreation. These are
the only two aspects of the body. If you go by the dimension beyond the body, the longing is
to become boundless. So the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to become
boundless come in conflict because of a strong identification with the physical. One force
helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other is supposed to take you beyond. Instead
of working in collaboration, they become in conflict. All the struggles of humanity in terms
of "should I be spiritual or materialistic" are just coming from this.
Unfortunately, when one tries to find physical expression to this longing to become
boundless, it usually leads to various types of insatiable activity (e.g., the pursuit of money,
power, love, pleasure, property); one always wants to be a little more than who one is right
now. So this is a never-ending longing, but this longing is not just seeking a little bit more, it
is seeking ultimate expansion. This is the longing of the limited to expand or evolve into the
unlimited.
- Sadhguru developed Isha Yoga as an invigorating process to transform oneself. For over 25
years, Isha Yoga programs have touched and transformed the lives of millions of people
around the world.
Are You a Yogi, a Bhogi or a Rogi?
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ed-and-deb-shapiro/are-you-a-yogi-bhogi-or-
a_b_757346.html#
When Ed trained as a yogi in India at the Bihar School of Yoga, his guru Swami Satyananda
asked him, "Are you a yogi, a bhogi or a rogi?" For a moment Ed was taken aback, confused,
not knowing what his teacher was saying: "I had traveled 10,000 miles from NYC, given up
all my worldly possessions to be a yogi, and now I was being asked what my motives were?
Wasn't yoga all about the higher life of unconditional love, service to others, inner peace and
happiness? Weren't yogis people who just did good?"
Then his guru explained that a bhogi is into sex, drugs and indulging the senses, and that a
rogi is a rascal or scoundrel, while a yogi is a seeker of truth. Ed knew that he was a
dedicated yogi, but he also knew he could have fit into all three categories. Luckily, as
Satyananda explained, each does not exclude the others. Although we may desire to be a
yogi, it usually happens gradually. So there are aspiring yogis who are still bhogis, and rogis
who will someday become yogis. For instance, in England we taught rogis in prison who
wanted to change their behavior through practicing yoga and meditation.
Ed's teacher was outrageous, unpredictable and unconventional. He taught the foundations of
classical yoga, but Ed never knew what he would say next: "In particular, Satyananda taught
how we need to experience life to its fullest in order to truly appreciate the spiritual path, and
he loved the rogis because he believed they would become great yogis. So when he asked me,
'Are you yogi, bhogi or rogi?' I knew what he was really asking: Are you a dedicated yogi
who cares about others or are you only concerned about yourself? Do you yearn and long for
truth or for the sensual world of pleasure and pain? In essence, do you want to be free? He
would always say, 'If you are passionate enough for truth, then you can't miss.'"
A bhogi is more into sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Ed was raised in the Bronx and lived a
typically indulgent life: "I won the NYC dance championship, danced on a NYC TV show,
and became a Latin dance teacher in Miami Beach. I hung out in the infamous Studio 54 with
all the beautiful people, and at Max's Kansas City where Blondie was a waitress. In other
words, I partied heavily and lived the life of a true bhogi!"
We all get into something like this at some point, but a bhogi, like most people in the world,
constantly tries to get satisfaction from everything external. "More, give me more!" is the
mantra. There is nothing particularly wrong with being a bhogi; to have desires and to enjoy
the pleasure of this world are natural, but the desire realm is endless and ultimately
unsatisfactory. Bhogis are like the hungry ghosts in the Tibetan Wheel of Life who have a
long but very thin throat and a huge belly. No matter how hard a hungry ghost tries, it can
never consume enough to satisfy its hunger. A bhogi looks for satisfaction in the world, never
having enough yet believing that the world can bring them everlasting happiness.
A rogi varies from being just a playful rascal to being dishonest, not very nice to others and
self-centered; their mantra is "It's all about me." In the ashram where Ed trained, the rogi was
the mischief- or troublemaker, someone who would steal milk from the kitchen even though
that meant the rest went without; who would use all the hot water in the winter so others had
cold showers; or who would cause dissension and unnecessary fights and blame everyone
else. A rogi thinks of himself or herself first, can hurt and prey on other people's weaknesses,
and thinks nothing of stealing or doing harm.
A yogi is someone who realizes that all the actions of both the bhogi and rogi are ultimately
fruitless, that satisfying cravings and indulgences is only short-lived. From this the desire for
something more genuine arises. So the yogi wants out, wants to be freed from the clutches of
the mind and the senses and realizes that true peace and happiness is within.
Swami Satchidananda would say how just one taste of this inner delight is more beautiful
than anything in this world. He told the story of the musk deer that lives in India and has a
beautiful smell in its anus, but searches the forest looking for that smell -- just like most of us
who search the world looking for happiness when it is within us all the time.
A rogi or a bhogi can become a yogi -- each is contained within the other. That is because the
true quality of a yogi is not just to be able to stand on his or her head, but to be able to stand
on his or her feet. And this is something every one of us can attain!
So are you a yogi, a bhogi or a rogi? Do comment below.

Hindu group stirs a debate over Yoga's soul
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/hindu-group-stirs-a-debate-over-yogas-soul-69061
*New York: * Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons
almost as numerous -- from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible
rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has
nothing to do with it.
But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world
of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies
every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labeled "Take Back Yoga," does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or
instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group
behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of
yoga's debt to the faith's ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from
figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has
dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert
Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that
yoga is Hindu -- and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians
who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate -- who owns yoga? -- has become an enduring topic of
chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many
consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient
drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further
claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars
who is based in Los Angeles. Mr. Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he
copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as "Bikram Yoga."
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first
described in Hinduism's seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet,
because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of "castes, cows
and curry," they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless,
spiritual "Indian wisdom."
"In a way," said Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation's co-founder, "our issue is that yoga has
thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand."
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
"Nobody owns yoga," she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting
her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. "Yoga is
not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of
yoga go back further than Hinduism itself."
Like Dr. Chopra and some religious historians, Ms. Desmond believes that yoga originated in
the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium B.C., long
before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written
description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been
written between the fifth and second centuries B.C.
The effort to "take back" yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January
on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that
promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub
in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled
the practice "from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity."
Dr. Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith
blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of "overt intellectual
property theft," made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had "offered up a
religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism."
That drew the attention of Dr. Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize
Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism
was too "tribal" and "self-enclosed" to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral -- or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by
yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the
debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American
culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
"All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading," she said. "But they are doing it
in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as 'Hinduism.'
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-
eminent voice for the country's two million Hindus, said Diana L. Eck, a professor of
comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-
Americans' interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as "the first
major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity," she said.
Dr. Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
"We started this, really, for our kids," said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation
Indian-American. "When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, 'Oh,
yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.' They say, 'What caste are you?' Or 'Do you pray to a
monkey god?' Because that's all Americans know about Hinduism."
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz
through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September
issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign,
if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga's "true history a mystery."
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr.
Uma V. Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in
Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians
in the United States. "My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the
professions," she said. "Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding
its voice, saying, 'Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be
acknowledged.' "
In the basement of the society's Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent
Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable "om." Via the lung power of 60
students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they
were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a
health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. "Yoga is part of
the tradition I come from," she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. "My parents are Hindu," she said. But
in matters of yoga, "I don't use that term."
Originally at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28yoga.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Comment
A debate started in April 2010 is going forward. There are, however, some who would still
like to try and disassociate yoga from Hinduism. I think Dr Deepak Chopra is one of
them. He seems to have completely ignored the two responses from Dr Shukla in the original
debate. Even here he is quoted as saying that the campaign to affirm the Hindu origin of the
yoga has to do with Hindu nationalism. Lisa Miller in her article, available at:
says: "But know where yoga came from and respect those origins. Then, when you chant
"om," it will resonate not only in the room but down through the ages."
I guess Dr Chopra will contend that Ms Miller is also a part of the Hindu naitonalist group!
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
Author: Paul Vitello
URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28yoga.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as
numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards
that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do
with it.
But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world
of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies
every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or
instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group
behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of
yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from
figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has
dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert
Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that
yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians
who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic
of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the
many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient
drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further
claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars
who is based in Los Angeles. Mr. Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he
copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as “Bikram Yoga.”
Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first
described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet,
because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of “castes, cows
and curry,” they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless,
spiritual “Indian wisdom.”
“In a way,” said Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, “our issue is that yoga has
thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.
“Nobody owns yoga,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting
her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. “Yoga is
not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of
yoga go back further than Hinduism itself.”
Like Dr. Chopra and some religious historians, Ms. Desmond believes that yoga originated in
the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium B.C., long
before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written
description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been
written between the fifth and second centuries B.C.
The effort to “take back” yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January
on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that
promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub
in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled
the practice “from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity.”
Dr. Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith
blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of “overt intellectual
property theft,” made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had “offered up a
religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.”
That drew the attention of Dr. Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize
Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism
was too “tribal” and “self-enclosed” to claim ownership of yoga.
The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by
yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.
Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the
debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American
culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.
“All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading,” she said. “But they are doing it
in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as ‘Hinduism.’ ”
The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-
eminent voice for the country’s two million Hindus, said Diana L. Eck, a professor of
comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-
Americans’ interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as “the first
major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity,” she said.
Dr. Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.
“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation
Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh,
yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a
monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”
With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz
through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September
issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign,
if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga’s “true history a mystery.”
The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr.
Uma V. Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in
Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.
A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians
in the United States. “My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the
professions,” she said. “Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding
its voice, saying, ‘Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be
acknowledged.’ ”
In the basement of the society’s Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent
Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable “om.” Via the lung power of 60
students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they
were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.
Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a
health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. “Yoga is part of
the tradition I come from,” she said.
But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. “My parents are Hindu,” she said. But
in matters of yoga, “I don’t use that term.”
Texas Baptist columnists disagree about yoga
Author: Bob Allen
URL: http://www.abpnews.com/content/view/5789/53/
Two Baptist panelists on a newspaper discussion blog had differing takes on recent
comments by a Southern Baptist leader urging Christians to avoid yoga.
Texas Faith, a regular feature of the Dallas Morning News website, invited panelists Oct. 19
to react to a column by Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
warning that "Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a
spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a 'post-Christian,
spiritually polyglot' reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?"
Sam Hodges, the reporter moderating the discussion, asked 12 panelists from various faith
traditions about whether they agree with Mohler. "Are there cautions you would give to
Westerners who want to borrow from non-Western religious traditions?" he asked. "Or
should everyone, including Al Mohler, just limber up and chill out?"
Jim Denison, theologian in residence for the Baptist General Convention of Texas and a
regular columnist for Associated Baptist Press, pointed out that the dictionary defines Yoga
with a capital "Y" as "a Hindu theistic philosophy." The lower-case form describes a series of
exercises "originally used to advance Yoga."
"Millions of Americans are apparently happy to adopt and adapt yoga with little or no
knowledge of Yoga," Denison, president of the Center for Informed Faith, wrote. "But is this
a good idea?"
Jim Denison
"Albert Mohler doesn't think so," he continued. "In his view, 'When Christians practice yoga,
they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions
between their Christian commitments and their practice of yoga.'"
"While I disagree with Dr. Mohler on a variety of subjects, I find myself persuaded by his
logic here," Denison said. "Christianity and Hinduism are contradictory worldviews. Jesus
taught that 'whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life' (John 3:16).
Hinduism embraces reincarnation, thousands of gods, and eventual 'moksha' whereby one is
absorbed into Brahman and ceases to exist. If one is right, the other is wrong."
George Mason, senior pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, meanwhile, observed that
Mohler "seems to be on the prowl these days to purge all impurities from Christian practice."
"The problem is that Christianity is always and has always been at work adjudicating spiritual
reality rather than summarily rejecting everything it doesn't create itself," Mason said.
Mason compared Mohler's logic to the historical "bonfire of the vanities" in 15th-century
Italy, when a Dominican priest named Girolamo Savonarola ordered the burning of objects --
including books and art -- in Florence he deemed as tempting people to sin.
"Christianity has long flourished by critical engagement with rather than a priori rejection of
other spiritual practices than those originating within the Christian faith," Mason said.
"Should Alcoholics Anonymous be rejected as a recovery program because some might take
a Higher Power to mean something other than the Father of Jesus Christ?"
"Spiritual practices like yoga can be infused with Christian meaning without opening the door
to New Age thinking," Mason said. "It requires knowing what one believes and why, but
Mohler's alternative of rejecting everything outside his world view of the Christian faith is
not a healthy or faithful approach to a God who is also at work in the world outside of the
Christian community."
Other columnists included Amy Martin, executive director of Earth Rhythms and
writer/editor for Moonlady Media.
"Mohler strikes me as having little faith in his faith," Martin commented. "Atheists by the
millions gather in China every morning for tai chi, an ancient practice arising from Taoism,
and have managed to stay godless. I'm sure Christians can practice yoga and remain faithful
while gaining immense health and emotional benefits that, frankly, only a cruel person would
deny them."
Martin said Mohler "expresses a fear of the body that has too long dominated Christianity."
"This opinion holds that being in touch with the body, expressing joy and spirituality through
the physical, is counter to being a person of faith," she said. "This unfounded but deep-seated
assumption has shown up in more than just a fear of yoga, reaching its natural extremes as
hatred towards homosexuals and distrust of women."
- Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

Hinduism owns yoga? US debates
Intro: Group of Indian Americans says yes; opponents call it Hindu nationalism
Author: NYT, New York
Publication: DNA
Dated: November 29, 2010
Yoga is practised by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as
numerous. religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.
But a group of Indian Americans has ignited a fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by
mounting a campaign to acquaint westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single
yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labelled take back yoga, does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or
instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The Hindu American foundation, a small but
increasingly influential group behind it, suggests people must become more aware of yoga’s
debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
That suggestion has drawn a flurry of strong reactions. Deepak Chopra, the new age writer,
has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R Albert
Mohler Jr, president of the southern Baptist theological seminary, has said he agrees that
yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians
who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic
of chatter in yoga web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the
many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
Organisers of the take back yoga effort say that the philosophy of yoga was first described in
Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion
has been stereotyped in the west as a polytheistic faith of “castes, cows and curry”, they say,
most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual “Indian
wisdom”.
“In a way,” said Dr Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, “our issue is that yoga has
thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”
For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Brooklyn, the
talk of branding and ownership is bewildering. “Nobody owns yoga,” she said. “Yoga is not a
religion. it is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go
back further than Hinduism itself.”
Like Chopra and some religious historians, Desmond believes that yoga originated in the
vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium BC, long before
the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description
of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, believed to have been written between the fifth and second
centuries BC.
The effort to “take back” yoga began with a scholarly essay posted in January on the website
of the Hindu American foundation, a minneapolis-based group. The essay lamented a
perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that magazines and studios had assiduously
decoupled the practice “from Hinduism that... gave forth this immense contribution to
humanity”.
Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the “on faith” blog
of the Washington post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of “overt intellectual
property theft”, made possible by generations of yoga teachers who had “offered up a
religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism”.
Does Hinduism own Yoga?
- Ashok Chowgule
On April 18, 2010, Dr Aseem Shukla wrote an article titled “The theft of yoga”, on the
website of Newsweek. It is available at:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/aseem_shukla/2010/04/nearly_twenty
_million_people_in.html
The essential point is that there is an attempt by some of the practitioners of Yoga to delink
its origin away from Hindu, even going to the extent of specifically denying that Hinduism
has anything to do with it. It is understood that a magazine relating to Yoga said that it is
disassociating Hinduism from Yoga because of the supposed baggage that Hinduism carries.
And then we have people like Dr Deepak Chopra who say that the linking of Yoga with
Hinduism is a based on ‘a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism’.
On the other hand, many members of Christian hierarchy are warning their members that
even a supposed de-Hnduised Yoga is dangerous, because it, too, would lead the followers of
Christianity away from the religion.
This reminds me of a story. In a small town in India, a person decided to open up a Bar,
which was right opposite to a Temple. The Temple & its congregation started a campaign to
block the Bar from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business. Work
progressed.... However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later,
a strong lightning struck the Bar and it was burnt to the ground.
The temple folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the Bar owner sued the
Temple authorities on the grounds that the Temple through its congregation & prayers was
ultimately responsible for the ill fate of his dream project, either through direct or indirect
actions or means. In its reply to the court, the temple vehemently denied all responsibility or
any connection that their prayers were reasons to the bar's burning down. As the case made
its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented: "I
don't know how I'm going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, we have a
bar owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire temple and its devotees
that doesn't."
Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that Hinduism carries with it certain baggage. The right
approach is to first determine that this supposed baggage has any merit. If they do, then
surely it would be in the interest of all to deal with the baggage, rather than sweep it under the
carpet. If they do not, or some of the supposed baggage is unfairly tagged, then the right
thing to do is to explain to the people that the supposed baggage has no merit, rather than shy
away from the problem.
About the charge of ‘Hindu nationalism’. This is hurled on all and sundry and not just those
who wish to acknowledge the Hindu origin of Yoga. If text-books are sort to be corrected, if
the glory of the Vedas is to be projected, if the perversions (like sexual connotations of Shri
Ganesh) is objected to, etc., every time the charge is brought to the table. The objective is to
ensure that the discussions are not held at a rational level, but to terrorise the opponent into an
intellectual submission.
However, let us deal ith the main topic, namely does Hinduism own Yoga. First, it should be
understood that this ownership is not in material terms. That is, no one will have to pay
Hindus anything if they wish to practice Yoga. All this being asked is that the source from
which Yoga comes is recognized. Is this asking too much?
Another important point being made is that divesting Yoga from Hinduism will take away
much of the value of Yoga for the practitioner. Yoga is not just a set of workout for the
physical parts of the body. It opens up the mind to dwell on various matters relating to
spirituality. And to help the person in this exercise, it would be necessary to go the Hindu
texts. He can, of course, figure what is written in the texts by himself. But would that not be
re-inventing the wheel?
The highlighting of the spiritual aspects of the benefits of Yoga can only be done by situating
Yoga within Hinduism. The problem for many in this line of inquiry is that one is hampered
by language – Hinduism is not a religion in the Semitic sense. This too needs to be explained
by the teachers of Yoga, so that the practitioner does not exhibit any reluctance to take the
necessary steps.
More than a hundred years ago, Swami Vivekanand said: “We are Hindus. I do not use the
word Hindu in any bad sense at all, nor do I agree with those that think there is any bad
meaning in it. In old times, it simply meant people who lived on the other side of the Indus;
today a good many among those who hate us may have put a bad interpretation upon it, but
names are nothing. Upon us depends whether the name Hindu stands for everything that is
glorious, everything that is spiritual, or whether it will remain a name of opprobrium, one
designating the down-trodden, the worthless, the heathen. If at present the word Hindu means
anything bad, never mind; by our action let us be ready to show that this is the highest word
that any language can invent. It has been one of the principles of my life not to be ashamed of
my own ancestors. I am proud to call myself a Hindu, I am proud that I am one of your
unworthy servants. I am proud that I am a countryman of yours, you the descendants of the
most glorious Rishis the world ever saw. Therefore have faith in yourselves, be proud of your
ancestors, instead of being ashamed of them. I am one of the proudest men ever born, but let
me tell you frankly, it is not for myself, but on account of my ancestry.”
It is time for all to re-dedicate themselves to the essential meaning behind what the Swami
has said, and stand up to the intellectual terrorism that is being inflicted on Hinduism. That
will be a sign of a true Yogi.
From the Guardian: It is wrong to deny that yoga has its origins in
Hinduism
Author:
Publication: Hafsite.org
URL: http://www.hafsite.org/Guardian_wrong_to_deny_yoga_origins_in_Hinduism
Professor Ramesh Rao, HAF's Human Rights Coordinator, provides his perspective on much
anticipated verdict on the dispute in Ayodhya, India. Please post your comments directly on
the Guardian
A 2002 survey of Americans showed that more than half the population expressed an interest
in practicing yoga, and a 2004 news report claimed that there were nearly 15.5 million yoga
practitioners in the country. Nearly 77% of the practitioners of yoga are women, and half of
the yoga enthusiasts have a college degree.
In the small college at which I teach in rural Virginia, at which participation in at least one
form of physical education is required, yoga classes are the first to fill up – not aerobic dance,
not fitness walking, and certainly not weight-lifting. Yoga Journal, the most popular
magazine for yoga enthusiasts, now has a paid circulation of 350,000 and a readership of
more than 1,000,000. Yoga has indeed been embraced by Americans.
But as yoga became more popular, and as the industry grew to be worth nearly six billion
dollars, and as a variety of savvy marketers begin branding their "special" yoga techniques, it
was hard not to notice that few yoga teachers and journals mentioned the origins of the
practice and its connection to Hinduism. Yoga was "secularised" to rid it of any taint of a
"pagan" tradition. The practice, the savvy marketers claimed, was "a spiritual path, but not a
religious one", to calm the committed Christian who wanted to hang on to Jesus while doing
the "surya namaskara" (obeisance to the Sun).
Hindus are an accepting lot, and they believe that each should be able to follow whatever
spiritual path they chose, according to one's "ishta" (desire) and "adhikara" (qualifications).
And as one scholar elegantly put it, Hinduism itself was "a rolling conference of conceptual
spaces, all of them facing all, and all of them requiring all", enabling it to accommodate
everyone in this grand cosmic munificence, label or no label.
Alas, we love to categorise, and lay claim to God, goodness, and "truth", and when those
making monopolistic claims to these began to dominate the world, and spread the idea of
"religion" – branding, marketing, and enlarging market share of souls harvested and
converted – we found the people of India (the new name for the old Bharatavarsha) began to
be labeled "Hindus" (an umbrella term to identify all those who adhered to Indian
spiritual/religious traditions, not including Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism) and their vast
"rolling conference of conceptual spaces" got neatly pigeon-holed as a religion – a religion,
very soon marked and demonised as "heathen", "pagan", "kafr", and so on.
Thus, when a neophyte yoga student, hanging on to Jesus, anxiously queried, "Is yoga part of
Hinduism?", the savvy marketer claimed that the origins of yoga were lost in myth and
mystery and that there "was no indication that it was ever part of an organised religion",
accomplishing two things simultaneously – reifying Hinduism as a "religion" in the sense of
"Abrahamic religions", and denying it as the fount and foundation of yoga.
Joining these local marketers were the Indian-origin marketers, with the lead being taken by
the savvy Deepak Chopra – the glib, red-sneakers-and-red-designer-glasses-wearing
Hollywood guru who would make PT Barnum proud. Thus, when Aseem Shukla of the
Hindu American Foundation wrote an essay in The Washington Post in April this year
arguing that there had been a deliberate attempt to represent yoga as separate from its origins
in Hinduism, Chopra came pouncing. Ironically, he was joining hands with those demonising
Hinduism and disemboweling it of its grand traditions. And when The New York Times, in a
front-page article, recently commended the Hindu American Foundation for its intelligent
activism, the nay-sayers screamed: "Hindu fundamentalists!"
But what do Hindus, not the deracinated variety, actually want? It is simply to urge the world
to acknowledge that yoga has its roots in the millennia-old Indian traditions now known as
Hinduism. There is no demand that those who do yoga profess any attachment to Hinduism,
let alone become Hindus! There is no tithe to be paid, no conversion sought, no allegiance to
a land and its people demanded. Hindus will gladly acknowledge that some modern versions
of yoga that focus mostly on shaping and controlling the body do have some Western
innovators, though few religion and yoga scholars will deny the fact that yoga spread in the
west because of the work of great teachers like T Krishnamacharya, K Pattabhi Jois, and BKS
Iyengar – all doing their morning and evening prayers to their chosen Hindu deities, and
proudly wearing their Hindu identity on their foreheads.
What should also be acknowledged is that most of the yoga that is taught and practiced in the
West is "hatha yoga", and that the focus on the body was only a very minor aspect of yoga
delineated by the great compiler of the yoga aphorisms, Patanjali. In fact, of the 196 sutras in
Patanjali's Yogasutras, only three focus on the body. The primary aim of yoga, Patanjali
stressed in the second sutra, is to still the mind for a transformation of consciousness.
Yoga is a complete psychological system, with clear and definite answers to explain the
human condition and relieve us of our psychological burdens. Alas, in the modern,
westernised, noise-making world, the argument presented by Hindus is under attack from the
professional anti-Hindu brigades, homegrown and foreign, whose aim is to proclaim yoga as
"anaatha" – an orphan.
Views expressed here are the personal views of Prof. Ramesh Rao, and do not necessarily
represent those Hindu American Foundation or Longwood University.
The Origins and Ownership of Yoga
Author: Suhag A. Shukla
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suhag-a-shukla-esq/the-origins-and-
ownership_b_791129.html?view=print
Of course no one owns yoga. Nor do you have to be Hindu to practice and benefit from yoga.
Pretty obvious one would think, but not so for the many perturbed Western yogis who have
entered the now global debate that the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) started about the
Hindu origins of yoga. A letter to the editor of Yoga Journal, a scholarly position paper, the
blog battle between HAF's Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra on the Washington Post's On
Faith and one New York Times front-page story later, folks still don't get that it's not at all
about ownership, but about origins. It's not about branding, but about
acknowledgement. It's not about conversion, but about self realization. It's about
understanding that yoga is but one of Hinduism's great contributions to humanity.
Perhaps some of the confusion is a result of the many ingredients of our modern lives -- mass
marketing, crass consumerism, the worldwide Web and a Twitter-soundbite culture. It's a
toxic cocktail that can lead to quick and faulty conclusions. But luckily there is an antidote --
directly from the source, which is HAF in this case.
"Take Back Yoga" is only the first half of HAF's campaign slogan, and the phrase may
very well mislead one to conclude that HAF is asserting proprietorship. But a quick trip
to HAF's website reveals the complete title of the campaign, "Take Back Yoga --
Bringing to Light Yoga's Hindu Roots," and also the campaign's history, purpose and
catalyst.
It started back in 2008, with the Yoga Journal. The summer issue was not particularly
different from any other -- the mantra of the month, the sacred Hindu symbol, Om, sprinkled
throughout the magazine, advertisements for products like bottom-shaping yoga pants and
sticky yoga toe socks, and, of course, feature articles offering advice, insight and wisdom on
yoga. What we did not find, however, was any reference to Hinduism. In fact, Buddhism,
Christianity and Judaism were more overtly associated with the discipline.
It was as if the Yoga Journal, as well as much of the $6 billion yoga industry, had agreed to
some sort of unwritten covenant to use code words rather than what they deemed the
unmarketable "H-word." Vedic, yogic, Sanskritic, ancient Indian and Eastern were the
pseudonyms of choice to source key elements of Hindu teachings: bhakti, karma and moksha,
even the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism's most revered scriptures.
After writing a letter to the editor, HAF's suspicions were confirmed when, during a follow
up phone call, the young woman answering said, "Yeah, they [the editors] probably avoid it
[Hinduism]. Hinduism does, like, you know, have a lot of baggage." Really? Hinduism has
baggage and the world's other religions don't?
As an advocacy group seeking to provide a progressive Hindu American voice and to

promote a better understanding of Hinduism, we were compelled to act. And so started a
quest to bring awareness to the Hindu roots of yoga and, in turn, gain acknowledgement of
yoga as one of Hinduism's great gifts. Hindus across America, including my school-aged
boys, face ridicule, discrimination and uninvited proseltyization as a result of caricature,
misinformation and false judgment about our "religion." Idol worshipper, cows, caste, dowry,
many gods (lower case "g") -- these are the terms that more commonly define Hinduism in
Western popular culture. Thanks to Deepak Chopra, we can add "one-eyed" and "tribal" to
the list too. At the same time, 15 million Americans, from all religions and no religion, are
turning to the power and healing benefits of yoga; some are even going beyond the physical
to study Vedanta and the Gita or other "yogic" texts.
Deepak Chopra's take is different, and absolutely wrong -- at least in what he has articulated
here on the Huffington Post. He is going beyond delinking yoga from Hinduism; he is
actually proffering to delink the Vedas from Hinduism! Even America's sixth grade social
studies textbooks, flawed as they are, accurately state that the Vedas are Hinduism's holiest
scriptures. And Chopra's argument that Shiva cults preceded Hinduism? Well, that is as
baffling an argument as would be to hold that the Buddha's eightfold path preceded
Buddhism as the Buddha cult was not yet a formalized religion.
Sadly, instead of using his position of influence to foster understanding of Hindu

traditions, Chopra too has succumbed to the H-word aversion. He did not celebrate the
Hindu origins of Transcendental Meditation as its spokesman, just as his New Age avatar
repackages Vedic (read: Hindu) philosophy for empire profits. He writes books on Buddha,
Jesus and Mohammed and then specifies to Larry King that he is not a Hindu but an Advaita
Vedantin (Advaita Vedanta is one of the most influential schools of Hindu philosophy). See a
pattern of denial here?
Chopra is not alone though -- there have been many a Hindu guru in the last century, who in
their desire to share that which they believed could enrich others, that which could be
articulated in universal, SBNR (spiritual but not religious) terms, or that which could
generate a pretty penny, have opted out of using the term Hindu. But call it what you may,
Sanatana Dharma, Vedic traditions and Hinduism are synonymous. Hindus have long
self-referred to our way of life as Sanatana Dharma -- the Eternal Law or Way which has no
beginning and no end in history. And while "Hindu" may be the 12th century Persian
abstraction referring to the Indic civilization existing on the banks of the Indus river, the
diverse followers of Sanatana Dharma include those who accept the sanctity of the Vedas and
other Hindu scripture. They believe in an all-pervasive formless or formed Divine; they
believe in the laws of karma, dharma and reincarnation; they tread the various yoga paths
(jnana, raja, karma or bhakti); and they accept that the ultimate goal of existence is
enlightenment (moksha).
Dr. Chopra is absolutely correct in affirming that Yoga is ultimately about achieving
enlightenment. But to profiteering yogis such as he, please remember that on the road to
moksha there are still the signposts of satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing) and
aparigraha (abstention from greed) guiding the way.
Who Owns Yoga?
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/who-owns-yoga_b_790078.html
Newspapers used to keep morgues of old clippings (I suppose the Web has largely replaced
them), and I had the feeling of being dusted off, if not revived from the dead, when my name
appeared in a New York Times article about the current kerfuffle over Yoga. The Hindu
American Foundation is as mad about the "brand" running out as they were a year or two ago,
and their claim is just as unfounded. There was bread and wine before the Last Supper, flies
and frogs before the curses that Jehovah visited on Egypt and Yoga before Hinduism.
The text usually cited as the definitive source for Yoga is Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, but the
familiar poses that are part of Hatha Yoga are generally traced to Shiva cults, the god Shiva
being its founder. The problem that is being swept aside is that exact dates cannot be assigned
to any of these texts. Nevertheless, what is certain is that ancient Vedic culture, which lays
claim to being the first written spiritual tradition in the world, is much older than the loosely
formed religion, Hinduism, that sprang from it. The spiritual practice of Yoga was part of
Vedic culture long before Hinduism. In the interests of generosity, maybe we should refer to
a famous Sanskrit aphorism, Vasudev Kutumbukam: "the world is my family." Yoga is
India's gift to the world, and it would be a shame to bring back the phrase Indian giver, now
banished from polite conversation, with a new meaning.
I don't know to what extent the "Take Back Yoga" campaign is an innocent attempt by the
Indian diaspora to get some respect. I sympathize with them taking offense at the "caste,
cows and curry" stereotype. Polish Americans want us to know that they are a group with
dignity who are offended by Polish jokes; Italian Americans hate the Mafia stereotype. I
suppose the price of a pluralistic society like America's is that it's an equal-opportunity
offender. Indians would do well to lighten up. With a burgeoning economy at home and a
return to importance on the world stage, Indian pride is getting more than its share of strokes.
Having written about spirituality for many years, I'd like to point out that the whole point of
Yoga is to achieve enlightenment, and that the most revered practitioners, whether known as
yogis, swamis or mahatmas, transcend religion. In fact, even if Yoga were granted a patent or
copyright by the U.S. Patent Office, there is no denying that enlightenment has always been
outside the bounds of religion. That's where the spiritual path leads, not into the arms of
priests or Yoga instructors. Before Hindu Americans complain about Hatha Yoga being
deracinated, they might want to promote the ideas that are the very essence of Indian
spirituality, which preceded Shiva, Krishna, cows and castes. The nobility of Indian
spirituality elevates Hinduism to a unique place in the world, something that religious
partisans forget all too quickly.
Deepak Chopra is the author of "Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet" and more than 50
books translated into over 35 languages, including other numerous New York Times
bestsellers in both the fiction and nonfiction categories.
Chopra's "Wellness Radio" airs weekly on Sirius/XM Stars, Channel 102 and 55, focusing on
the areas of success, love, sexuality and relationships, well-being, and spirituality. He is
founder of The Chopra Foundation.
Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century
and credits him as "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine." Learn more at
www.deepakchopra.com.
Yoga: Reaffirming the Transformational Practice's Hindu Roots
Author: Philip Goldberg
Date: May 27, 2010
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/yoga-reaffirming-the-
tran_b_589652.html
Recently, a debate played out on the Washington Post's On Faith blog between Aseem
Shukla, a physician who heads the Hindu American Foundation, and Deepak Chopra. The
argument, which was also reported in Newsweek, began with Shukla's essay, "The Theft of
Yoga," in which he lamented that the phenomenal popularity of yoga has been achieved at a
cost, namely its disconnection from the tradition that gave it birth. "Yoga originated in
Hinduism," he wrote. "It's disingenuous to say otherwise. A little bit of credit wouldn't be a
bad thing, and it would help Hindu Americans feel proud of their heritage." Chopra countered
on historical grounds -- which Shukla later refuted -- and on the grounds that modern yoga is
one response to the need for a secularized spirituality that transcends religious forms.
It seems like an almost comical irony: yoga proponents, including many of Indian descent,
disassociate yoga from Hinduism, while many Hindus wish to claim it. In fact, it is a tribute
to the tremendous depth and complexity of India's spiritual heritage that both sides can be
considered correct. The same teachings can be understood in spiritual/religious terms and in
secular/scientific terms.
The problem is largely one of language. "Hinduism" is, by definition, a religious term. It was
coined by British imperialists to describe the dominant spirituality of the "Hindus," which is
what the inhabitants of the Indus River region were called by earlier invaders. What we call
Hinduism is actually so multifaceted that it makes the sects of Christianity look uniform by
comparison. It has also been the victim of centuries of misconceptions (e.g., that it is
polytheistic) thanks to mendacious colonists, condescending missionaries, and ordinary
ignorance. Further complicating the matter, the everyday religion of India is as different from
the teachings that caught on in America as everyday Judaism is from Kabbalah or as Sunday
morning Christianity is from the mysticism of Meister Eckhart or John of the Cross. As a
result, many people prefer not to use the term Hinduism, favoring instead Sanatana Dharma
(the original term, commonly translated as "Eternal Path"), or phrases such as "Vedic
tradition" or "Indian philosophy." All of this means that you can argue for or against the
premise that yoga stems from Hinduism, depending on how you define "Hinduism" and
interpret its history.
None of this is new. About 200 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's greatest
homegrown philosopher, read the first translations of Hindu texts to land in Boston Harbor.
While he made explicit his debt to Vedic philosophy, he blended those ideas with other
ingredients in his Transcendentalist stew, and the individual flavors are not always easy to
identify. That kind of adaptation has been going on ever since.
The first Indian-born guru to grace our shores was Swami Vivekananda, the star of the
landmark Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893. In the face of attacks from Christian
leaders, Vivekananda patiently explained and fiercely defended Hinduism. But, when he
created an organization to carry on his teachings, he named it the Vedanta Society, not the
Hinduism Society. It was an accurate term, since Vedanta was the component of Hinduism
that he emphasized, but it was also an expedient one, since it did not carry religious baggage
that might cause people to think he was out to convert them. To this day, there are monks and
nuns in Vivekananda's lineage who refuse to call themselves Hindus, while others happily
accept the label.
A few decades later, Paramahansa Yogananda made similar choices. He named his
organization the Self-Realization Fellowship, not the Hindu Fellowship, and the title of his
enormously popular memoir was Autobiography of a Yogi, not Autobiography of a Hindu.
Then came the perfect storm of the Sixties, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (with the help of
the Beatles) ushered Transcendental Meditation into the mainstream and convinced scientists
to study the practice. His organization was an educational non-profit, not a religious one, and
his rendering of Vedanta was called the Science of Creative Intelligence.
Like those three seminal figures, virtually every guru and yoga master who came to the West
made similar adaptations. They expounded one component of Hinduism or another, but in a
universal context, and they were circumspect about using the word Hinduism. They offered a
spiritual science -- a science of consciousness, if you will -- and not a religion as such.
Therefore, Americans were free to utilize the teachings on their own terms, whether religious
or secular. Millions took them up on it. In the process American spirituality changed, and so
did health care, psychology, and other fields of endeavor.
I just devoted about 400 pages to analyzing this history for a book that will be published in
November. Its title is American Veda, not some variation on Hinduism in America. My
publisher (Doubleday) and I made that decision because: 1) if Hinduism were in the title,
potential readers might think it is only about the religion practiced in Hindu temples, and 2)
what influenced American culture was a combination of the philosophy of Vedanta and the
mental and physical practices of yoga, not the everyday Hinduism that most people associate
with exotic rituals and colorful iconography.
From the perspective of Hindus who are proud of their great heritage, such choices are
unfortunate. Advocates like Dr. Shukla are doing exactly what ought to be done to
rehabilitate the image of Hinduism, and I for one hope they succeed. At the same time, we
probably would not be having this conversation at all if the influential gurus had not made the
choices they did. How many Americans would have taken up meditation or yoga if those
practices had been offered to them as Hinduism?
I look forward to the day when people like me can use the term Hinduism without fear of
being misconstrued. In the meantime, it is incumbent upon yoga proponents to give credit
where it is due, not just because India deserves it after centuries of exploitation, but to keep
the spiritual and philosophical foundation of yoga in the foreground. If those deeper elements
are lost and yoga comes to be seen as just another fitness exercise, we will fail to take full
advantage of its gifts. Most veteran yoga teachers recognize this, which puts them on the
same page as the Hindu advocacy groups -- except for that pesky issue of nomenclature. I
would urge them all to not let arguments over terminology overshadow what really matters:
the depth and authenticity of the teachings. Putting substance over form would be in keeping
with the most fundamental premise of Hinduism and the Vedic tradition that predates that
term by centuries: "Truth is one, the wise call it by many names."
Deepak Chopra Does it Again!
Author:
Publication: Sandeepweb.com
URL: http://www.sandeepweb.com/2010/12/03/deepak-chopra-does-it-again/
Guess who can beat Deepak Chopra’s record? Only Deepak Chopra. He’s truly nulli
secundus. Despite calling his bluff on not one, but two occasions, despite the fact that he
hasn’t answered any of my questions, I’m compelled to write again simply because given his
reach and influence, his misleading assertions will get even wider currency.
His latest post on Huffington Post is pompously titled Who Owns Yoga where he repeats the
same untruths as earlier in his Newsweek post. The crux–rather, the only point he makes is
this: Yoga doesn’t “belong” to Hinduism.
Note: For a detailed exposition on how Yoga and Hinduism can’t be delinked, read my Hindu
Roots of Yoga.
At the outset, Chopra claims that “The text usually cited as the definitive source for Yoga is
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, but the familiar poses that are part of Hatha Yoga are generally
traced to Shiva cults, the god Shiva being its founder. The problem that is being swept aside
is that exact dates cannot be assigned to any of these texts.” (Italics mine) If by “exact dates,”
Chopra means right up to the last Millisecond, he’s right but that doesn’t save his claim from
sounding both ridiculous and false. Perhaps Deepak Chopra might want to refer to Page 453
of S. Radhakrishnan (former President of India) and Moore’s, A Source Book in Indian
Philosophy which sets the date at 2 BCE. Other scholars, for example, Gavin Flood, puts the
date between 100 BCE and 500 CE. Hatha Yoga is derived primarily from Swami
Swaratma’s definitive Hatha Yoga Pradipika and other major works like the Gheranda
Samhita and Shiva Samhita. There’s no dispute to the dating of these three works–Hatha
Yoga Pradipika, was composed sometime in the 15th Century CE, the Gheranda Samhita in
the 17th Century CE, and Shiva Samhita is dated variously between 15th, 17th, or 18th
Century CE. We need to ask Deepak Chopra where he detects a sweeping aside of the “date
problem.”
Deepak Chopra is not alone when he asserts that Hinduism “sprang from the Vedic religion.”
This is a very mischievous claim to make because even a cursory reading of the history of
Hinduism reveals that the two are synonymous and inseparable. There is nothing in Hinduism
that can’t be traced back to the Vedas. Equally, every verse in the Vedas have “raw material,”
so to say, to spawn anything that we find in what’s called Hinduism today. For instance, the
Vedic Durga Suktam chanted in the worship of Goddess Durga (or Parvati) is actually a
Vedic chant dedicated to Agni, or the God of Fire. We can cite thousands of similar examples
but this is enough in view of space constraints.
Realistically, the word “Hindu” or “Hinduism” was not an indigenous or native construct. It
was given to us by the Arabs, who called India as the “Land bounded by the river Sindhu
(today’s Indus).” “Hindu” is the corruption of the word “Sindhu,” and the land of the Hindus
was “Hindustan,” or India. From this, it follows that “Hinduism,” is really not a religion in
the strict sense of the word but merely a word used by foreign invaders to describe the
landmass/country of India. The correct term to describe the predominant faith/religion of
today’s India is the “Vedic religion” or “Vaidika Dharma” or “Sanatana Dharma (the Eternal
Dharma).” In the 5000 years of its antiquity, not one Indic text refers to the native religion as
“Hinduism”— we’re talking of a corpus of the 4 Vedas, 6 Vedangas, 18 Puranas, the 4
Upavedas, the various smritis, the numerous Aagamas, the Ramayana and Mahabharata–in all
over 3000000 verses. One wonders how Deepak Chopra confidently states that “Hinduism” is
a “later” religion that “sprang” from “Vedic culture” when indeed the same Vedic culture
doesn’t mention the word “Hinduism” even once.
Everything in what we call today as Hinduism–from its philosophy, art, music, sculpture,
architecture, dance, Yoga, temples, Gods, Goddesses, rituals, worship, traditions, and
practices–was derived from and belongs to what Chopra calls “Vedic culture.” What explains
the fact that Vedic rituals and mantras are still used in Hindu temples in India and abroad?
What explains the fact that a Carnatic classical concert opens with a Varnam (on a Hindu
God) followed by the Vedic God, Ganesha? What explains the fact that a Hindustani classical
concert opens with “Om Sri Anantha Hari Naryana,” Naryana, a synonymn of the Vedic God,
Vishnu? The same applies to any classical dance form.
It’s true that temple culture was absent in the ancient Vedic times. But the temple culture if
anything, is a glorious tribute to the conception of philosophy and “God” in the Vedas. The
highest conception of what’s called “God” in the Vedas is the Nirguna Nirakara Brahman, or
the Formless Universal Reality, which is called Brahman. To a lay person, this conception is
almost incomprehensible because the human mind requires a Form and Name (or definition)
to conceptualize anything. In other words, you can’t address somebody as “Good morning,
Male” or “Good night, Female.” You need to call him/her as “John/Jane” to put him/her in a
specific place-time reference. When you apply this principle to the Formless Universal
Reality, you get names for Gods like Shiva, Vishnu, Parvati, Lakshmi, Indra, Agni, and so
on. You assign them specific attributes but what you’re really doing is humanizing that
Formless Universal Reality so that it’s easy to identify and define a highly abstract
philosophical conception. In other words, you’re making them accessible to your mind. When
the highest philosophical conception is a Formless “God,” it can be both male and female,
which is why Hinduism has both Gods and Goddesses. In a way, the gradual development of
what was derided as “idol worship” actually made the “Vedic religion” more accessible to
more and more people–an organic growth so to say. If it had been confined to just a group of
people who knew how to conduct rituals, there’s little chance that it’d have survived as an
unbroken tradition for so long. It is therefore unsurprising that the Vedic culture that gave
birth to this kind of conception of a Formless “God” also developed the methods to realize
that God. Yoga is one such method. Trying to delink it from Hinduism or the Vedic religion
is bound to backfire on the credibillity of the person attempting the feat.
I don’t have a position on the Hindu American Foundation but I’ve read enough news and
other material that proves beyond doubt how the original aims and goals of Yoga have been
hijacked by self-seeking “New Age” Gurus whose lifestyles and behavior show a yawning
gap between what they preach and practice. A true Yoga Guru will not solicit disciples or
advertise his shows, writings, and books the way Deepak Chopra does. It’s similar to a person
without a degree in medicine opening a clinic. Chopra’s ill-advised pronouncements about
“the spiritual path” and “englightenment” reek of hypocrisy because Yoga texts state that a
seeker of Yoga must first purify himself by strict ethical observances–non-violence, non-
stealing, hygiene, non-covetousness, celibacy and the rest–before he is qualified to learn
Yoga Asanas. How does Deepak Chopra rate on these parameters? We must remember that
he professes himself to be a Yoga teacher and healer–a status higher than an aspirant of
Yoga–so it’s natural that we must hold him to a higher standard. This by itself denies Chopra
the moral authority to speak about Yoga much less teach it to people. It’s also hard therefore
to take his claim about “equal-opportunity offender” seriously. Offense for the sake of
offense is not only childish but if left to itself, dangerous.
Equally, it is not in good taste on Deepak Chopra’s part to mischaracterize the HAF’s
position on Yoga as “an innocent attempt by the Indian diaspora to get some respect” and “to
lighten up.” Indeed, the NYT piece that Chopra refers to says that the HAF’s campaign “does
not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism…[but]
suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.”
It is similar to honouring say Einstein for giving us the theory of relativity or acknolwedging
our debt to Pythagoras. One wonders why Chopra is so upset about a similar effort to give
honour where it’s due.
Further, Deepak Chopra claims that he’d “like to point out that the whole point of Yoga is to
achieve enlightenment, and that the most revered practitioners, whether known as yogis,
swamis or mahatmas, transcend religion. In fact, even if Yoga were granted a patent or
copyright…there is no denying that enlightenment has always been outside the bounds of
religion.” One would like to ask him about the ethics of taking something from somebody
and not crediting the original source. If this had happened in the intellectual/academic arena,
professors would be sued for infringement, or in plain words, punished for committing
intellectual theft. As Chopra would know, one of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras talks about asteya
or non-stealing.
We also need to spend some time on Chopra’s leaps of logic, his contradictions, and the
authenticity of his knowledge. He says that Yoga is a spiritual path that leads to
englightenment and not “into the arms of priests or Yoga instructors.” If this was the case,
why would the world need Yoga instructors? You know, you can just think up one of these
asanas, get on the spiritual path and get enlightened on your own. Chopra doesn’t seem to
realize that the moment large numbers of people begin to do this, begin to explore true
spirituality on their own, he’d be out of business first. He also issues a caution of sorts that
before Hindu Americans “complain about Hatha Yoga being deracinated, they might want to
promote the ideas that are the very essence of Indian spirituality, which preceded Shiva,
Krishna, cows and castes.” Perhaps Deepak Chopra might want to recall that both Shiva and
Krishna were called the perfect Yogis, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika is a treatise, which
Shiva imparts to his consort, Parvati and that the Bhagavad Gita is also known as one of the
finest expositions of Yoga. Earlier in his piece, he talks about how Hatha Yoga is “generally
traced to Shiva cults, the god Shiva being its founder.” One needs to ask Chopra the name of
the religion, which regards Shiva as a God. Just an example of the nature of contradictions his
piece exudes. Given his anxiety to delink Yoga from Hinduism or the Vedic religion, why
does he continue to teach Yoga?
Chopra’s piece–like his attack on Aseem Shukla in Newsweek earlier this year–is singularly
noteworthy for one point: it cites no references, doesn’t backup extraordinary claims with
research, indulges in ad hominem attacks, argues from ignorance–in short, violates most
principles of logical reasoning. In other words, he doesn’t have an argument other than his
brand name and a self-professed claim that he has been writing ” about spirituality for many
years.”
Nobody owns Yoga, Mr. Chopra, indeed the concept of ownership is abhorred by Yoga,
which says that God pervades the entire creation (Ishavasyam Idam Sarvam). However, it
also asks us to repay the debts we owe our ancestors. Or at the least, acknowledge that we
owe those debts.
The Hindu Roots of Yoga
Author:
Date: June, 3, 2010
URL: http://www.sandeepweb.com/2010/06/03/the-hindu-roots-of-yoga/
Preface
One of the more unfortunate but widespread phenomena today with regard to Hinduism is
that we now need to produce elaborate evidence for things accepted as evident truths just
thirty or forty years ago. In other words, writing defenses instead of doing original,
constructive work. Yet the devil must be given its due lest it unleash more mischief upon us.
I admit I was surprised by some of the responses I received for my piece about what I called
the Yoga Disease. A common refrain in my comment space and elsewhere on the Internet is
that Yoga is almost always equated to Asana, Pranayama, and meditation (Dhyana) and never
as a separate system of philosophy. The glittering empires of most of the 5-star Yoga gurus
today would instantly come crashing down if they acknowledged this because it would mean
admitting that Yoga forms one of the Six Darshanas (or revelations or systems) of Hindu
philosophical thought.
Yoga is Rooted in the Vedas
Like everything in Hinduism, Yoga has its roots in the Vedas. A cursory reading of the Vedas
and the principal Upanishads shows the widespread usage of the word Yoga therein. It is used
in different philosophical contexts, and conveys different meanings and it’s not as a one-size-
fits-all theory as these Yoga gurus claim it is. In no particular order, the word Yoga is used
liberally throughout the Rg, Yajur and Atharva Vedas, and the Aitareya, Katha, Mundaka,
Mandukya, Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, and the Mahanarayana Upanishads. These apart,
there are about 50 Yogopanishads–Upanishads specifically dedicated to various aspects of
Yoga like the Amritananda, Amritabindu, Yogatattva, Yogasikha, Pasupatabrahma, Hamsa,
and Varaha Yogopanishads.
In the Vedas, Yoga is used in the sense of tapas (literally, “to burn” but it usually means
intense penance). The Mahanarayana Upanishad, which has a separate section dedicated to
Tapah Prashamsa (Glory of Penance) terms Tapas variously as rta (the Cosmic Order), truth,
and self-restraint and upholds the importance and glory of Sanyasa Yoga or the Yoga of
renunciation. Other principal Upanishads refer to Yoga in terms of Shravana (concentrated
listening), Manana (revision, reflection), and Nidhidhyasana (intense contemplation on that
which is learnt), all essential qualities that an aspirant of Vedanta should possess. The Katha
Upanishad carries this celebrated verse, expounding the nature and aim of Yoga:
AtmAnam rathinam viddhi shareeram rathameva tu |

Buddhim to saarathim viddhi manah pragrahameva cha ||
The soul/Self is the charioteer, the body the chariot, the intellect the driver, the mind the
reins, and the senses are the horses||
The Mandukya, a short and terse Upanishad of just twelve verses, expounds on the meaning
and nature of OM. It describes the states of Jagrat (wakeful), Swapna (dream), Sushupti (deep
sleep), and Turiya (the Fourth state beyond deep sleep, the state of pure consciousness where
only non-duality exists). The focus of this Upanishad on meditating upon OM in a way,
forms some of the roots of Yoga Darshana. Similarly, we find a reference to Nadis in the
Chandogya Upanishad, which says:
A hundred and one are the arteries of the heart, one of them leads up to the crown of the head.
Going upward through that, one becomes immortal. (8.6.6)
The “crown of the head” mentioned here is the precursor of the widely ill-understood
Kundalini Yoga. The whole of Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is indeed, the exposition of the
Moksha Yoga or the Yoga of Liberation. The Aitareya Brahmana mentions the
Brahmarandhra, or the Gateway of Bliss located at the center of the skull, which again has a
parallel with the Sahasrara Chakra found in Kundalini Yoga.
Yoga in Hindu Lore
Another definitive source that help us trace the foundations of Yoga is the mammoth Yoga
Vasishta (The Yoga of Sage Vasishta) attributed to Sage Valmiki, author of the Ramayana.
The Yoga Vasishta, dated earlier than Ramayana, is a conversation between Rama and Sage
Vasishta and forms one of the main pillars of Hindu philosophy.
We don’t need a text other than the Bhagavad Gita to look for ample references to Yoga.
Celebrated verses about Yoga include
Yogastah kuru karmani sangam tyaktva Dhananjaya… (Perform your duty/actions being
steadfast in Yoga without getting attached to your actions, Arjuna)
Yogah karmasu kaushalam…(Yoga is doing things right)
Samatwam yoga uchyate… (Being balanced in both success and failure is Yoga)
These apart, the chapter on Dhyana Yoga (Yoga of Meditation) is a veritable guide on the
aims, method, and goals of Yoga. In a way, the entire Bhagavad Gita is a treatise on Yoga.
Tracing it
The tedious, and cataloging kind of exercise so far was necessary to underscore a crucial
point: that this vast range of literature of meditations on Yoga in a few thousand verses
spread over several centuries occured before Patanjali systematized Yoga as an independent
school of Hindu philosophy.
A distinctive mark of anything that can be called Hindu is its origins in the Vedas. The
discussion so far proves beyond doubt that Yoga does possess this mark. More importantly,
Patanjala Yoga doesn’t really deal with what modern day Yoga salesmen say it does–
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras do not have instructions to perform various Asanas and Pranayamas.
More on that in a while.
There’s even more direct evidence as to the undeniable Hindu roots of Yoga as it is
(mis)understood today. Sage Patanjali is worshipped as an avatar of Adishesha, the thousand-
headed serpent upon whom Lord Vishnu reclines. Representations of Patanjali in pictures and
sculptures show his lower body coiled like a snake. See an example below.
Now, if you argue that Adishesha is not connected with Hinduism….
Later day scholars, philosophers and saints of Hinduism interpreted Yoga Sutras in the light
of Vedanta. Bhoja, Vignanabhikshu, Adi Shankara, Sadashiva Brahmendra and Ramana
Maharshi are prominent examples.
Conclusion
Today’s Yoga Enterpreneurs, instead of being grateful to the religion, culture and land that
enabled them to earn their mega bucks actually revel in dissociating with it and in denigrating
it. As I’ve repeatedly said, they are gym and/or fitness instructors, not Yoga teachers. If they
really taught Yoga, they wouldn’t have paid lipservice to the basic requirements imposed
upon a practioner of Yoga: Yamas and Niyamas. Aside, I’m not sure how many of these
snakeoil salesmen even tell their students about Yamas and Niyamas. It’s all about
“meditation,” “vibrations,” “cosmic energy,” “quantum” nonsense, and “super
consciousness.”
Yoga is deeper and learning it properly takes an entirely different spirit. Actually, you don’t
really “learn” Yoga. You realize it. Like most other disciplines in Sanatana Dharma, Yoga
needs to be learnt traditionally. Under a Guru who is himself a Yogi in the truest sense of the
word. Most philosophical traditions including Yoga forbids a person to declare
himself/herself a Guru. One of the basic qualities such a Guru possesses is Aparigraha (non-
possession), one of the five Yamas (Abstinences) identified by Patanjali. Additionally, every
Guru always recites the name of God, his parents, the ancient Rishis (Seers/Sages) and his
own Guru at all times as a way of showing deep reverence and gratitude to the tradition and
people that enabled him to become a Yogi. In a way, it is his way of repaying a debt, which
you can never really repay. This in short is how Yoga (in the fullest sense of the word) is
taught and learnt traditionally.
Now we need to take a count of the number of Yoga Peddlers who practice Aparigraha. Their
Gurudom, and what they hawk as Yoga violates every known precept, tenet, and principle
laid down by Patanjali and other sages. And the vilest yet is what Deepak Chopra did
recently–spitting on the very religion that enabled him to build his swanky empire. People
like him, Bikram-whatever, and the rest of the patent mongers are deserving candidates for
this Sanskrit saying:
||KrthaGHnasya na Nishkrutih||
There is no atonement for the ungrateful

The Yoga Disease
Author:
Date: May 4, 2010
URL: http://www.sandeepweb.com/2010/05/04/the-yoga-disease/
Preface
It began with this factual article by Dr. Aseem Shukla who exposed the “theft of Yoga” in
America. Dr. Shukla details out what we already knew: that Yoga has been appropriated by
self-proclaimed “Masters” and “Yogis” and that it is a flourishing, $6-billion enterprise. But
Dr. Shukla’s more crucial point is that Yoga has been steadily delinked from Hinduism or
Sanatana Dharma from which it originates. And it’s pretty much free for all today, as Dr.
Shukla notes that there are “themed (sic) Yogas:”
“Christ is my guru. Yoga is a spiritual discipline much like prayer, meditation and fasting
[and] no one religion can claim ownership,” says a vocal proponent of “Christian themed”
yoga practices. Some Jews practice Torah yoga, Kabbalah yoga and aleph bet yoga, and even
some Muslims are joining the act.
And look who first took exception to Dr. Shukla’s piece: the millionaire “mystic,” and
“healer,” Deepak Chopra. Which is logical given that Chopra is one of the early birds to cash
in on the yet-unharvested bounty that Yoga offered to the materialistic mind. More on this in
a little while.
Dr. Shukla in turn, responded to Chopra’s poorly-written, illogical, and accusatory piece, and
calls Chopra’s bluff thus:
Indeed, Chopra is the perfect emissary to fire a salvo against my assertion that delinking
Hinduism from its celebrated contributions to contemporary spiritual dialogue…The right
messenger because Chopra is a principal purveyor of the very usurpation I sought to expose.
Deepak Chopra and his brand of highwaymen are ultra materialists who did two things
phenomenally well: they made a near-perfect diagnosis of the societal ills of the USA and
packaged their snakeoil to a similar level of perfection. They worked at the level of
individuals. They didn’t say “you know, you and your family is fucked up and I have the
cure,” but “you know, this healing/soul-body/consciousness/Yoga thing really works. And
this is how it is done. It improves your health, reduces obesity, makes you flexible, puts you
in touch with yourself…” In other words, How to win friends and influence people: the Yoga
Edition. And Chopra & co were equipped with the right tools: a convent education back in
India and stints at prestigious hospitals across the US. The tag of a medical doctor counts for
a lot in the US (he’s a doc, he must know what he’s talking about) not to mention this:
IN Los Angeles a radio station plays tapes of the lectures of Deepak Chopra, the world-
famous mind/body guru, late into the night. Chopra’s mellifluous, seductive, pukka Anglo-
Indian voice wafts across the nocturnal southern Californian airwaves, dipping here into
Ayurvedic medicine, there into quantum physics, offering simple connections to the
“unfathomable mysteries of karma”, gentle guides to better health and intriguing promises of
a body that will never age. A deliciously soothing cure for insomnia.
Read the underlined words again. The mellifluousness and seductiveness is an undeniable
crowdpuller. All Google searches revealed one unanimous quality about Chopra: his masterly
oratory, a quality common to successful politicians and leaders and among others, self-styled
Gurus: remember Osho?
So is Deepak Chopra’s–and similar folks’–empire built only on sheer oratory and fluff? Does
he know any Yoga and Hindu philosophy at all? As Dr. Shukla shows, Chopra is aware of
these concepts and philosophies but refuses to as much as acknowledge them as rooted in
Hinduism. Worse, he seeks to divorce them from Hinduism.
Which brings us to the next question: what exactly do Deepak Chopra & co teach/preach?
The Rape of Yoga
Most self-styled healers, Yoga and spiritual Gurus teach physical exercise not Yoga. In Yogic
terminology, they teach asanas or postures and add some doses of Pranayama (breathing
techniques/practices) and meditation. But their main ingredient is the generous booster-dose
of “consciousness,” “liberation,” “ageless body,” “timeless mind,” “perfection,”
“enlightenment,” “deeper aims of Existence,” “creation,” “Karma,” “afterlife,”….. However,
they have no idea of the actual meaning of these terms, their origins, context of usage, and the
philosophical systems that underlie them. But if they do know it, it’s even worse because
they’re then consciously committing fraud.
But here’s the beauty: folks like Deepak Chopra don’t need to know the actual meaning of
these terms because the average participant who enrolls in these courses is actually looking
for this: a sense of hope and reassurance, and a solution to overcome the emptiness that has
come to characterize (mostly) the Western society post the early 20th century. Yogasanas,
meditation, and pranayama guarantee a sense of calmness, stability, and inner peace, which
can only be experienced and is repeatable. However, this doesn’t mean those are the only
benefits it bestows upon the practitioner. But to an empty mind, these positive benefits have
an avalanche-like, and in some cases, a life-altering effect. And once people have
experienced this, they’re willing to believe any tripe that’s packaged in the garb of Yoga.
The extent to which Yoga has been mangled today, especially in the US is incredible. It’s
fashionable among even the lay folks to speak about stuff like the “different systems and
schools of Yoga” and other balderdash out of absolute ignorance. The blame for this lies
squarely on the doorstep of folks like Deepak Chopra.
At the very basics, we need to clearly distinguish between Yoga as a darshana, a system of
philosophy from Yoga as we find in texts like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. This difference is
akin to looking at the arati performed in temples and concluding that Santana Dharma is just
this. A genuine Yoga teacher/Guru will explain this difference at the outset. Patanjali, the
father of Yoga-as-a-system-of-philosophy, in his terse Yoga Sutras, talks about asanas in just
two or three places in a total of 196 aphorisms. Even there, he simply says that it is
recommended for a Yoga practitioner to sit in an asana that allows the mind to concentrate.
A genuine guru will also tell you about adhikari bheda, something I mentioned in an earlier
post, from which I quote:
…Adhikari bheda, which simply means that a student should first successfully complete all
the previous courses before attempting to sit for an Engineering exam.
This is equally applicable in this case. Yoga is not for everybody: and I’m talking about
aspirants who want to reach the final state of Yogic bliss or Samadhi. Asanas, pranayama,
meditation, etc are merely aids for attaining Samadhi. According to tradition, only a person
who has actually experienced Samadhi is qualified to teach them to others.
But what are the self-proclaimed Yoga Gurus actually teaching? “Healing,” “wellness,”
“well-being,” “being attentive,” “mindfulness,” and related nonsense in the name of Yoga.
For good reason. The purveyors of such terms are not self-realized souls, I suspect they
haven’t ever experienced Samadhi (I challenge them to prove me wrong). They are but mere
traders. Their mantras of “healing,” and “wellness” simply means: “I need to keep you
coming to my classes, I want you to buy my CDs, DVDs and books.” This also explains the
filthy trend of branding/patenting/trademarking–Bikram Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, etc–that has
tarnished the original aims and goals of Yoga. Read this vomit-worthy “guideline” of using
“Iyengar Yoga brand”:
I.6. Iyengar Yoga Teachers refrain from using the “figure and temple” trademark design
registered with the United States Patent and Trade Mark Department in BKS Iyengar’s name.
The use of this service mark is reserved for use by non-profit organizations comprised of
students and friends of BKS Iyengar who meet the criteria of I.1 and are approved for such
usage by the Service Mark Committee (Asteya).
This beautiful instance showcases the Art of Defecating in the Plate that You Eat out of.
Asteya (non-covetousness), as one of the Yamas (absentions) of Patanjali Yoga, is twisted to
mean “non-covetousness of BKS Iyengar’s brand of Yoga!” While Patanjali laid down this as
one of the principles to be strictly adhered to in order to attain Samadhi, the “Iyengar brand”
lays it down to prevent the leakage of a single dollar/cent/rupee/paisa from its coffers. And
these Gurus lecture millions on righteousness, soul, rebirth, ego, Karma, and peace. The gulf
as it’s already clear, lies in precept and practice.
Branding/claims of ownership goes against the very spirit of Yoga and indeed, the entire
Indian ethos. Why does a guy who talks about liberation need to enter into multi-million
dollar businesses with Richard Branson? Equally, why didn’t Patanjali or any other sage
claim ownership on individual asanas and breathing practices?
Yoga is a Disease
A common factor characterizes most of these self-styled soul-savers and agents of liberation:
they rarely, if never, enter into public debates. They’re content to ignore genuine criticism
directed at them. For instance, read this biting dissection of Chopra’s “expert” views on
Genes.
Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I’ve tussled with his weird arguments before, and
now he’s flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on
human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his
profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a
doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he
sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his
way forward with a succession of unlikely and indefensible claims. This latest article is one
in which I think he’s trying to criticize the very idea of genes, but it’s more like he’s
criticizing his own lack of knowledge. [...] Instead, though, what we get is the maunderings
of a third-rate mind with no understanding of even decades-old ideas. Instead of revealing
any working knowledge of biological thought, Chopra gives us a list of questions about the
gene that he is wondering about, and also claiming that no one else understands, and babbling
foolishly. Some of these would be good questions coming from a student who seriously
wanted to learn, but coming from an M.D. who routinely pontificates on how your body
works, and stated with such a stunning certainty that because he doesn’t know, no one else
does either, this is an infuriating list. Can we get Chopra’s license to practice medicine
revoked, if he has one?
This criticism needs to be taken really seriously because it is about Deepak Chopra’s primary
area of expertise/profession. This criticism exposes his (lack of) credentials in that area.
Given his unintelligible pontifications on his current area of “expertise” as a
Guru/Healer/Mystic, we have a fairly reasonable conclusion: that Chopra relies more on his
oratory and confidence in the power of the igorance of the masses (how many educated,
laymen can understand genetics? If Dr.Chopra spins something about connecting it with past
lives, it must be true. After all, he’s a doctor). This explains why he doesn’t engage in
anything that seriously challenges him. But like most similar Gurus, he lets his loyal band of
blind followers speak for him. Once in a while, when questioned, he comes up with acrid and
illogical rejoinders.
Secondly, yoga did not originate in Hinduism as Prof. Shukla claims. Perhaps he has a
fundamentalist agenda in mind, but he must know very well that the rise of Hinduism as a
religion came centuries after the foundation of yoga in consciousness and consciousness
alone. Religious rites and the worship of gods has always been seen as being in service to a
higher cause, knowing the self.
The preacher of daily inspirations, and the unveiler of Spiritual Laws loses his cool so easily
that he is compelled find hidden agendas in peoples’ minds instead of giving a factual
rebuttal! And that, when Dr. Shukla hasn’t named anybody. Guilty conscience, doctor? Tch
tch tch. Dr. Shukla has already given an effective rebuttal so I won’t touch that portion again.
But, Dr.Chopra, the “fundamentalist” term has been hurled at Hindus enough times for us to
know that you have a sizeable repertoire of jokes, your anger notwithstanding.
Before you accuse me that I’m singling out Deepak Chopra, let me tell you that I’m using
him merely as an example, a celebrity case study if you will, of what I call the Yoga Disease
that’s spread across the United States. It has been transformed into a disease because of the
vile potion that Deepak Chopra & his ilk have injected into an otherwise noble philosophical
system. On the other side, as Dr. Shukla says, Chopra doesn’t have even the basic gratitude to
acknowledge the roots of the source of his magnificent empire. Now, some folks say that
“Yoga doesn’t need his gratitude.” This is a braindead argument and it simply encourages
others like him to steal from, and appropriate native traditions without acknowledgment.
Here’s something to Deepak Chopra who rants incoherently about Yoga being rooted in
“consciousness alone.” By this token, Chopra must not sue me if I use one of his
patented/trademarked/copyrighted snakeoil techniques and claim that it is rooted in
“consciousness alone.” This applies equally to any self-proclaimed Guru trying to hide under
a similar umbrella. I do not decry or call for these Gurus to stop teaching whatever techniques
they are teaching but for heaven’s sake, give credit where it’s due, don’t misrepresent and
most importantly, don’t blabber about things you don’t know. Teach asanas, etc by all means
but call it by its name: don’t package it as philosophy or Yoga.
In parting, here’s a very fundamental point even the most informed critics of Deepak Chopra
& co miss: a true Yoga Guru will not advertise his/her Gurudom. Think about it.
Deepak Chopra does it again
Author:
Publication: Scienceblogs.com
URL: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/deepak_chopra_does_it_again.php
Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I've tussled with his weird arguments before, and
now he's flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on
human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his
profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a
doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he
sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his
way forward with a succession of unlikely and indefensible claims. This latest article is one
in which I think he's trying to criticize the very idea of genes, but it's more like he's criticizing
his own lack of knowledge.
It's amazing to realize that nobody really knows what a gene is or how it works, even though
the word 'gene' has become the miracle of the hour.
Nobody? Or Deepak Chopra?
There are complexities in defining the details of what a gene is, and there are all kinds of
fascinating exceptions and quirks; we find differences of opinion between the operational
definitions of a classical geneticist and the molecular and computational approaches of a
bioinformaticist, for instance. There are real papers in the literature that wrestle with what we
mean by the concept of the gene, and if this were such a work, it might have been the start of
an interesting discussion. As we'll quickly see, it is not such a work.
Almost every bit of important research in biology and medicine over the past decade has
centered on genetics. After the successful mapping of the human genome, we were told that
an enormous range of disease will prove curable through gene therapy.
OK, this is another worthwhile point—there has been a lot of hype, and the ease of translating
basic research into applied therapies has been oversold. Again, this is material that could
make for an interesting paper.
Instead, though, what we get is the maunderings of a third-rate mind with no understanding
of even decades-old ideas. Instead of revealing any working knowledge of biological thought,
Chopra gives us a list of questions about the gene that he is wondering about, and also
claiming that no one else understands, and babbling foolishly. Some of these would be good
questions coming from a student who seriously wanted to learn, but coming from an M.D.
who routinely pontificates on how your body works, and stated with such a stunning certainty
that because he doesn't know, no one else does either, this is an infuriating list. Can we get
Chopra's license to practice medicine revoked, if he has one?
No one knows how genes make inanimate chemicals like hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen
come to life.
This is a very peculiar complaint. Hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen don't "come to life". The
fundamental activities going on in the cell are chemistry. There isn't anything magical going
on.
The ability of DNA to replicate has never been explained.
How strange. You can find a short summary of the biochemistry of replication on Wikipedia.
Arthur Kornberg, father of the recent winner of the Nobel in chemistry, won the Nobel
himself in 1959 for the discovery of DNA polymerase (that's right, 1959. Where's Chopra
been?) This has been the stuff of undergraduate cell biology courses for at least 30 years.
We don't know how genes time their actions years or decades in advance.
This doesn't make sense. We know lots of factors that regulate gene expression on various
time scales, from seconds to months. We understand much of the process of maturation that
leads to, for instance, new patterns of gene expression in humans at puberty. I'd suggest that
Chopra look up the term epigenesis sometime, if I weren't certain he wouldn't understand it.
Having mapped the sequence of genes, we don't know what the sequence means, only that it
exists.
Ah, well. This is finally a statement where he's close to saying something valid. He's wrong
that we only know that the sequence exists; we do know quite a bit about some parts of the
genome, and what those parts do. There is a lot more to learn, though.
Having found out that mice share 90% of human genes and gorillas over 99%, we can't
explain how the tremendous differences between species should come down to such a tiny
fraction of the genetic code.
Yes, we can. A great many genes carry out functions that are the same in people and mice
and chimpanzees: we all carry out the same processes of basic metabolism, for instance, we
all have an enzyme called pyruvate carboxylase, which adds a carbon to a 3-carbon molecule
to form the 4-carbon oxaloacetate. Why should we expect this to be different between a
human and a mouse, or between a human and a carrot? Our biochemistry is mostly the same,
and we'll all have this similar set of genes for the essential enzymes. Then look at our overall
form: we've all got lungs and livers and kidneys and teeth. The genetic substrates that will
build these organs will use the same genes in all of us. Finally, what makes people distinct
from mice isn't entirely the nucleotide sequence of our genes, but how those genes are
switched off and on—a process modified by very small changes to the genome.
Similarity to a high degree is what we should expect.
We can't explain why people with the same genes (identical twins) turn out to be different in
so many ways as they grow up and age.
Let's remember that word "epigenesis" again. Development is a process in which genes
interact with each other and the environment; everyone, even identical twins, experience
slightly different environments. As a trivial example, whisper a secret into one twin's ear, and
not the other's. Voila, the two people have two different circumstances despite having nearly
identical genes!
We don't know why over 90% of genes are inactive at any given time.
Where did this 90% number come from, I wonder? It doesn't sound right.
No matter, we do know. This is what molecular genetics/developmental genetics is all about:

differential gene expression. Different interactions during development set up different
patterns of gene expression in different tissues. We wouldn't expect a pancreatic cell to have
all of the same genes active as a skin cell, but we know that in their nuclei pancreatic and skin
cells do have the same set of genes present.
We don't know why evolution developed genes that cause cancer, and why such genes
weren't weeded out after they appeared.
Is this a rather muddled interpretation of oncogenes? There are genes that are known to be
involved in cancer, called oncogenes. They are mutated or otherwise modified forms of genes
called proto-oncogenes. For example, some of these genes are important in causing cell
death; if some kind of somatic mutation causes a cell to proliferate uncontrollably, these
genes respond to the abnormal activity by triggering destruction of the cell. These genes
evolved to suppress cancers (they obviously have a selective advantage, because people with
them live longer—they don't keel over at an early age, riddled with tumors).
Proto-oncogenes are genes that prevent cancer. They are called cancer genes because patients
with damage to these genes in certain cells get cancers.
Isn't it a little embarrassing for an M.D. like Chopra to not know this?
We don't know if genes cause or prevent aging. In the same vein, we don't know if they cause
or prevent cellular death, since there is evidence that they do both.
We know that some genes are involved in aging. We know that the environment is also
important in aging. Of course there are genes involved in both causing and preventing cell
death—this is a process in a kind of dynamic tension, with cells balanced between healthy
growth and death.
Chopra is just babbling to himself here, trying to sound profound, I think.
We haven't unraveled the significance of the space on the DNA strand, even though the blank
spots in our genetic code may be just as important, if not more, than the genetic material
itself.
Uh, the spaces between genes are part of the genetic material. In general, this looks like
incomprehension of basic ideas in genetic structure. There are various classes of repetitive
DNA, there are pseudogenes, there are random stretches of nucleotides, there are specific
regulatory regions, there are coding regions of DNA (there are, however, no blank spots).
While there are still mysteries in there, it's not as if we don't know anything…and in
particular, there is no evidence that junk DNA (which is what I presume he means by "blank
spots") is more important than the rest. That claim sounds rather goofy, actually.
Genes respond to the outside world as well as to behavior and thoughts, but we don't know
how or why except in the most general terms.
Thoughts? We don't think genes on or off, unless he's talking about such processes as
learning and memory, where mental activity leads to patterns in gene expression, and a
couple of guys, including Eric Kandel, won Nobels for figuring out mechanisms of signal
transduction in the nervous system. We also know in great detail how many developmental
genes regulate their activity.
Take Yoga Back
Author:
URL: http://www.hafsite.org/media/pr/takeyogaback
Bringing to Light Yoga's Hindu Roots
HAF's Take Back Yoga campaign truly went national on November 27-28, 2010 when the
New York Times ran a piece entitled "Hindu Group Stirs a Debate over Yoga's Soul" on the
front page of its Sunday print edition and online. The Times piece has catapulted the
Foundation's campaign to new levels and has resulted in a flurry of debate, discussion and
dialog over the Hindu roots of yoga.
The popularity of yoga continues to skyrocket in the Western world as yoga studios become
as prevalent as Starbucks and the likes of Lululemon find continued success in the mass
marketing of $108 form enhancing yoga pants. As this $6 billion industry completes one
Suryanamaskar (sun salutation) after another, there has been growing concern from the Hindu
American Foundation about a conscious delinking of yoga from its Hindu roots.
From asanas named after Hindu Gods to the shared goal of moksha to the common pluralistic
philosophy, the Hindu roots of yoga seem difficult to deny. Yet, more often than not, many
Western yoga practitioners are aghast at the very suggestion that the cherished "spiritual
practice" of yoga is firmly grounded in Hindu philosophy. In fact, in a letter to Yoga Journal
magazine, HAF noted its disappointment at finding countless descriptions of the Upanishads
or Gita as "ancient Indian" or "yogic", but rarely "Hindu".
Shortly after being told by Yoga Journal that "Hinduism carries too much baggage," the
Foundation formulated its stance on this important issue with the release of its paper Yoga
Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice, quoting extensively from both the legendary yoga
guru B.K.S. Iyengar as well as his son, Prashant Iyenagar. The stance paper highlights not
only the delinking of yoga from its Hindu roots, but also the erroneous idea that yoga is
primarily a physical practice based on asana. Yoga covers a wide array of practices,
embodied in eight "limbs," which range from ethical and moral guidelines to meditation on
the Ultimate Reality. Asana is merely one "limb" which as become the crux of Western yoga
practice.
In December 2009, HAF's Suhag Shukla had the opportunity to bright light to yoga's Hindu
roots at the Parliament of World Religions in Australia during a panel discussion. Shukla
spoke out against the commercial appropriation and misappropriation of yoga which
purposefully delinks yoga from its roots in Hinduism.
A piece in the LA Times, Bending yoga to fit their worship needs, quoting yet another yoga
instructor denying any and all religious roots lead not only to a Letter to the Editor, but also
to the publication of The Theft of Yoga, the beginning of what eventually became know as
The Great Yoga Debate: Shukla vs Chopra on the Newsweek/Washington Post On Faith site.
As HAF's Dr. Aseem Shukla proudly brought to light yoga's Hindu roots, Dr. Deepak Chopra
penned his disagreement. Shukla's reply, Dr. Chopra - Honor Thy Heritage, was met with
continued resistance from Chopra.
The Great Yoga Debate received hundreds of comments from readers across the board.
Within days, the Pioneer requested HAF to provide a piece of a similar strain, leading to yet
another opportunity to take yoga back.
The interest of the Interfaith Alliance was also peaked and lead to a radio interview with
HAF's Sheetal Shah (the yoga interview begins approximately 13 minutes into the recorded
segment).
Even months after the initial launch of this campaign, the issue remains very much alive. On
September 23, David Waters, the former editor of On Faith, quotes heavily from HAF's
stance paper in his piece "Should Christians practice yoga? Shouldn't everyone?" And on
October 3, Ms. Shukla once again voiced HAF's stance in the "yoga debate" on air in a
segment on Common Threads
Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in Practice
Author:
Date: December 2 2010
URL: http://www.hafsite.org/media/pr/yoga-hindu-origins
“There is no physical yoga and spiritual yoga. If it is exclusively physical, it won’t be yoga.
Yoga is dealing with the entirety; it is a union.” – Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S Iyengar
Yoga, from the word “yuj” (Sanskrit, “to yoke” or “to unite”), refers to spiritual practices that
are essential to the understanding and practice of Hinduism. Yoga and yogic practices date
back more than 5,000 years — the Indus Valley seals depict figures in yoga poses. The term
covers a wide array of practices, embodied in eight “limbs,” which range from ethical and
moral guidelines to meditation on the Ultimate Reality. Yoga is a combination of both
physical and spiritual exercises, entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and
transcendence of desire. The ultimate goal is moksha, the attainment of liberation from
worldly suffering and the cycle of birth and rebirth.
With the popularity of Yoga skyrocketing throughout the world, particularly in the West,
there arise two main points in need of clarification. First, that which is practiced as “Hatha
Yoga” - a form of Raja Yoga - in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a
single limb of Yoga: asana (posture). From Yoga studios that recommend room temperatures
to be maintained at 105 degrees to 90 minute Vinyasa flow classes that prescribe one
Suryanamaskar (Sun Salutation) sequence after another, this “asana heavy” form of Yoga –
sometimes complemented with pranayama (breathing) – is only a form of exercise to control,
tone and stretch muscles. Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate
spiritual goal.
Second, there is the concerning trend of disassociating Yoga from its Hindu roots. Both
Yoga magazines and studios assiduously present Yoga as an ancient practice independent and
disembodied from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity. With
the intense focus on asana, magazines and studios have seemingly "gotten away" with this
mischaracterization. Yet, even when Yoga is practiced solely in the form of an exercise, it
cannot be completely delinked from its Hindu roots. As the legendary Yoga guru B.K.S
Iyengar aptly points out in his famous Light on Yoga, "Some asanas are also called after
Gods of the Hindu pantheon and some recall the Avataras, or incarnations of Divine Power."
It is disappointing to know that many of the yogis regularly practicing Hanumanasana or
Natarajasana continue to deny the Hindu roots of their Yoga practice.
In a time where Hindus around the globe face discrimination and hate because of their
religious identity, and Hindu belief and practice continue to be widely misunderstood due to
exoticized portrayals of it being caricaturized in “caste, cows and curry” fashion, recognition
of Yoga as a tremendous contribution of ancient Hindus to the world is imperative. Yoga is
inextricable from Hindu traditions, and a better awareness of this fact is reached only if one
understands that “Yoga” and “Asana” are not interchangeable terms.
Asana aka Yoga

A perusal of a few of the best known Yoga texts, such as Swami Svatmarama’s Hatha Yoga
Pradipika or Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, will quickly demonstrate that asana (posture) is only
one component of Yoga. The Pradipika is divided into four main sections, of which 25% of
only the first section focuses on asana. The Yoga Sutras are also divided into four parts, with
a total of 196 sutras. The second part, composed of 55 sutras, briefly mentions asana as one
of the eight limbs [1] of Raja Yoga.
In his forward to an English translation of Pradipika [2], Iyengar aptly describes, “Hatha
yoga…[to be] commonly misunderstood and misrepresented as being simply a physical
culture, divorced from spiritual goals…Asanas are not just physical exercises: they have
biochemical, psycho-physiological and psycho-spiritual effects.”
In a 2005 interview published in Namarupa magazine [3], Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S.
Iyengar, clearly espouses a similar view when he said, “We cannot expect that millions are
practicing real yoga just because millions of people claim to be doing yoga all over the globe.
What has spread all over the world is not yoga. It is not even non-yoga; it is un-yoga.” The
undue emphasis, particularly in the West, on asana as the crux of Yoga dilutes the essence of
the spiritual practice and its ultimate goal of moksha.
B.K.S. Iyengar again reminds readers of the purpose of asanas in his Light on Yoga, when he
states, "Their [Asanas] real importance lies in the way they train and discipline the
mind...The yogi conquers the body by the practice of asanas and make it a fit vehicle for the
spirit...He does not consider it [the body] his property...The yogi realizes that his life and all
its activities are part of the divine action in nature" [4].
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) concludes from its research that Yoga, as an integral
part of Hindu philosophy, is not simply physical exercise in the form of various asanas and
pranayama, but is in fact a Hindu way of life. The ubiquitous use of the word “Yoga” to
describe what in fact is simply an asana exercise is not only misleading, but has lead to and is
fueling a problematic delinking of Yoga and Hinduism, as described further in the section
below.
This attempt to clarify Yoga as far more complex than just asanas is not intended to discount
the array of health benefits gained by practicing asanas alone. Beyond increasing muscle
tone and flexibility, regular practice of asana has been associated with lower blood pressure,
relief of back pain and arthritis, and boosting of the immune system [5]. Increasingly, many
believe asana practice to reduce Attention Deficit Disorder (AD/HD) [6] in children, and
recent studies have shown it improves general behavior and grades [7]. But the Foundation
argues that the full potential of the physiological, intellectual and spiritual benefits of asana
would be increased manifold if practiced as a component of the holistic practice of Yoga.
Reversing the Efforts to Decouple Yoga from Hinduism
Although the Western Yoga community fully acknowledges Yoga’s Indian roots, and even
requires study of Hindu philosophy and scripture in most of its teacher certification programs,
much of it openly disassociates Yoga’s Hindu roots [8]. While HAF affirms that one does not
have to profess faith in Hinduism in order to practice Yoga or asana, it firmly holds that Yoga
is an essential part of Hindu philosophy and the two cannot be delinked, despite efforts to do
so.
Shyam Ranganathan's [9] analysis gets to the crux of the issue when he writes, “Though
some modern atheistic minds and aspiring yogis may disagree, textually there is no getting
around the fact that Patanjali uses words, that in the context of Hindu culture, have obvious
theological implications” [10]. Patanjali describes the goal of Yoga as chitta-vritti-nirodha or
“the cessation of mental fluctuations”, a core concept also expounded in Hinduism’s
Bhagavad Gita: “Thus always absorbing one’s self in yoga, the yogi, whose mind is subdued,
achieves peace that culminates in the highest state of Nirvana, which rests in me [Lord
Krishna/Brahman/Supreme Reality]” [11].
Similarly, Swami Svatmarama’s opening line in the Pradipika is in honor of the Hindu God
Shiva (Siva): “Reverence to Siva the Lord of Yoga, who taught Parvati hatha wisdom as the
first step to the pinnacle of raja yoga.”
In the same 2005 interview cited previously, Prashant Iyengar expounds upon Yoga with
references to both Hindu epics and Hindu philosophy: “Mahabharat has so many aspects of
yoga like yama (restraint), niyama (observance), sama (calmness)…Ramayana gives us so
many beautiful aspects of bhakti yoga and karma yoga. Essential yoga starts with karma
yoga…Without karma-consciousness, there will be no progress in yoga.”
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) reaffirms that Yoga, “an inward journey, where you
explore your mind, your awareness, your consciousness, your conscience” [12], is an
essential part of Hindu belief and practice. But the science of yoga and the immense benefits
its practice affords are for the benefit of all of humanity regardless of personal faith.
Hinduism itself is a family of pluralistic doctrines and ways of life that acknowledge the
existence of other spiritual and religious traditions. Hinduism, as a non-proselytizing
religion, never compels practitioners of yoga to profess allegiance to the faith or convert.
Yoga is a means of spiritual attainment for any and all seekers.
[1] The remaining seven limbs are Yama, Niyama, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana,
and Samadhi.
[2] http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/HathaYogaPradipika.pdf
[4] Iyengar, B.K.S. Light on Yoga. p.40-1
[5] http://www.webmd.com/balance/the-health-benefits-of-yoga?page=2
[6] http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/04/news/adme-yoga4
[7] http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/04/news/adme-yoga4?pg=1
[8] Interestingly enough, one of, if not the most common argument used by Christian
organizations to oppose the practice of Yoga in public schools is that Yoga’s roots in
Hinduism violate the separation of church and state.
[9] Author of Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy and translator of Patanjali’s Yoga
Sutras
[11] The Bhagavad Gita 6.15
Should Christians practice yoga? Shouldn't everyone?
Author: David Waters
URL:
http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2010/09/should_christians_practice_yog
a_shouldnt_everyone.html
Yoga, the Hindu-inspired spiritual practice that bears a strong resemblance to stretching, is
said to relieve pain and lower blood pressure, boost mental (and spiritual) awareness and
reduce stress.
Ironically, it's having the inverse effect on some religious leaders.
Earlier this week, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
(and On Faith panelist), set off a bit of an interfaith fuss by suggesting that Christians should
not practice yoga. "Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with,
a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a 'post-Christian,
spiritually polyglot' reality."
Seems to me there are many more serious threats to the spiritual lives of Christians: Greed,
envy, lust, fear, hate, violence. But Mohler isn't the only religious leader stressed out by
yoga's growing popularity in America. He isn't even the only concerned On Faith panelist.
Earlier this year, On Faith panelists Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra created a bit of a
ruckus with their friendly debate about whether Americans had ripped yoga from its Hindu
roots. "The severance of yoga from Hinduism disenfranchises millions of Hindu Americans
from their spiritual heritage," Shukla wrote.
It would be easy to categorize these concerns as Y'all are Overreacting to God stuff Again.
(YOGA). But the concerns expressed by Shukla and Mohler, in particular, shouldn't be
summarily dismissed. In fact, from very different perspectives, these wise and learned men,
neither of them reactionaries, are raising important questions for an increasingly pluralistic
world.
Should we adopt, adapt or adjust the rituals and practices of other faiths for our own
purposes?
According to the Hindu American Foundation, "Yoga is a combination of both physical and
spiritual exercises, entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and transcendence
of desire. The ultimate goal is moksha, the attainment of liberation from worldly suffering
and the cycle of birth and rebirth."
Moksha. Is that why you take yoga classes?
"The form of yoga that is practiced in much of the Western world is but merely a focus on a
single limb of yoga: asana (posture) . . . which is only a form of exercise to control, tone and
stretch muscles. Ignored are both the moral basis of the practice and the ultimate spiritual
goal.
Does your yoga instructor discuss the moral basis and spiritual goals of yoga?
"Even when Yoga is practiced solely in the form of an exercise, it cannot be completely
delinked from its Hindu roots. ..The Hindu American Foundation concludes from its research
that Yoga, as an integral part of Hindu philosophy, is not simply physical exercise . . . but is
in fact a Hindu way of life."
Some Hindus are concerned that yoga has been confiscated. Some Muslims are concerned
that Hindus are using yoga as a tool of conversion. Buddhists remain detached from the issue.
But some Christians are concerned that practicing yoga will lead to theological confusion.
Should Christians or Muslims or any non-Hindus practice yoga? If they practice the physical
aspects of the ancient spiritual discpline, should they call it yoga?
More importantly, if it reduces stress, why aren't we all praticing yoga?

Can Yoga be Christian?
Author: Url Scaramanga
Publication: Outofur.com
URL: http://www.outofur.com/archives/2010/12/can_yoga_be_chr.html
Mohler, Driscoll, and others weigh in on the controversy.
A few months ago, Al Mohler set off a firestorm when he pronounced yoga to be
incompatible with Christian faith. The comments came in a review the Southern Baptist
leader wrote about Stephanie Syman's book The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America.
Mohler said:
Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds
with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the
human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are called
to meditate upon the Word of God -- an external Word that comes to us by divine revelation -
- not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.
To his surprise, Mohler received a significant backlash from Christians who use yoga as part
of their exercise routine as well as those who believe the practice can mesh with Christian
forms of reflection and meditation. But Mohler would have none of it. He wrote, “Most seem
unaware that yoga cannot be neatly separated into physical and spiritual dimensions.” In
other words, those who merely use yoga as a form of stretching and muscle strengthening are
mistaken. He continued:
that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a 'post-Christian, spiritually polyglot'
reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?
Not to be ignored amid a cultural controversy, Mark Driscoll added his $.02 into the
discussion. In this video the pugnacious pastor calls yoga “absolute paganism” and says it
opens the door to demonism. But he adds this caveat: “Is it possible for a Christian to do
stretching and read scripture and pray and do so in a way that is exercise that is biblical? Yes,
it is possible. But if you just sign up for a little yoga class you’re signing up for a little demon
class.” (BTW, Driscoll also warns against watching Avatar…the “most demonic movie
ever.”)
Of course not everyone agrees with Mohler and Driscoll. David Sapp, senior pastor at Second
Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta says the form of yoga taught at his church has "sort
of been de-religionalized.”
"What we do is yoga as stretching, exercise and relaxation technique," he said. "We don't do
yoga as Buddhist philosophy." Sapp also believes that when yoga stretches and breathing
techniques are combined with Scripture meditation, it can be used as a way of communing
with God."I believe that God can come to us in all experiences in life," Sapp said. "God has
lots of ways of revealing himself to people, and if he chose to do it through yoga, he could
sure do that."
Dayna Gelinas, a Christian yoga instructor, also sees a benefit in combining yoga with
Christian themes. "It's very different from getting on a treadmill,” she says. Gelinas has
replaced any association with Hinduism or Buddhism in her yoga instruction with signing or
chanting Scripture.
"My yoga practice is just something I do to enhance my faith," Gelinas said. "I don't see how
you can separate your body from your mind or spirit."
Many of the responses Al Mohler received to his original column were from people who do
yoga stretches while forgoing any of yoga’s religious elements. Mohler took issue with this
bifurcation. "My response to that would be simple and straightforward: You're just not doing
yoga.”
Mohler received support for his view from a surprising souce—a Hindu. Rajiv Malhotra
wrote a column for The Huffington Post on the question of “Christian yoga.” He said:
While yoga is not a "religion" in the sense that the Abrahamic religions are, it is a well-
established spiritual path. Its physical postures are only the tip of an iceberg, beneath which is
a distinct metaphysics with profound depth and breadth. Its spiritual benefits are undoubtedly
available to anyone regardless of religion. However, the assumptions and consequences of
yoga do run counter to much of Christianity as understood today. This is why, as a Hindu
yoga practitioner and scholar, I agree with the Southern Baptist Seminary President, Albert
Mohler, when he speaks of the incompatibility between Christianity and yoga, arguing that
"the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine" is
fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching.
With the popularity of yoga among all people, including Christians, getting a better
understanding of the issue is important for pastors responsible for giving spiritual guidance.
What Mohler, Driscoll, and even Malhotra agree on is that the philosophical/religious origins
of yoga are incompatible with Christian belief, AND if those elements of yoga are stripped
away what remains (the stretches and breathing practices) cannot be rightly called “yoga.”
So what are we to do? Christianity has a long tradition of adapted pagan symbols and
practices and filling them with biblical meaning. Even Christmas and the celebration of
Christ’s birth near the winter solstice is an extra-biblical tradition rooted in the pagan rituals
of Scandinavian and Germanic tribes. The Puritans were so disturbed by the Christmas
holiday that they refused to acknowledge it.
What do you think? Is it possible to take pieces of yoga and adapt them for non-religious or
even Christian use? Or are Driscoll and Mohler right—are we flirting with the demonic?
Is Yoga a Science or Religion Part I?
Author: Dr. Om Prakash Sudrania
Publication: Australia.to
URL: http://australia.to/2010/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5102:is-
yoga-a-science-or-religion-part-i&catid=132:dr-om-prakash-sudrania&Itemid=206
It is unfortunate that a vicious campaign against yoga practice has started in some parts of the
globe. There are two human weaknesses. One is sex and other is religion (to be more precise
organised religion) that can be very easily exploited to gain mass support for any cause. With
an additional season of the fiscal sauce will ensure the desired result. If you want to exploit or
defame for exploitation of someone, label him/her with some kind of sexual misconduct/libel
and it immediately invokes a good public support paving the way in your favour. Then you
can easily litigate on or publicly punish the persona.
Same way, the religious sentiments can also be equally exploited to utilise a mass uprising, as
is being done in various parts of the globe. Could it be a similar exploitation being warped
against the “Yoga” that is followed by about fifteen million Americans involving an industry
with a turn over of about $ 6 Billion per year? This is quite a wryly significant socio-fiscal
involvement to create some religious panics in the highly orthodox groups finding it a veiled
threat to their number game. It is based obviously on a misinformation campaign.
The Common Psychology
The average common individual in any society or belief, by and large, is a simple house
holder concerned mostly with personal daily life of "eating, drinking and be merry". They
only think or are made to think by the modern propaganda machinery of media and etc
inclusive of the religious institutions’ (mis)information campaign, as they want to swing the
masses. It is all business after all.
The modern way of whole religious practice is concerned with the business aspects of
religion, which in turn involves the number game. The recent sex scandal in Church did
explain its corporate nature with full fledged monetary benefits of pay scales, other amenities
and post retirement pension benefits. Some religions have organised themselves more while
others less. Current competition is fierce in this God-market.
The Common Yoga Exercises
Hereunder is a simple line chart of a few “Yoga” exercises that are advised in practice to use
for the physical exercises for fitness of the “Body” and the “Mind” in turn. It is an old
English saying, “A healthy body has a healthy mind”. In modern parlance, it equates to
physiotherapy if one wants to limit its uses to simple physical exercises only.
Epistemology of “Hindu” terminology
Hindu word is a recent discovery in the anthropological epistemology after the western
conquests of the new worlds as they call it or its exact origin is very ill understood and is a
subject of intense debate. Before that, Hindu word did not exist.
In Arabic world even today, they use "Hindi" word to denote all the inhabitants of Indian
subcontinents irrespective of any identity including the Muslims or any other community.
Please mark the difference between "Hindi and Hindu". Perhaps this may also be a
manifestation of regional versions of pronunciation as one finds in the spelling and
pronunciation of the word Muhammad or Mahmoud or the likes of umpteen variations
depending upon the region one hails from.
It is also said that Alexander the Great came to east for his conquests but after his bitter fight
with Porus, he was badly depleted of his resources. His Army revolted, he also became
exhausted; hence he retreated back from the western side of Indus River handing over the
charge of the Kingdom back to Porus. Some believe, Alexander addressed the people on east
side as Indi, Hindi or Hindu. Some add Sindi/Sindu, while others have their own versions.
Alexander the Great lived some two to three centuries before the Common Era.
The gist of the matter is that “Hindu” is neither a religion, nor a caste or a community or a
society. There is nowhere any such word stated in the millennia old scriptures. This has come
to stand to denote the Indian society adhering to the Vedic culture in the modern context.
This is how the word “Yoga” is being framed to link as “Hindu” for petty propaganda.
The Origin of major Religions
The so called Hindu religion (Sanatan Vedic tradition) exists for far longer period counted at
least for 4-5 millennia even by western historians. Although the exact periodicity is still a
matter of conjecture, as some believe it is far older. But the “West” was in dark ages at those
times.
The origin of Christianity is reckoned since the birth of Jesus or his enlightenment at best,
that is reckoned to be somewhere around two millennia being born in Jerusalem in a devout
Jewish family. The spread of Christianity in West is much later than this period making
Christianity even younger than apparent.
Islam took its roots after the advent of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). He is dated back to
around fourteen hundred years or so. Muslims believe that He is the last Prophet to arrive on
this planet and thrust this “Truth” by a very forceful ideology of “Fatwa and Jihad”. They
consider that anything other than Islam is blasphemous and impure. Hence Islam is
considered as most sacrosanct philosophy, according to them.
The Origin of Yoga
The “Yoga” practices are mentioned in the ancient Vedic treatises and the further generations
of wise men called Saints and Seers developped this technique with greater details for the
overall benefit of the posterity.
The most important Saint who developped this method is called “Sage Patanjali”. His exact
age as well as Name is a misty memory. The treatise he wrote is famously called “Yoga
Sutra” or better known as “Patanjali Yoga Sutra” through his “Eightfold Path” or eight limbs.
The Ancient Indian Philosophical Psychology

The ancient Indian Sages and Seers did not want any publicity or personal advertisements in
this mundane world, which they considered as “false or temporary world” full of miseries.
There are Saints even now in and around the Indian peninsula in remote places engaged in
selfless services for the sake of humanity.
For this very reason, they even used to change their family names also and leave their
worldly homes and hearths to live a secluded life. Swami Vivekanand was Narendra and Sri
Satya Sai Baba is Satynarayana Raju; while the family name of Saint Kabir and Sri Shirdi Sai
Baba is not known at all to this world. If they were ever asked about their worldly and family
connections, they will avoid and discourage such discussions.
This tradition still continues. This makes the exact details of the historiology of the ancient
Indian people and its culture vulnerable to gross misinterpretation.
The Purpose of Yoga Practices
These Yoga practices were devised only to deliver the people from their misery from/in this
world in the ancient Vedic tradition. However it must not be confused that “Yoga” is a
proselytising philosophy or method or technique towards a religious conversion. In fact the
people following the Vedic culture never ever thought the need for such practice as it was
thought that there is neither a need nor they thought it to compete with any other philosophy.
The Religion was not a sellable commodity unlike today. During those days, there was no
competition in the “God Market” as we find it today.
The Basic Concept behind Yoga Philosophy
It has been said that our body consists of three parts. Body, mind and soul, though the
western concept of religion is confused on the soul aspect of the body. That is the reason that
World Health Organisation does not include the word "Spirit" in its definition of "Health".
But it is long overdue to do that.
Carl Jung had said that in my long 60 yrs of practice of psychiatry, I had never seen even a
single person who believed in "Spirituality", as a psychiatric patient. It must not be construed
with "Yoga" as a Hindu religion. For the practice of "Pure Spirituality" has no Hindu
hallmark or copyright on it.
Yoga has two initial components - one body and second mind aspect. Once you have healed
the both, then the third component of "Pure Spirituality" to heal the “Soul” comes but only if
one wishes.
Here comes the catch. The catch is that once you have come off the by-lanes to catch the
highway, it depends upon you, which highway to take. If you want Jesus highway, get in the
Church supermarket. If you want Islam, get in the Islamic supermarket and so on. The
healing of body-mind complex does not or should not compel one or force upon one to take a
particular highway. In that case, I would only say that the fault is in the finder, not in the
highway if he lands into a wrong track.
Most important of all, after that stage of “Enlightenment”, one has no desire of a
“Trademark”. This leads one to “His/Her” own mark in this “Trade”.
In some interesting explanation of the venerable Patanjali concept of Yogas in his typical
eightfold paths or limbs in the following descriptions from an anonymous blog is reproduced
hereunder, slightly edited:
What is Traditional Astanga Yoga?
In his classical yoga text, the Yoga Sutras, sage Patanjali has outlined the various stages of
practice along the yogic path. So in a way, yoga can be seen as a progressive process, where
one must follow certain steps in order to reach the ultimate goal strictly systematically.
Ok, perhaps the word ‘steps’ doesn’t completely convey the full idea either. But what
Patanjali is trying to teach us is that in order to grow as human beings; to rise above the
problems of our daily lives; to find real peace, harmony and understanding in life… and to
ultimately transcend all of our worldly limitations, we must deal with many often overlooked
and unknown “layers” of ourselves.
How Do We Do This?
Well, that process is the very science of yoga itself! In his Yoga Sutras, the definitive
Ashtaanga yoga book, the great sage lays out the eight practical stages of yoga for health,
harmony, wellbeing and ultimate self-realization. Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga narrative
involve:
1. Yama
The yamas can be thought of as the ethical restraints that are necessary for achieving
harmony with other beings. In other words, the “Don’t-s”.
2. Niyama
The niyamas are the actions necessary for achieving balance within oneself. In other words,
the “Do-s”.
3. Asana ( yoga pose )
These are the Ashtaanga yoga poses (or postures) so commonly made the focal point of many
types of yoga today… It is this physical part of Yoga, the ‘Third Limb or Path’ that is the
focal point of this intense debate.
4. Pranayama
Pranayama is the practice of breath control, a fundamental aspect of the Ashtaanga yoga
system…
5. Pratyahara
Pratyahara is the stage of withdrawal of the attention into oneself. It is

the state of re-sorption into the self of all the senses… i.e. withdrawal from all worldly
negative traits. This prepares one from the “Outer side to the Inner side” of “Yoga” – i call it
“Milieu Interior”, “The Real Ultimate Knowledge. A stage for metamorphosis.
{NB: OUTER and INNER Yoga
These first 5 limbs are referred to as the Bahiranga Yoga, or the ‘outer practices’ of yoga.
(Bahir = Outer, Anga = Part)
The final 3 stages, known as Antaranga Yoga, (Antar = Inner) or ‘inner yoga’, are higher
stages of the practice of yoga. These final 3 stages are also referred to as Samyama Yoga.}
6. Dharana
Dharana is the act of concentration of the mind. It can be said that it at this stage where ‘real
yoga’ actually begins!
* Without concentration of the mind, there is no yoga (in its advanced stages)!
7. Dhyana
Dhyana is meditation, an unbroken stream of consciousness whereby very little sense of the
‘Self’ (body sense) remains…
8. Samadhi
This is the stage of ‘mystic absorption’, where knowledge of the ‘essential Self’ is attained. It
is the state otherwise referred to as nirvana, jivana mukti, sartori …
This stage of “Consciousness” is referred by different streams in different style and their way
of versions but the actual state of “Experience” achieved remains the same. Also referred to
as “Self Consciousness or the Self Realisation or Jesus Consciousness or Krishna
Consciousness” and can be similarly extended to other self suiting versions by anybody.
The Real Nature of Yoga
Yoga is much more than a system of physical exercises for improved health and wellbeing.
Yoga is a magnificent “Science of Life” – one that can take us into the vastly uncharted
territory of our inner selves… if we dare to go there.
This website is dedicated to giving you a glimpse at some of the many aspects of Ashtaanga
yoga… to intrigue you… to inspire you… to motivate you to look deeper into this thing
called yoga… to see what it is really all about and what it can truly bring to you.
It is my utmost sincere desire to attempt to clarify the ambiguity waged in this most useful
practice and knowledge highly beneficial to the humanity. It can be used at the physical level
as well as to proceed to attain the most advanced knowledge of the “Science of Self
Realisation”.
Let us not deprive the society of this benevolent self serving scientific technique devolved for
the service to the humanity from the ancient times, the exact chronology of which may never
be understood due to natural obstacles.
It has, though nothing of a religious hallmark but it can not be denied that it was discovered
in this ancient pristine tradition in this ancient land by the Sage Patanjali through his
monumental monograph of “Yoga Sutra”. Anything else on this subject is only next to this.
I may also refer in passing that the “Noble Eightfold Path” stated in Buddhism has nothing to
do with this “Yoga” tradition. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that Buddhism arose
from this very land where Lord Buddha was born to a devout King in India who followed the
Vedic tradition in a missionary zeal and was brought up till his adulthood there.
Buddhism has also bifurcated in two major sects and the sect preached by “Dalai Lama” is
the sect called “Mahayana”, very close to what is referred to as “Hinduism”. The other
branch is being evolved as more orthodox puritanical rigid cult.
Lastly the other words used by some other traditions e.g. Hatha Yoga or Raj Yoga are
variants but the “Path” described by them all is abridged from the Patanjali method and
named differently to maintain their own brand. But none can match the original sacred
technique enumerated in “Yoga Sutra”.
Answering the stark question of “Yoga” being a “Science or Religion”, perhaps both;
depending on our interpretation and how do we take it. It is something like taking “Water”. In
whatever sense or language or its manner one take it, the basic nature of “Water” does not
alter.
(Dr. O. P. Sudrania is a senior retired teacher in surgery and a medico-legal counsellor; now
also engaged in research of socio-political analytical science as a part of service to humanity.)
Here is a PDf version of Is Yoga a Science or Religion Part I?

Irony and the 'yoga wars'
Author: Dr. Pankaj Jain
URL:
http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/12/irony_and_the_yoga_wars.ht
ml
Over last several months the pages on Washington Post "On Faith" Forum, Newsweek, and
now New York Times and Huffington Post have been abuzz with the "Great Yoga Debate."
One of question being debated is "Is Yoga Hindu or Secular"? Several people have rejected
the claim that yoga should acknowledge its "Hindu" origin and that such claim is yet another
campaign by Hindu nationalists that need not be taken seriously.
Several points seem to be lost in this vociferous debate. First, the very word "Hindu" is
difficult to decide if it is religious or secular. While its common usage refers to people
practicing Hinduism, etymologically it simply refers to people living across or near the river
Sindhu, also called as Indus in English. The word is still often used by non-Hindus and non-
Indians to refer to all people living in South Asia or even the languages used by people of
South Asian origin. For instance, I am sometimes asked this question, "Do you speak
Hindu?" Here the questioner is really referring to the language Hindi, which again is a
reference to the people living in South Asia and speaking Hindi-Urdu, the twin language of
India and Pakistan with shared grammar and vocabulary.
My point is that the very question of whether "yoga" is secular or religious has its origins in
the history of the Western enlightenment which separated the secular from religion.
From the South Asian perspective the very word Hindu is both religious and secular.
Furthermore, for several millennia yoga has strived to transcend all kinds of dichotomies, for
instance, between the body, mind, and soul. The very word yoga means to yoke or to join, not
to separate or dichotomize! Absence of dichotomy is, of course, not limited to the term Hindu
or yoga but much of indigenous traditions in Asia, Australia, Africa, and in the Americas
make no such distinction between 'religion' and 'secular.' So perhaps, it is time to remind us
that the concept or idea of 'religion' is not of the same kind in other cultures as it is in the
West. In fact, several scholars have argued that there is no such distinct or tangible
phenomenon in Asian cultures, which can be called as 'religion'. Virtually, every part of life
is filled with religious (and secular) ideas including food, music, entertainment, health,
education, and many other spheres usually considered 'secular' in the West.
Perhaps more importantly, why do some people insist that the Hindu "debt" to yoga must be
duly acknowledged? In this age of globalization, ideas and trends will continue to travel in all
directions. Even more than a century ago, Swami Vivekananda, one of the most famous
Hindu yogis of all times, had this to say about the Indian spiritual ideas:
"Whenever such a state [globalization] has been brought about, the result has been the
flooding of the world with Indian spiritual ideas".
So, Hindus and people of Indian origin should indeed be happy that the prediction of their
first Hindu monk in the West has indeed come true. Yoga has indeed flooded the American
gyms and health centers with millions of practitioners all over the country. Why then some
Hindus are mounting a campaign "to take yoga back"? They seem to be quite satisfied and
even proud that several Westerners are leading yoga teachers and publishers of other Hindu
books and magazines. For instance, one of the world's most prominent Hindu magazine
"Hinduism Today" is published by Western Shaivites based in Hawaii with a huge number of
subscribers from Indians in India and the Indian diaspora around the world. Whenever
Western scholars, political leaders, or even industrialists go to India, they experience the
legendary hospitality offered by Indians. Evidently, there is no tension on the racial or
cultural or religious perspective, not at least from Indian side. What then is the driving force
behind the recent not-so-friendly reactions from Indian diaspora?
One way to interpret this anxiety about yoga could be to look beyond Yoga and study the
issues related to biopiracy. Indian scientists, politicians, and activists seem deeply worried
that the ancient traditions such as yoga and even indigenous spices and other food items such
as Indian species of rice, turmeric, and other plants such as Neem and Tulsi would eventually
be patented by the Western powers. This Indian concern is similar to 'Indian' concern of
Native Americans about their native symbols and legends being appropriated and exploited
by business interests in the USA. Perhaps the psychological and cultural wounds (both real
and perceived) of indigenous people in India or elsewhere are yet to be studied and healed by
Western forces. And that may be one way to bridge this gap of fear and insecurity among
different cultures.
This whole debate over who owns yoga is reminiscent of President Obama's now-famous
"race speech" delivered during his election campaign in March 2008 when people were
shocked by the angry sermons of his pastor Reverend Jeremy Wright. Here is how Obama
appealed to understand this anger:
"The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without
understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists
between the races."
I could not agree more!
Finally, the biggest irony is the word 'yoga', which is meant to unite, is creating new walls of
fear and mistrust. How about everybody sits down in one of the easiest yogic asana
'Sukhasana', (the relaxed posture) and do some 'Pranayama' (deep breathing) and 'Dhyana'
(meditation) together!
- Dr. Pankaj Jain is Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas. He has also recently
authored posts on 'The Hindu Method to Save the Planet' and 'Ten Key Hindu Environmental
Teachings.'
Yoga Better Than Walking For Beating The Blues
Author: Lisa Watson
Publication: Fyiliving.com
URL: http://fyiliving.com/depression/yoga-better-than-walking-for-beating-the-
blues/#ixzz18G2YmF4t
Scientists are now giving serious attention to an idea that yogis have known for centuries:
that yoga has a positive effect on your mood. Although it’s an ancient mind-body practice,
the future of yoga may be in treating mood disorders. For this small study, scientists at the
Boston University School of Medicine measured yoga’s effect on depression and anxiety
versus walking with a brain imaging study. They found that compared to walking, yoga
provides a greater improvement in mood, as well as a decrease in anxiety.
The 34 study participants were randomly selected healthy men and women between the ages
of 18 and 45. They were divided into two groups: those who walked for an hour three times a
week, and those who practiced Iyengar yoga (a strenuous form of yoga) for the same amount
of time.
The subjects’ brain scans were taken using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). This
cutting-edge technology measured the participants’ levels of a brain chemical gamma-amino
butyric acid (GABA). GABA levels are markedly decreased in depressed people, but those
levels increase in those who take medications such as Prozac that target serotonin levels. In
the study, GABA levels were monitored before, during and after the exercise. Those subjects
practicing yoga reported greater mood improvement than those walking, and their GABA
levels matched those improvements.
Originating from India, yoga involves meditative movements and controlled breathing. The
various postures, called asanas, are appropriate for most people regardless of any age, weight
or fitness level. Yoga reduces stress, enhances concentration and increases flexibility. It’s
gentle enough so that beginners don’t feel threatened. There’s no need to twist yourself into a
pretzel to realize the benefits. As a quiet retreat from life’s demands, yoga can help you
detach from whatever is troubling you.
By looking at actual changes in the brain, scientists are identifying new approaches to
treating depression and anxiety. Walking is still a great form of exercise, and any exercise
will be beneficial for those struggling with mood disorders. However, yoga improved mood
more than walking did in this small study population. While yoga may not be a substitute for
treatment, it could be an appropriate add-on. When starting any new exercise, it’s important
to consult a healthcare professional and to learn the moves from a qualified teacher.
Bottom line is that while yoga is a great way to get toned, the inner source of calm it provides
might also be an effective antidote to the blues.
Yoga essentially Hindu, anti-Christ
Author: Albert Mohler
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/304400/Yoga-essentially-Hindu-anti-Christ.html
One of the biggest controversies to sweep intellectual circles of the developed world in 2010
was generated by this article, penned by an evangelist obviously alarmed at the potential of
Yoga to unite mankind into Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam
The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral.
Some questions we ask today would simply baffle our ancestors. When Christians ask
whether believers should practice yoga, they are asking a question that betrays the
strangeness of our current cultural moment — a time in which yoga seems almost mainstream
in America.
It was not always so. No one tells the story of yoga in America better than Stefanie Syman,
whose recent book, The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, is a masterpiece of
cultural history. Syman, an engaging author who is also a fifteen-year devotee of yoga, tells
this story well.
Her book actually opens with a scene from this year’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
President Barack Obama made a few comments and then introduced First Lady Michelle
Obama, who said: “Our goal today is just to have fun. We want to focus on activity, healthy
eating. We’ve got yoga, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got Easter-egg
decorating.”
Syman describes the yoga on the White House lawn as “sanitised, sanctioned, and family-
friendly,” and she noted the rather amazing fact that a practice once seen as so exotic and
even dangerous was now included as an activity sufficiently safe and mainstream for
children.
In her words:
There certainly was no better proof that Americans had assimilated this spiritual discipline.
We had turned a technique for God realisation that had, at various points in time, enjoined its
adherents to reduce their diet to rice, milk, and a few vegetables, fix their minds on a set of,
to us, incomprehensible syllables, and self-administer daily enemas (without the benefit of
equipment), to name just a few of its prerequisites, into an activity suitable for children.
Though yoga has no coherent tradition in India, being preserved instead by thousands of
gurus and hundreds of lineages, each of which makes a unique claim to authenticity, we had
managed to turn it into a singular thing: a way to stay healthy and relaxed.
In her book, Syman tells the fascinating story of how yoga was transformed in the American
mind from a foreign and “even heathen” practice into a cultural reality that is widely admired
and practiced.
In telling this story, Syman documents the ties between yoga and groups or movements such
as the Transcendentalists and New Thought — movements that sought to provide a
spirituality that would be a clear alternative to biblical Christianity. She traces the influence
of leading figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Swami Prabhavananda, along with Pierre
Bernard and the now lesser-known Margaret Woodrow Wilson. Each of these figures played
a role in the growing acceptance of yoga in America, but most were controversial at the time
— some extremely so.
Syman describes yoga as a varied practice, but she makes clear that yoga cannot be fully
extricated from its spiritual roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. She is also straightforward in
explaining the role of sexual energy in virtually all forms of yoga and of ritualised sex in
some yoga traditions. She also explains that yoga “is one of the first and most successful
products of globalisation, and it has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot
country.”
Reading The Subtle Body is an eye-opening and truly interesting experience. To a remarkable
degree, the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the
culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least,
at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see
the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are
called to meditate upon the Word of God — an external Word that comes to us by divine
revelation — not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.
Nevertheless, a significant number of American Christians either experiment with yoga or

become adherents of some yoga discipline. Most seem unaware that yoga cannot be neatly
separated into physical and spiritual dimensions. The physical is the spiritual in yoga, and the
exercises and disciplines of yoga are meant to connect with the divine.
Douglas R Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and a respected specialist

on the New Age Movement, warns Christians that yoga is not merely about physical exercise
or health. “All forms of yoga involve occult assumptions,” he warns, “even hatha yoga,
which is often presented as a merely physical discipline.” While most adherents of yoga
avoid the more exotic forms of ritualised sex that are associated with tantric yoga, virtually
all forms of yoga involve an emphasis on channeling sexual energy throughout the body as a
means of spiritual enlightenment.Stefanie Syman documents how yoga was transformed in
American culture from an exotic and heathen practice into a central component of our
national cult of health. Of course, her story would end differently if Americans still had
cultural access to the notion of “heathen.”
The nation of India is almost manically syncretistic, blending worldviews over and over
again. But, in more recent times, America has developed its own obsession with syncretism,
mixing elements of worldviews with little or no attention to what each mix means. Americans
have turned yoga into an exercise ritual, a means of focusing attention, and an avenue to
longer life and greater health. Many Americans attempt to deny or minimise the spiritual
aspects of yoga — to the great consternation of many in India.
The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. The bare fact is that yoga is a spiritual
discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving
consciousness of the divine. Christians are called to look to Christ for all that we need and to
obey Christ through obeying his Word. We are not called to escape the consciousness of this
world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness, but to follow Christ in the way of
faithfulness.
There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the
main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose. Consider this
— if you have to meditate intensely in order to achieve or to maintain a physical posture, it is
no longer merely a physical posture.
The embrace of yoga is a symptom of our postmodern spiritual confusion, and, to our shame,
this confusion reaches into the church. Stefanie Syman is telling us something important
when she writes that yoga “has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country.”
that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually
polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?
- The writer is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the flagship school
of the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest seminaries in the world
Yoga rules
Author: Subhash Chandra Sharma
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/304396/Yoga-rules.html
Evangelical Christianity is passing through a bad patch; perhaps a bit of Yoga could help
Gospel pushers see new light
In the 19th century, Christian missionaries who came to propagate the white man’s faith in
India dismissed our ancient way of life as ‘pagan’. But despite all use of force and guile, they
failed to make an impression on the vast majority of Indians. Today’s Caucasian missionaries
are terribly worried that not only are they failing to win converts in India, their own ilk are
subscribing to Yogic philosophy. They perceive this, wrongly too, as an attack on
Christianity. An Osama bin Laden character has emerged in the American Church — Rev
Albert Mohler.
People in India are familiar with the Southern Baptists. This Church is actively converting
people in parts of India where there is great disaffection over poverty and corruption. One of
its most prominent faces is Albert Mohler, president of their theological seminary. In
September this year, he lashed out at Yoga, which is perhaps one of the few ‘industries’ in
recession-hit America to be growing, calling it essentially Hindu and something which good
Christians should shun because it negates Jesus Christ. I don’t apologise for the quack Yoga
which dominates the Yoga market of America. A lot of garbage is being sold to gullible
Americans as Yoga and I thank Saturday Special for highlighting this in its May 1, 2010
issue (The Rape of Yoga), but Mohler is stooping to an unprecedented low in intellectual
morality. But since the power of the media gives all sorts of humbug theories extra mileage, it
is necessary for Saturday Special to put things in their right perspective. The views of Mohler
are presented in the Main space, and the picture on the ground in America is revealed through
Rajiv Malhotra’s article (The Other Voice).
I want to take this discourse to a slightly higher level. Let’s start with the bottomline — Sutra
24 of Samadhi Pada in Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms. Kles, Karma, Vipaaka,
Ashayer ae paramrashtPurush vishesh Ishwaraha In other words, affliction, karma, result,
impressions of that result lead Man on to further affliction. This is not the work of God, but
Man alone.
Man is trapped in an unending cycle. From the moment of birth, he feels the need to breathe
to live. That is the original affliction and sets off a chain of actions from which there is no
release on earth. Who is free of this definition of Man which is also the apt description of
God? A Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim?
One who has affliction does not feel the need to work, waits not for the result of his action
and hence does not have impressions of any kind. In other words, he has no past, therefore no
present and future too, which is further explained through another Sutra:
Sa purvesam api giri aaem amisjjedat (He is the guide of even the past, therefore present and
the future; and therefore out of time).
On the other hand, if this is not His definition, then He must have afflictions of listening to
the prayers and fulfilling their prayers becomes His job. But everybody’s prayers cannot
possibly be fulfilled and therefore he should either be sad about it or happy when He
succeeds in intervening. His interventions become His results (vipaka). Subject to these
results, He should have impressions of the actions of all people on earth (rewarded or not),
which means he is within the timeframe of birth and death and other features of life. This
means either the second sutra is valueless or utterly wrong.
This second definition of Mohler’s God is essentially Dwaita (dualist) philosophy, which he
calls his Christianity (not true Christianity) and has been rejected all over the world. He
means to say “God is God, Man is Man, never the twain shall meet”. The Adwaita
philosophy propounded by Adi Shankara and Ramanuja, which gave a new dimension to the
Sanatana faith, God and Man are the same much like ornaments of gold and gold, the metal.
If Rev Mohler says dualism is at the heart of Christianity, then I must say he has
misunderstood his own religion. Like all white practitioners of Christianity, he denies the
Asiatic roots of Christ and his Word. I don’t want to dwell here on Lord Jesus Christ’s India
connection — contemporary historians have more than proved it with the help of hard
evidence. But it is important to point out Mohler’s bigger agenda: he betrays his belief in the
“war of civilisations” and would like to reinvent the White West versus Dark East war by
seeking recourse to bogus rhetoric.
Yoga offers hope to Man in that Man alone has cosmic powers to sustain the cosmos. If all
the consciousness of Man becomes coherent, Man would become a superpower or
superconscious. In our ordinary life we see superconsciousness in sacred shrines, wherever
people collect with positive thoughts in their head. Yoga cultivation takes Man towards that.
Roop, Lavanya, Bal, Vajra, Samnatvaani kaya sampat — or, the complete health of a person
is achieved when he has a body like vajra, forceful intellectualism and spiritual beauty. No
herbs, lotions and potions can give this to any human being, except Yoga. Today, humanity is
in its worst hour. Materialism is destroying everything that was sacred and decent in our
lives. The popularisation of Yoga, even in the bogus forms seen in the United States, was a
silver lining. Now, we have mock-Christians like Mohler undermining it.
Throughout history, Christian superciliousness has been the curse of civilisation. It has
caused enough misery across South America, Africa and Asia. Now, the sad denizens of
North America who are fast realising the poverty of being rich, are the intended victims.
- The writer is a pioneer in Yoga therapy and lives in New Delhi

Yoga bad for your knees, Indian doctor warns
Author: Dean Nelson
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8222484/Yoga-bad-for-your-
knees-Indian-doctor-warns.html
Yoga may be good for your karma, but is terrible for your knees, an Indian orthopaedic
surgeon has warned.
Dr Ashok Rajgopal says he has performed knee replacement surgery on a number of leading
yoga gurus.
His warnings are a serious challenge to those who say yoga, which is now a multi-billion
pound global industry, can ward off the effects of ageing and leave devotees feeling fitter,
stronger and at peace with the world.
Some of its most charismatic teachers, like India's Baba Ramdev, who has built a worldwide
empire through television appearances, believe its breathing exercises can even cure diseases
like HIV Aids and cancer. In the United States alone, more than £4 billion a year is spent on
yoga equipment and 15 million people are regular practitioners.
But according to Dr Rajgopal, the extreme stretching exercises at the heart of the
discipline cause severe stress on joints, leading to arthritis.
He has seen a higher incidence of joint and bone ailments among yoga followers.
"Yoga is wonderful provided it is done in a controlled environment, and people are trained
and built up to doing such postures but putting the public at large through these extreme yoga
postures can create problems for them," he said.
"Many yoga gurus had to undergo knee surgeries, they had been affected by yoga postures,"
he told The Daily Telegraph.
"Extreme postures like acute deep knee bends, particularly for people who are not used to
doing these postures, it is definitely harmful to them in terms of the abnormal stresses, and
damage to cartilages. In that respect it is harmful."
He said he had seen particular problems among people who had practised yoga in classes of
more than 100 people.
"We see a significant number of people who have been not trained adequately to get into
yoga and harmed themselves.
"The vast majority of people have to build up to the level where they can actually take to
such postures without harming their joints."
Many yoga gurus had suffered knee and joint problems from performing the 'vajrasana'
posture, also known as the 'thunderbolt,' where the practitioner kneels with heels tucked
under buttocks, while he or she performs a 'pranayama' fast breathing routine.
Savira Gupta, an instructor at India's Yogalife centre said while it was possible to suffer
injuries in yoga, they could be avoided by slowly building up to more strenuous exercises.
"Anatomy is key when you are teaching yoga because everybody has a different body and
build. We have to be very careful how we could keep up from one posture to another without
injuring them. Everything has to be done according to what your body can handle. With
proper alignments and training one can avoid these injuries," he said.
A yoga society was formed in Britain in 1910 but its popularity began to take off in the late
1950s when pioneer BKS Iyengar taught Sir Yehudi Menuhin and later in 1968 after the
Beatles joined a yoga retreat in India with their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
In the 1970s its popularity spread through school halls and community centres as 'keep fit
classes.' Today there are an estimated 30 million people around the world practicing yoga
every week with around 500,000 in Britain where there are more than 30,000 yoga classes.
Yoga: A Positively Un-Indian Experience
Author: Sandip Roy
Publication:
URL: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132207910/yoga-a-positively-un-indian-experience
True confession: I am an Indian who doesn't do yoga. I wouldn't know a downward dog if it
bit me. But because I'm Indian, people don't even ask if I know yoga. They ask, "What kind
of yoga did you grow up with? Iyengar? Ashtanga? Bikram?"
Actually, most Indians I know don't do yoga, either. My friend Rajasvini Bhansali is an
exception. And she's often the only Indian in class. She recalled one class in particular:
"The instructor pointed to me and said Indians are better oriented towards squats. And I
realized he was holding me up as an example of how we primitive people are better squatters
and have looser hips," she laughed.
I always thought I wasn't thick-skinned enough to survive yoga class. Then I heard the Hindu
American Foundation had launched a campaign to Take Back Yoga and reclaim its Hindu
roots. I was alarmed. What if they really took it back? And I wasn't ready. I decided to fix my
Yoga Deficit Disorder.
So I show up at my first yoga class in San Francisco. It's steamy hot. There are over 100
people — and sure enough, my friends and I are the only four Indians.
The instructor is from Tennessee. Blond, shirtless, and a bit of a yoga rock star. There are
disco balls on the ceiling and huge posters of Krishna on the wall.
I am just amazed at all the ... stuff. Yoga tops, bottoms, blankets, mats. My vision of a yogi
was a guy in the forest, sitting on a piece of tree bark — or in the deluxe version, a deerskin.
He didn't have a yoga mat carrier!
I survive the yoga class without embarrassing 5,000 years of Indian culture. It doesn't feel
very Indian. My friend Naveen Chandra calls it bionic disco yoga. But he thinks Yoga's
Hindu roots are still there.
"The vast majority of yoga teachers have studied more Hinduism than I have or my
parents have," says Chandra. "I am learning more about the meanings of the shlokas
and the intention of Hinduism than I ever knew as a kid growing up, being taught from
my community."
Even back in India, yoga has not been such a big deal.
Kate Churchill, director of the documentary Enlighten Up, interviewed yoga pioneer Pattabhi
Jois at his school in south India.
"And we might as well have been in the Puck building in New York. There were over 100
Westerners, not a single Indian. I was looking around and saying, 'Well, where are the
Indians?' "
But things are starting to change. The Indian government is filming hundreds of yoga
poses so no one tries to patent them. People are practicing yoga at call centers and other
workplaces.
"We saw in large cities like Mumbai, power yoga studios cropping up, because Madonna
does yoga," says Churchill. "It has nothing to do with India. Whereas if you go to a power
yoga studio in the U.S., they will say it's a 5,000-year-old tradition."
I hear they come to your homes now in India to teach you yoga. Private lessons. And it's the
real thing. They learned it from American DVDs.
- Commentator Sandip Roy is an editor with New America Media.

On Yoga Asana the Hindu Legacy
Author: Sarvesh K Tiwari
Publication: Bharatendu.Wordpress.com
Date: January 2, 2011
URL: http://bharatendu.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/yoga-asana-the-hindu-legacy/
We have seen in the previous part how the identity of pata~njali, about which Hindus have
never had doubts, is maliciously obliterated by the western commentators of yoga.
Having obfuscated yoga-sUtra and having reduced its author to obscurity, next our western
scholars say the following to reject the ancientness (and indigenousness) of yogAsana, an
important pillar in the edifice of yoga:
“…The text usually cited as the definitive source for Yoga is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, but the
to any of these texts…” – Deepak Chopra
“…But these texts say nothing about the physical “positions” or “postures” that distinguish
contemporary yoga. The postures developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga
and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish
gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still others devised
by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting
against those non-Indian influences.” – Wendy Doniger
We are reminded of the remark of Prof. Surendranatha Dasgupta on such western yoga
scholars in one of his lectures on Yoga to the students of Calcutta Univerity several decades
back: “(These) unsympathetic and shallow-minded scholars lack the imagination and the will
to understand the Indian thought and culture of its past.”
But even a very sympathetic scholar and a Hinduphile Dr. Koenraad Elst colludes with the
general view of the above scholars when he says:
“…the description of these specific techniques is found in the Hatha Yoga classics which do
not predate the 13th century: the Gheranda Samhita, the Shiva Samhita and the Hatha Yoga
Pradipika… There too, a number of asana-s or postures is described, though important ones
now popular in the Western (and westernized-Indian) yoga circuit, particularly standing ones,
are still not in evidence even in these more recent texts. In the Yoga Sutra, they are totally
absent. Patanjali merely defines Asana, ‘seat’, as ‘comfortable but stable’… I don’t think any
other asana postures except those for simply sitting up straight have been recorded before the
late-medieval Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and such.” – Dr. Koenraad Elst
Let us examine.
Having commented upon the yama-niyamau, pata~njali describes Asana, the third great limb
of the yoga, in the following three yoga-sUtra-s:
sthira sukhamAsanam (2.46), prayatnashaithilyAnantyasamApattibhyAm (2.47), and tato

dvandvAnabhighAt (2.48).
The view of Dr. Elst, that “pata~njali merely defines Asana as ‘seat’, ‘comfortable but
stable’”, seems very simplistic reduction of the first sUtra sthirasukhamAsanam. Had Asana
just meant so little as to merely mean a “comfortable but stable seat”, was it really worth
enumerating as one of the limbs of the aShTA~Nga yoga? Would it not be pretty obvious to a
rAjayoga student to anyway naturally take a “comfortable but stable seat” for practicing
yoga? Why formulize upon Asana at all?
Indeed, the word “Asana” in simple saMskRîta, in itself means to sit comfortably, according
to its vyutpatti: “Asyate Asate anena iti Asanam” (deriving from the same dhAtu from which
English ‘sit’ and ‘seat’ also came). That a sUtra-kAra of pata~njali’s fame, who scrupulously
economizes on even half of the short vowels (as he says in the mahAbhAShya), should spend
not one but three precious sUtra-s to Asana, when all he meant by it merely was a
“comfortable but stable seat”, is hard to fathom. pata~njali must have a deeper meaning when
he says sthirasukhamAsanam. What does he signify by the specific indication of ‘sthira-
sukha’ in the sUtra, when ‘Asana’ itself would be sufficient had his intention been such a
basic meaning as suggested?
The traditional Hindu wisdom says that deciphering the sUtras without help of an
authoritative commentary, and better still under the guidance of a siddha preceptor, is fraught
with the danger of gross errors for laymen. We refer therefore to the authorities of how they
decipher what pata~njali implies in this first sUtra?
vyAsa explains the meaning of pata~njali here by considering the joint of “sthira” and
“sukha” to be the karmadhAraya samAsa, making the sUtra mean, “That Asana is here called
Asana which yields sthira-sukha i.e. unwavering delight”.
AchArya shaMkara in his own TIkA explains this sUtra as, “yasmin Asane sthitasya
manogAtrANAmupajAyate sthiratvam, duHkham cha yena nabhavati tadabhaset.” [Practice
is recommended of that Asana which leads the practitioner’s mind to immovableness and
constancy, and does not cause any discomfort.]
vAchaspati mishra in the eighth century explains this sUtra in his tattva vaiShAradi as,
“sthiram nishchalam yatsukham sukhAvaham tadAsana”: Asana is that which yields a
comfort that is lasting, stable, and unwavering. (Although vAchaspati treats the samAsa
between sthira and sukha as bahubrIhi: “sthiram sukham yena tat”).
But the clearest explanation of the sUtra comes from our favourite scholar, bhojadeva the
learned rAjan: “Asana, the posture. Posture without motion. One that leads the practitioner to
the not-flickering and lasting comfort. Only that type of Asana is Asana-proper, counted as
one of the eight limbs of yoga.”
So, all these eminent authors on yoga understand pata~njali’s instruction to not mean just any
“comfortable but stable seat”, which by definition ‘Asana’ anyway is, but specifically an
Asana that gives the sthira sukha to the yogAbhyAsI helping him reach a concentrated mind;
such an Asana alone is called yogAsana. Like ‘chitta’, pata~njali is not defining ‘Asana’, as
he considers Asana to have been already understood earlier, he is only adding these further
qualifications to it.
But is Wendy Doniger right when she says that the old texts including YS “say nothing about
the physical “positions” or “postures” that distinguish contemporary yoga”, a view which Dr.
Elst and Deepak Chopra seem to share? What about Chopra’s opinion when he says that the
“the familiar poses are generally traced to Shiva cults”?
Let us explore this next.
Contrary to the above assertions, we find that ancient authorities mention the yogAsana-s,
referring to them by name. Even the fairly antiquated commentaries of the pata~njali’s yoga
sUtra itself, preceding the haThayoga dIpikA and gheraNya saMhita etc. by several centuries,
already explain that Master pata~njali particularly implied these same standard “postures”
when he instructed upon Asana in the yoga-sUtra.
Consider the oldest available commentary on yoga sUtra by vyAsa. The author ends his
explanation of pata~njali’s ‘sthira-sukham-Asanam’ with, “…tadyathA padmAsanam
bhadrAsanam”, that is, “Asana like the padmAsana or the bhadrAsana etc.” He mentions
these two postures by name, and then too, in a way as if those were a matter of common
knowledge; this is from at least as old as the 6th century if not older.
Explaining the same sUtra of ‘sthirasukhamAsanam’, AchArya shaMkara also concludes his
explanation of pata~njali’s instruction with, “…tadyathA shAstrAntara prasiddhAni nAmAni
padmAsanAdIni pradarshyante”, meaning “…that is, for example, those well known postures
explained in the other shAstras, like the padmAsana etcetera.”]
An acute reader cannot fail to notice the casualness shown here in mentioning the example of
same of the postures, when both the above authors refer to the names of the Asana-s, just
mentioning the name of one or two Asana followed by ‘Adi’, etcetera, meaning that the
reader is anyway easily familiar with them.
Also observe the words AchArya shaMkara uses above, “prasiddhAni nAmAni”, explicitly
signifying that many Asanas were already famous by specific names and were not worth
repeating there.
Besides the above, further note the important word he uses, ‘shAstrAntara’. It is significant
that shaMkara not only refers to these postures as famous, but also says those are
‘shAstrAntara’, or explained elsewhere beyond the yogasUtra or by the “other shAstra-s”. Of
course we have no means at present to say which other shAstra he was referring here, but
probably some older material no more extant.
In an entirely different book, that is the celebrated bramha-sUtra-bhAShya, AchArya

shaMkara further refers to the Asana postures in a similar vein when he says, “ata eva
padmakAdInAmAsana visheShANAmupadesho yogashAstre”: “…This is why yoga-shAstra
particularly prescribes the postures like padmAsana etcetera…” (See BSB 4.1.10 under
‘smaranti cha’)
Still elsewhere, and very significantly, AchArya shaMkara alludes to the yoga darshana and
its development from the vaidika roots. In the same bhAShya talking about yoga system what
strikes his mind as uniquely characteristic of yoga, is its elaborate system of Asana! AchArya
remarks: “AsanAdi-kalpanA-purassaram bahu-prapa~ncham yoga-vidhAnam
shvetAshvataropaniShAdi dRîshyate” [“Such emphasis on postures and related amplified
prapa~ncha, one can already sense in the (old) upaniShada-s such as that of shvetAshvatAra
etcetera”]
This is a very important testimony we get from the AchArya that even as far back as in his
time, he understood the importance of the elaborate system of Asana postures to have gone
back to the ancient upaniShada times, and their development being of a very obscure
antiquity.
We return again to the genius bhoja rAjan, who, still a few centuries before the haThayoga
classics that are available to us, enumerates some specific yoga postures. Having explained
the meaning of sthirasukhamAsanam, he ends his statement by saying, “padmAsana-
daNDAsana-svastikAsanAdi | tadyadA sthiraM niShkampaM sukhaM anudvejanIyaM
bhavati tadA tadyogA~NgatAM bhajate”, meaning,”…such as padmAsana, daNDAsana,
svAstikAsana etcetera. When the (practice of) a posture (advances, it) becomes (a vehicle)
yielding of a stable unwavering sukha and is not uncomfortable (anymore). That is when it
becomes, that much-praised limb of the (eight) yoga a~Nga-s, the blessed Asana.]
Here rAjA bhoja also interprets pata~njali to have really meant the specific yoga postures,
giving here the names of postures such as padma, daNDa, and svAstika Asana-s. And he also
adds an “Adi”, etcetera, to mean that already there must be a long list of very famous and
commonly known Asana-s which he felt no need to elaborate upon beyond ‘etcetera’. The
above shows, we think, that in light of these ancient authorities, we can take it that pata~njali
did imply specific postures that are understood as standard yoga Asana-s, and not just any
comfortable seat.
But already, even much before pata~njali himself, the Asana-s were already quite well known
and practiced, as AchArya shaMkara said. We find an attestation from the Great bhArata of
his observation, that the concept of Asana, that is the specific yoga postures, in the technical
sense of it, was already an integral part of spiritual practice of ascetics. From the
araNyakaparvan the 3rd book of mahAbhArata:
bhRîgor maharSheH putro ‘bhUch chyavano nAma bhArgavaH

samIpe sarasaH so ‘sya tapas tepe mahAdyutiH
sthANubhUto mahAtejA vIrasthAnena pANDava
atiSThat subahUn kAlAn ekadeshe vishAM pate
sa valmIko ‘bhavad RîShir latAbhir abhisaMvRîtaH
kAlena mahatA rAjan samAkIrNaH pipIlikaiH (MBh 3.122.1-3)
["A son was born to the great bhRîgu, chyavana by name. And he, of an exceedingly
resplendent body, began to perform austerities by the side of a lake. And, O Son of pANDu,
O Protector of men! He of mighty energy assumed the Posture known as the Vira, in it being
quiet and still like an inanimate post, and for a long period remained immobile at the same
spot in the same posture. And as a long time elapsed he was swarmed by the ants turned into
an anthill covered with the creepers growing upon it."]
In the anushAsana parvan, the thirteenth book:
vIrAsanaM vIrashayyAM vIrasthAnam upAsataH

akSayAs tasya vai lokAH sarvakAmagamAs tathA MBh 13.7.13
[“He who performs tapscharya-s sitting in the vIrAsana posture, by going to the secluded
dense forest (where only the braves dare tread) and sleeping on the (hard rock,) the bed
worthy for the braves, he attains to those eternal regions where all the objects of desire are
fulfilled (or desires are nullified)”]
(In above, we differ in translating the verse from how the learned paNDita shrI K M Ganguly
translated it. He takes the first line in sense of gaining martyrdom on the battlefield assuming
the posture of vIrAsana.)
At yet another place in the same anushAsana parvan, mahAdeva is describing to umAdevI
the routine of tapasyA that the ascetic siddha yogi-s perform:
yogacharyAkRîtaiH siddhaiH kAmakrodhavivarjanam

vIrashayyAm upAsadbhir vIrasthAnopasevibhiH
yuktair yogavahaiH sadbhir grIShme pa~ncatapais tathA
maNDUka-yoganiyatair yathAnyAyaniShevibhiH
vIrAsanagatair nityaM sthaNDile shayanais tathA
shItayogo ‘gniyogashcha chartavyo dharmabuddhibhiH (MBh 13.130.8–10)
[“Observant of the excellent ordinances relating to Yoga, having alleviated the passions of
lust and violence, seated in the posture called vIrAsana in the midst of four fires on four sides
with the sun overhead in summer months, duly practising what is called mANDUkya yoga,
and sleeping on bare rocks or on the earth, these men, with hearts set upon dharma, expose
themselves to the extremes of cold and warm (and are unaffected by the duality).”]
Not only do we find evidence in mahAbhArata therefore, of the importance given to the
postures, specific postures, we should also observe that much before pata~njali,
mahAbhArata already describes the yoga praxis in great detail. In the anushAsana parvan, it
even describes the aShTA~Nga-s of yoga and even lists the famous teachers of sAMkhya and
yoga, in which list pata~njali does not figure. This also means that the yoga text in the
bhArata was pre-pata~njali and that by the time of pata~njali, yoga was quite a very well
founded practice, its Asanas included.
In the early classical saMskRîta literature also, we find the Asana-s mentioned. The
Emperor of saMskRîta poetry, mahAkavi kAlidAsa, already names the yaugika postures. He
mentions vIrAsana in his raghuvaMsham by name (13.52) and also beautifully describes the
siddhAsana through a verse. Ancient drama mRîchcHakaTikA, going back to the BCE age,
also describes yoga posture (see the opening chapter).
Dr. Elst has speculated why there are only sitting postures characterize or at least dominate
the yogAsana-s, speculating that this is to do with the climatic conditions, Chinese postures
being in standing position because it is wet and cold there, and Hindu ones being in sitting
position because of the warm climate.
But the observation is inaccurate. Indeed we have enough textual and non-textual records of
Hindu Asana-s also in standing, half-standing and leaning postures too from fairly old
periods. mahAbhArata itself attests to this at multiple places, too numerous to recount, that
standing postures were common for tapashcharyA. We find many ancient frescoes, murals,
and bas-relief from old temples displaying the yoga postures in the standing position, see for
instance the pallava temple carvings at mahAbalIpuram, dated to the 600s, depicting arjuna,
bhagIratha and other characters (including a charlatan cat), to be performing the ascetics
standing in the classical postures like the tADAsana and vRîkShAsana. There are many
other sources that attest to the postures in standing position, particularly for performing the
tapascharyA, more specifically recorded by the early nAstika grantha-s, and both the bauddha
and jaina texts record the standing postures.
mahAvIra’s austerities in pristine tADAsana is all too famous. Also important to note is that
the jaina-s carefully record that bhagavat mahAvIra acquired his siddhi while he was in a
specific yoga posture known as the godohanAsana (see image), so called because it resembles
how one milches the cow. godohanAsana remains a classical standard yoga posture.
We further find traces of standard yoga postures in standing, half-standing, or leaning

positions in other extra-yaugika special interest groups such as those in nATya and the
practitioners of the Hindu martial arts, both of which are concerned with and utilize the
standard yoga postures. The dhanurveda texts, variously titled and differently dated, tell us
about specific Asana-s to be employed for specific purposes. The most complete, last
redacted in the present form by around the 13th century but obviously containing much older
material, the dhanurveda of vyAsa, tells the archers to assume one of the Eight Asana-s while
shooting the arrow, each of which except the last, is in standing and half-standing posture. It
describes each Asana and even mentions them by well known names such as the Asana-s of
vishAkha, padma, and garuDa. Other and older Hindu martial art texts such as those
contained within the purANa-s or bauddha pAlI sUtra-s inform us about the specific standing
postures useful for practicing malla and other yuddha vidhA-s.
Coming to the climate part, yoga authors specifically mention that the Asana, by one of its
very purposes, takes the body of the practitioner beyond the effects of climate and other such
dualities. Explaining the last yoga sUtra on Asana, “dvandvAnabhighAt”, rAjan bhoja
explicitly gives the example of climate, saying when the practitioner has perfected the
yogAsana, the very effect of it is that that Asana makes him body transcend and withstand the
effects of climate, both warm and cold.
To summarize, what the foregoing discussion aimed to show is that Asana had already
acquired a technical sense during mahAbhArata, and even before, from upaniShadic times.
That pata~njali does not need to define Asana itself, but simply add more specific qualifiers
to it, also shows that the concept of specific Asanas was already a common knowledge. Such
names of Asanas as padmAsana, daNDAsana, bhadrAsana, svAstikAsana, and vIrAsana,
vajrAsana etc. were so very common and well known among the Hindus already from very
early days. By as early as the 6th century we find the yoga authors not only mentioning them
by name, but in a sense that it was such a common knowledge that simply indicating one
appended by ‘etcetera’ is sufficient to indicate them all. Even the representative Asana-s thus
named by different authors vary from one author to the other, further signifying a wide
common knowledge of the different Asana-s. We also see that even these ancient Hindus
were conscious about much further antiquity of the system of postures for yoga, as even
AchArya shaMkara remarks about its obscurely ancient origins and wide popularity and
recognition already by the time of the old layer of the upaniShada-s. There we also saw the
Asana-s, the postures, being a general identifying characteristic trait of yoga praxis. We also
saw that there are old records of not only sitting but standing, half-standing and leaning
postures being practiced, and that the yoga authors were particular about Asana being for the
very purpose to make the body of practitioner withstand the worldly dualities like the hot and
cold climate.
The hindU-dviTa vultures delegitimizing the Hindu legacy of yogAsana remind us of how
the legacies of our glorious cousins the Hellenes of Greece were also robbed away, how the
fanatic pretamata first undermined, then outlawed, and finally secularized as its own, the
ancient spiritual gymnast-athletics and its kumbha-like deeply spiritual festival of Olympic
that was celebrated to honour the dyauspitRî. Lamentably the perished Hellenic civilization
would be unable to reclaim the Olympic from what it has now been vulgarized and
secularized into. But the Hindu civilization is still alive, so far at least, to call yogAsana its
asset, happy to share with the world, but as its very own ancestral civilizational and spiritual
legacy.
How “Hindu” is yoga after all?
Author: Meera Nanda
Publication: Butterfliesandwheels.org
URL: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/how-“hindu”-is-yoga-after-all/
Yoga is to North America what McDonalds is to India: both are foreign implants gone native.
The urban and suburban landscape of the United States is dotted with neighbourhood health
clubs, spas and even churches and synagogues offering yoga classes. Some 16 million
Americans do some form of yoga, primarily as a part of their exercise and fitness routine.
Thus, when everyday Americans talk about yoga, they mostly mean physical, or hatha yoga,
involving stretches, breathing and bodily postures, or asanas. Many styles of postural yoga
pioneered by India-origin teachers are thriving, including the Iyengar and Sivananada
schools, the Ashtanga Vinyasa or ‘power yoga’ of Pattabhi Jois, and ‘hot yoga’ recently
copyrighted by Bikram Chaudhary. The more meditational forms of yoga popularised by the
disciples of Vivekananda, Sivananda and others are less popular. Americans’ preference for
postural over meditational yoga is not all that unique: In India, too, hundreds of millions
follow Baba Ramdev, a popular TV-yogi, who teaches a purely medicalised, asana-oriented
yoga.
By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the origins of what it teaches. On the
contrary, in a country that is so young and so constantly in flux, yoga’s presumed antiquity
(‘5000-year-old exercise system’, etc.) and its connections with Eastern spirituality have
become part of the sales pitch. Thus, doing namastes, intoning ‘om’ and chanting Sanskrit
mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many yoga studios
use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of om and other paraphernalia of the
Subcontinent to create a suitably ‘spiritual’ ambience. Iyengar yoga schools begin their
sessions with a hymn to Patanjali, the second-century composer of the Yoga Sutras, and some
have even installed his murthis. This Hinduisation is not entirely decorative, either, as yoga
instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy and scripture in order to get a license to
teach yoga.
One would think that yoga’s immense popularity and Hinduisation would gladden the hearts
of Hindu immigrants to the US. But in fact, the leading Hindu advocacy organisation in the
US, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), is not swelling with pride. On the contrary, it
has recently accused the American yoga industry of ‘stealing’ yoga from Hinduism. Millions
of Americans will be shocked to learn that they are committing ‘intellectual property theft’
whenever they do an asana, because they do not acknowledge their debt to ‘yoga’s mother
tradition’. HAF’s co-founder and chief spokesperson, Aseem Shukla, is now exhorting his
fellow Hindus to ‘take back yoga and reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual
heritage.’
The take-back-yoga campaigners are not impressed with the growing visibility of Hindu
symbols and rituals in yoga and other cultural institutions in the US. They still find Hindu-
phobia lurking everywhere they look. They want Americans to think of yoga, the Yoga Sutras
of Patanjali and the great Vedas when they think of Hinduism, instead of the old stereotypes
of caste, cows and curry. They would rather that, to paraphrase Shukla, Hinduism is linked
less with ‘holy cows than Gomukhasana,’ a reference to a particularly arduous asana; less
with the ‘colourful and harrowing wandering sadhus’ than with ‘the spiritual inspiration of
Patanjali’. It seems that this yoga-reclamation campaign is less about yoga and more about
the Indian diaspora’s strange mix of defensiveness, combined with an exaggerated sense of
the excellence of the elite, Sanskritic, aspects of Hindu religion and culture.
The ‘who owns yoga’ debate gained worldwide attention in late November, when the New
York Times carried a front-page feature on the issue. But the dispute started earlier this year,
with a battle of blogs hosted online by the Washington Post between HAF’s Shukla and the
New Age guru, Deepak Chopra. Shukla complained of the yoga establishment shunning the
‘H-word’ while making its fortunes out of Hindu ideas and practices. Chopra, who shuns
the Hindu label, instead describing himself as an ‘Advaita Vedantist’, declared that
Hinduism had no patent on yoga. He argued that yoga existed in ‘consciousness and
consciousness alone’ much before Hinduism, just like wine and bread existed before the
Jesus Christ’s Last Supper, implying that Hindus had as much claim over yoga as Christians
had over bread and wine. Shukla called Chopra a ‘philosophical profiteer’ who did not
honour his Hindu heritage, while Chopra accused Shukla and his foundation of Hindu-
fundamentalist bias.
Neither eternal nor Vedic
This ‘debate’ is really about two equally fundamentalist views of Hindu history. The
underlying objective is to draw an unbroken line connecting the 21st-century yogic postures
with the nearly 2000-year-old Yoga Sutras, and tie both to the supposedly 5000-year-old
Vedas. The only difference is that, for Chopra, yoga existed before Hinduism, while Shukla
and HAF want to claim the entire five millennia for the glory of Hinduism. For Chopra, yoga
is a part of a ‘timeless Eastern wisdom’, while for HAF, ‘Yoga and Vedas are synonymous,
and are as eternal as they are contemporaneous.’
The reality is that yoga as we know it is neither ‘eternal’ nor synonymous with the
Vedas or the Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism in which
Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as
crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took
place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely
along the Theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science’ introduced into India by the US-origin,
India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga
renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-
building techniques introduced from Sweden, Denmark, England and other Western
countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras – which has been
correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the
yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’ – to create an impression of
5000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. HAF’s current insistence is thus part
of a false-advertising campaign that has been going on for much of the 20th century.
Contrary to widespread impressions, the vast majority of asanas taught by modern yoga gurus
are nowhere described in the ancient texts. The highly ritualistic, yagna-oriented Vedas have
nothing to say about Patanjali’s quest for experiencing pure consciousness. Indeed, out of the
195 sutras that make up the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali devotes barely three short sutras to asanas.
The Mahabharata mentions asanas only twice out of 900 references to yoga, and the Bhagvat
Gita does not mention them at all.
There are, of course asana-centred, hatha-yoga texts. But they were authored by precisely
those matted-haired, ash-smeared ‘harrowing’ sadhus that the HAF wants to banish from the
Western imagination. Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent on postural
yoga, it is these caste-defying, ganja-smoking, sexually permissive, Shiva- and shakti-
worshipping sorcerers, alchemists and Tantriks who were cowherds, potters and such.
They undertook arduous physical austerities not because they sought to transcend the material
world, but because they wanted magical powers (siddhis) to control their bodies and the rest
of the material world.
The Mysore Palace mystery
New research has brought to light intriguing historical documents and oral histories that raise
serious doubts about the “ancient” lineage of Ashatanga Vinyasa of Pattabhi Jois and Iyengar
yoga. Both Jois (1915-2009) and Iyengar (b. 1918) learned yoga from T. Krishnamacharya
during the years (1933 until late 1940s) when he directed a yogasala in one wing of the
Jaganmohan palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodiyar IV (1884-1940).
The maharaja, who ruled the state and the city of Mysore from 1902 until his death, was well-
known as a great promoter of Indian culture and religion, but was also a great cultural
innovator who welcomed positive innovations from the West and incorporated them into his
social programs. Promoting physical education was one of his passions and under his rein
Mysore became the hub of physical culture revival in the country. He hired
Krishnamacharya primarily to teach yoga to the young princes of the royal family, but also
funded Krishnamacharya and his yoga protégés to travel all over India giving yoga
demonstrations, thereby encouraging an enormous popular revival of yoga
Indeed, Mysore’s royal family had a long-standing interest in hatha yoga: Wodeyar IV’s
ancestor, Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799-1868), is credited with composing an
exquisitely illustrated manual, titled Sritattvanidhi, which was first discovered by Norman
Sjoman, a Swedish yoga student, in the mid-1980s in the library of the Mysore Palace. What
is remarkable about this book is its innovative combination of hatha yoga asanas with rope
exercises used by Indian wrestlers and the danda push-ups developed at the vyayamasalas,
the indigenous Indian gymnasium.
Both Sjoman and Mark Singleton, a US-based scholar who has interviewed many of those
associated with the Mysore Palace during its heyday in the 1930s, believe that the seeds of
modern yoga lie in the innovatory style of Sritattvanidhi. Krishnamacharya – who was
familiar with this text and cited it in his own books — carried on the innovation by adding a
variety of western gymnastics and drills to the routines he learned from Sritattvanidhi, which
had already cross-bred hatha yoga with traditional Indian wrestling and acrobatic routines.
In addition, it is well established that Krishnamacharya had full access to a Western-

style gymnastics hall in the Mysore Palace which had all the usual wall ropes and other
props which he began to include in his yoga routines. Sjoman has excerpted the Western
gymnastics manual which was available to Krishnamacharya. Sjoman claims that many of the
gymnastics techniques from that manual — for example, the corss-legged jumpback and
walking the hands down a wall into a back arch — found their way into Krishnamacharya’s
teachings which he passed on to Iyengar and Jois. In addition, in early years of the 20th
century, an apparatus-free Swedish drill and a gymnastic routine developed by a Dane by the
name of Niels Bukh (1880-1950) was introduced into India by the British and was
popularized by YMCA. Singleton argues that “at least 28 of the exercises in the first edition
of Bukh’s manual are strikingly similar (often identical) to yoga postures occurring in
Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga sequence or in Iyengar’s Light on Yoga.” The link again is
Krishnamacharya who Singleton calls a “major player in the modern merging of gymnastic-
style asana practice and the Patanjala tradition.”
So, who owns yoga?
The shrill claims of HAF about Westerners stealing yoga ends up covering up the tremendous
amount of cross-breeding and hybridization that has given birth to yoga as we know it.
Indeed, cotemporary yoga is a unique example of a truly global innovation in which eastern
and western practices merged to produce something that is valued and cherished all around
the world.
Hinduism whether ancient, medieval or modern, has no special claims on yoga. To pretend
otherwise is not only churlish, but also simply untrue.
- About the Author: Meera Nanda is currently a visiting professor in history of science in the
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (Mohali), India. Her book God and
globalization in India will be published in the US by Monthly Review Press in 2011.
Response 1
Dear Meeraji,
Pranam,
Thank you for the link to your article. I also warmly reciprocate your
wishes for the new year.
It seems that you are very confused about what the HAF campaign is all
about. They want the practitioners of Yoga to acknowledge that its
origin is within Hinduism. They are not thinking in terms of patenting
the system - that is a materialistic way of looking and not a spiritual
way. Dr Deepak Chopra's comments in terms of patent clearly shows that
he has not absorbed, or has lost, the spirituality that Yoga is expected
to bring out in a person. Incidentally, the Government of India is
documenting the various asanas, so that no one is able to patent any of
them, and so would be available in the free domain.
Your article has lots of internal confusion. You say at the beginning
as follows: "By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the
origins of what it teaches.". Then you have pointed out that Deepakji
'shuns the Hindu label'. This comes out of your own confusion about
what the HAF campaign is all about.
And in your article itself you give an impression that Yoga is really
quite young when you say: "On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries." I do not know what exactly you
mean by modern, but I guess you do know that Patanjali was born more
than 5000 years ago.
You also say: "Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent
on postural yoga, it is these caste-defying, ganja-smoking, sexually
permissive, Shiva- and shakti-worshipping sorcerers, alchemists and
Tantriks who were cowherds, potters and such." Is this what you mean by
a modern yoga?
I do not know why there are so many like you who wish to minimise
Hinduism today. But then the world is full of all sorts of people.
I will share this conversation with my friends in HAF. Of course, I

will not make your email id known to them.
I thought you would be interested in an article in support of the HAF

campaign on yoga written by Lisa Miller. Earlier she had written an
article titled "We are all Hindus now".
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
----- Original Message -----
From: "Meera Nanda" <[email protected]>
To: "Ashok Chowgule" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2011 6:24 PM
Subject: Hello
Chowgule ji: just saw the bank ad. you sent me. interesting.
I thought you may find my take on "who owns yoga" debate that is going
on
between the Hindu American Foundation and Deepak Chopra interesting. .
Please follow the link below for my essay, "How Hindu is Yoga after
all."
Slightly shorter version appears in this month issue of Himal Southasian
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/how-%E2%80%9Chindu%E2%80%9D-is-yoga-
after-all/
my best wishes for a happy 2011.
meera nanda
---------------------
Lisa Miller
I don't care much for bland spirituality, so at yoga class I generally

tune out the prelude, when the teacher reads aloud-as is the custom-an
inspirational passage on which to meditate. Recently, though, I was
startled to attention when the teacher chose a paragraph on compassion
from the Dalai Lama's bestseller The Art of Happiness. Hold on a minute,
I thought. Isn't the Dalai Lama a Tibetan Buddhist? And isn't yoga a
Hindu practice? And haven't Buddhists and Hindus been at war over land
and gods for thousands of years? The Dalai Lama may be regarded
throughout the world as a holy man, but downward dog is not his
expertise.
Sixteen million Americans practice yoga, according to Yoga Journal, and

in 2008 we spent nearly $6 billion on classes and stretch pants. Yet
aside from "om" and the occasional "namaste," Americans rarely
acknowledge that yoga is, at its foundation, an ancient Hindu religious
practice, the goal of which is to achieve spiritual liberation by
joining one's soul to the essence of the divine. In its American
version, yoga is a mishmash: Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, 12-step rhetoric,
self-help philosophies, cleansing diets, exercise, physical therapy, and
massage. Its Hindu roots are obliterated by the modern infatuation with
all things Eastern-and by our growing predilection for spiritual
practices stripped of the sectarian burdens of religion. Americans'
naive but characteristic conflation of Eastern religions isn't new; in
1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Bhagavad-Gita (which is Hindu
scripture) "the much renowned book of Buddhism."
Lately, though, that muddle is less innocent. Some of yoga's

best-known-and most entrepreneurial-purveyors concede they've
consciously separated Hinduism from yoga to make it more palatable. "The
reason I sanitized it is there's a lot of junk in [Hinduism]," explains
Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru whose latest book, co-written with
Marianne Williamson and Debbie Ford, is The Shadow Effect. "We've got to
evolve to a secular spirituality that still addresses our deepest
longings . Most religion is culture and mythology. Read any religious
text, and there's a lot of nonsense there. Yet the religious experience
is beautiful."
Generically spiritual yoga may be fine for most Americans-preferable,

even, for those who desire the benefits of meditative exercise without
any apparent conflict with their own religious beliefs. But for some
American Hindus, it amounts to a kind of ethnic cleansing. In The
Washington Post's On Faith blog (to which I contribute), the pediatric
urologist Aseem Shukla last month tangled with Chopra over the
whitewashing of yoga. Shukla, who is also the head of the Hindu American
Foundation, believes that if he doesn't help his American-born children
feel good about their religion, no one will. And so he says, loudly and
often and to anyone who will listen: "Yoga originated in Hinduism. It's
disingenuous to say otherwise. A little bit of credit wouldn't be a bad
thing, and it would help Hindu Americans feel proud of their heritage."
In all religions, heartbreak and enmity lie in this struggle between

those who want to unify and transcend, like Chopra, and those who want
to protect their tradition's unique identity and character, like Shukla.
My friend the Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero has
just written a book called God Is Not One, which argues that the good in
any religion (e.g., yoga) necessarily comes with the bad (caste
systems). By seeing religion as a single, happy universal force, we
blind ourselves to tensions of great consequence to individuals and to
history. "America," he says, "has this amazing capacity to make
everything banal. That's what we do. We make things banal and then we
sell them. If you're a Hindu, you see this beautiful, ancient tradition
of yoga being turned into this ugly materialistic vehicle for selling
clothes. It makes sense to me that you would be upset."
But, Prothero points out, Chopra has a point. The American creative,
materialistic, pluralistic impulse allows religion here to grow and
change, taking on new and unimagined shapes. "You can't stop people from
appropriating elements in your religion," Prothero adds. "You can't stop
people from using and transforming yoga. But you have to honor and
credit the source." Prothero's bottom line is also my own. You can read
from the Dalai Lama in yoga class. You can even read from the Sermon on
the Mount. But know where yoga came from and respect those origins.
Then, when you chant "om," it will resonate not only in the room but
down through the ages.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of Heaven: Our
Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. Become a fan of Lisa on
Facebook.
Response 2
Dear Meeraji,
Pranam,
I forgot to mention a couple of points in my earlier message.
First the end result expected from Yoga is not just physical well-being,
but an opening of one's mind to inquire what is happening around at the
spiritual level. For this, a healthy body is indeed a necessary
condition. But Yoga enables one to go beyond.
It is in this context, the comment of patent by Dr Deepak Chopra

indicates that he has not really become a Yogi.
The second point is that the Christian churches are against Yoga because
they accept that it originates from within Hinduism, and so they are
afraid that the practitioner will accept the essence of Hinduism, which
is diametrically opposite to what Christianity is all about.
Given that some of the non-Christian Yoga practitioners deny the Hindu
connection, reminds me of a story.
In a small town, construction started for a bar and night club right
opposite one of the prominent temples. The devotees met the owner and
pleaded with him that such an activity would be most inappropriate in
the place chosen by him. The owner said that he had all the necessary
permission and was not doing anything illegal.
Having failed to convince the owner, the devotees started a prayer

sessions in the temple asking the deity to intervene on their behalf.
Nothing happened until the day before the place was to open up for
business, when there was mighty thunder storm and a bolt of lightning
struck the night club and destroyed it. The devotees were very happy
until the owner filed a case against them in the local court for
destroying his livelihood.
Taken aback, the devotees stoutly said that they had nothing to do with
the turn of events. The judge heard both the sides diligently, and then
said: "I am in a very difficult situation here. The owner of a night
club believes that there is something called divine intervention, while
the temple devotees deny any such thing."
Anyway, as far as the physical aspects of yoga is concerned, the

enclosed item tells of one of the benefits.
Enjoy.
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
Benefits of Yoga
Mantoo had a habit of biting of his fingernails.

At any time you could see Mantoo with one finger, or the other, in his
mouth.
Mantoo's father was worried about this nasty habit.
As per advice of one of his friends, he sent Mantoo to Baba Ramdev's
Yoga Ashram for a course.
There, Mantoo learnt many Yoga postures.
Now, after returning from his visit, Mantoo can bite his toenails, also,
with equal ease.
Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism? Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publication: The Christian Post
URL: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20101230/is-yoga-a-form-of-hinduism-is-
hinduism-a-form-of-yoga/
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2010/1230.shtml
Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some American Hindus
have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that Hindus should “Take Back Yoga”
(the label of a campaign by the Hindu American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the
Hindus should take back yoga-but because yoga is too Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president
of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they
value their (Christian) souls, for “yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs directly counter to the
spiritual counsel of the Bible.” The problem should not have been breaking news; a spoof in
2003, “Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts,” depicted a Christian minister who was asked,
“Should Christians practice Yoga?” He replied, “Are we going to have to bring this whole
thing up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about
the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga!”
But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact, “a spiritual practice”? More
particularly, is it a Hindu spiritual practice? The word “yoga” originally meant “yoking”
horses to chariots or draft animals to plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are
cognate). Though many yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their
practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c. 200 CE), the
word “yoga” in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-
control, “yoking” the senses in order to control the spirit, and then “yoking” the mind in order
to obtain immortality.
Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and
the body, and the word “yoga,” owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to
mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece
and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great
deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad Gita,
a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the
yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical
“positions” or “postures” that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures developed much
later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century
European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science,
and the YMCA, and still others devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T.
Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.
So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in
today’s yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far cry both from the Upanishads
and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century American yoga practitioners have more
in common with a jogger than with a meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard
day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood
pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a
cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not
etymologically related to “yoga”)--oh yes, and a route to God.
Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or like going to the
gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To all these questions, the answer is: yes.
For some people (both in India and in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for
many, both.
In his online column and elsewhere, the Reverend Mohler has objected to the frequent
citation by yoga teachers of "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness
with the divine," which he says is “just not Christianity.” But yoga is “not just Hinduism”; as
we have seen, it has rich European (and Christian!) elements. Despite this historical evidence,
however, many Hindus, such as those in the Hindu American Foundation, insist that
meditational yoga - rather than temple rituals, the worship of images of the gods, or other,
more passionate and communal forms of religion - has always been, and remains, the essence
of Hinduism, their religion. Christians for whom a yoga class is simply physical exercise may
offend such Hindus but should pose no problem for Mohler; and Christians who take the
philosophical doctrines of yoga seriously should be no problem for a more ecumenical, not to
say multi-cultural, pastor.
References
Landover Baptist Church, “Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts,” March 2003.
Dylan Lovan, “Southern Baptist Leader on Yoga: Not Christianity,” Associated Press,
October 7, 2010.
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., “Yahoo, Yoga, and Yours Truly,” AlbertMohler.com, October 7, 2010.
Paul Vitrello, “Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul,” New York Times, November
27, 2010.
POSES AND POSEURS
Author: Chitra Raman
Publication: Chitraraman.Voiceofdharma.org
URL: http://chitraraman.voiceofdharma.org/blogs/general/poses-and-poseurs
If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.

Victor Cousin, (1792-1867) French philosopher and historian
A recent essay by Wendy Doniger on the website of The Christian Post (December 30, 2010)
is titled: Is Yoga a form of Hinduism? Is Hinduism a form of Yoga?
Which leads me to ask: Is American anthropology a form of Donigerism? Or does Doniger

manifest a form of American anthropology?
More amazing to me than Doniger's inventiveness is her reputation as an infallible authority

on Hinduism. Many Americans would sooner turn to her than to a Hindu for answers on
Hinduism, even if the latter were a scholar.
Anyway, what is someone with Doniger's personal and publishing history doing on a
conservative Christian website that publishes strongly anti-gay viewpoints? Hoping she
won't be noticed, perhaps?
In discussing the origins and evolution of yoga, she says in this article: "The (yoga) postures
developed much later ... but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as
Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA."
I wonder what Yogacharya B.K.S Iyengar would make of this contention. At what point in
Iyengar's life, I wonder, does Doniger place him secretly observing Swedish gymnasts and
British bodybuilders and incorporating their moves into his asanas ? Surely not before the
age of 15, in the years that Iyengar spent falling ill with malaria, typhoid and tubercolosis.
He couldn't have picked up pointers from watching television either. Iyengar began teaching
yoga at Pune in 1937. The first hour-long inaugural television program on Doordarshan was
broadcast from New Delhi in 1973.
Doniger's forays into her subject matter are sometimes strongly reminiscent of the first-
century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose completely made-up descriptions of animals
and exotic places transfixed his gullible readership. According to one source,
"Compiling so much information didn't leave much time for fact-checking, and Pliny verified
little of what he wrote. Among the marvels he described were monstrous races in far-off
places: evil-eyed Illyrians, one-legged Monocoli and animal-human hybrids. Monsters
particularly congregated, he suspected, in places like India and Ethiopia."
Pliny wrote about a tiny fish that could immobilize a war ship with the power of its suction.
He described elephants walking to a river for a purification ritual at the new moon, and
carrying their young in a procession after it was completed.
Apart from its entertainment value, certain aspects of Pliny's work are worth noting for their
bearing on modern-day scholarship. His Natural History -- a staggeringly voluminous 37-
Volume opus - continued to be regarded as a respected and much-admired reference among
the highly educated a whole millennium after his death. He wrote in Latin, a language
accessible to a very narrow spectrum of the educated elite, which might explain why no
serious critique of his work appeared until 1492. He did not willfully set out to mislead. He
just didn't -- or couldn't -- verify the information that he presented as absolute fact.
So how can we reasonably separate fact from fancy with respect to yoga?
Modern yoga had its genesis in the work of the 14th century Hindu sage Svatmarama, who
wrote the 389-verse "Hatha Yoga Pradipika." However, its roots and philosophical approach
to human enlightenment through self-discipline and awareness definitely extend much farther
back to older Hindu texts. Indian scholars date Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras to 1300
BCE, not 250 BCE as believed by Doniger. The basis for this date is that the texts record
Kappa Draconis in the constellation Draco as the pole star.
Astronomical data can reliably be construed as absolute proof of a text's true antiquity. This
is because observations were made with the naked eye in ancient times, without recourse to
the computerized and immensely powerful observational instruments available today. There
would have been no way of making up the coordinates and relative positions of the stars
unless that was exactly how it appeared at that point in time. The ancients faithfully recorded
what they saw. And with the sophisticated instruments now available to make back-
calculations, we are able to verify the historical era that best fits that celestial snapshot.
Doniger goes on to contend that "yoga is ‘not just Hinduism'; as we have seen, it has rich
European (and Christian!) elements..."
She then adds "despite the historical evidence" for those influences (you'll have to look
elsewhere for that evidence, it's not in this article) "many Hindus, such as those in the Hindu
American Foundation, insist that meditational yoga-rather than temple rituals, the worship of
images of the gods, or other, more passionate and communal forms of religion-has always
been, and remains, the essence of Hinduism, their religion."
I don't recall that the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) ever said Hinduism was about
meditational yoga "rather than" temple rituals and all the other practices of Hinduism that
Doniger lists. The Hinduism that Hindus practice is not encoded in George Bush - style
"either-or" binaries. One may incorporate meditational yoga if one so chooses, along with
other norms of worship.
What HAF did was to step forward and make a strong and unambiguous statement in the "On
Faith" blog of the Washington Post, about something that all Hindus know to be true --
namely, that yoga is of Hindu origin and is part of Hindu spiritual practice. Period.
This assertion piqued none other than the mighty Deepak Chopra, pop salvation icon and
recipient of the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in 1998 for "his unique interpretation of quantum
physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness." Chopra, alarmed
perhaps by the possible damage to his multimillion-dollar repackaging enterprise tried in his
rejoinder to decisively unyoke Yoga from Hinduism.
Chopra stated that yoga was rooted in a "non-sectarian universal consciousness" as
expounded by Vedic sages long before Hinduism arose. His comments clearly were
addressed to the sizeable section of his readership that cannot tell if the word "Vedic" has any
connection with Hinduism.
Not to be intimidated, blog author and HAF co-founder Aseem Shukla shot back with an
essay titled "Dr. Chopra: Honor thy Heritage." The piece delivered a strong and classy rebuke
to Chopra for the latter's failure to acknowledge the philosophical source of his brilliant
word-edifices.
One understands why Chopra would be worried, but accepting yoga's roots in Hinduism
needn't be traumatic for our Christian friends. After all, no Hindu expects a Christian to deny
Christ and embrace Hinduism in order to practice yoga.
So, to fence-sitters from every faith, I say relax, renew, and resume your deep breathing
exercises.
But if it's enlightenment you're after, do abstain from Wendy Doniger.

Is Yoga Hindu?
By Roman Palitsky
January 11, 2010.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/3978/is_yoga_hindu/
Yes, but it’s been influenced by Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, television, military calisthenics,
Swedish gymnastics, and the YMCA—as well as radical Hindu nationalism
[Roman Palitsky (MDiv) is an academic-on-hiatus and a yoga teacher. He has a passionate

interest in India: his studies at Harvard Divinity School focused on Indian religion and the
psychology and anthropology of religion. Roman is particularly concerned with
contemporary yoga practices in India and America, and the marvelous transformations that
these practices entail. He currently teaches yoga and is a tutor in New York, and will be
lecturing at Hunter College beginning in the summer of 2011.]
Last month, the Take Yoga Back campaign of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) got a
leg up when the New York Times ran an article about their movement to reclaim yoga’s soul.
The campaign aims to spread awareness that yoga originated in Hinduism, drawing on
arguments that will resonate with many yoga practitioners and Hindus. HAF
Spokesperson and co-founder Suhag Shukla bemoans a loss of Hindu identity in yoga that
corresponds with an erosion of Hindu identity in general. While the idea is compelling, it also
has considerable flaws.
Shukla and her allies claim that yoga is being separated from its Hindu roots by the new age
and fitness cultures of America, and by a generally irreverent modernity. In a December 3
Huffington Post piece, she stresses that the Take Yoga Back movement is not about
ownership, but rather about origins. This is a seductive line, suggesting that before the
corruptions of modern life there existed an untainted yoga that was coextensive with
Hinduism.
A vocal band of scholars have re-mounted the perennial argument that yoga is a Hindu
practice because it traces its origins from the ‘proto-Rudra’ seals at Harappa, through the
Yoga Sutras and into modernity. B.K.S. Iyengar, a living legend in the world of postural yoga
practice, has come out in favor of the movement. Even University of Colorado professor
Lorelai Biernacki is cited by the New York Times, attributing not only yoga but meditation
itself to Hinduism.
Yoga’s Birth Certificate(s)
Unfortunately Shukla’s claim falls apart under scrutiny. While the Take Yoga Back
movement positions itself against the secularization and de-Hinduization of yoga, it can also
be seen as an answer to one of the most fruitful decades in yoga research to date. A corpus of
literature has emerged over the past ten years, including David Gordon White’s “Siddha”
trilogy, several volumes by Joseph Alter, Elizabeth DeMichelis’ A History of Modern Yoga
and just last year Stefanie Syman’s Subtle Body and Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body, all of
which oppose the straightforward message of the Take Yoga Back movement.
These works reveal the formative influence of (wait for it) Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism,
television, military calisthenics, Swedish gymnastics and the YMCA, as well as of radical
Hindu nationalism, upon today’s postural yoga practice. There is no doubt that the Vedas,
Upanishads, and folk traditions of India have been formative toward yoga: yoga is almost
inseparable from them. Nevertheless to assert that yoga is essentially and primarily a
Hindu practice means to ignore millennia of generative influence from other quarters.
Worse still, it means to step blindly into a political fight for the heart of India that has
simmered for over two hundred years.
Is Hinduism Really Hindu?
If we are to really speak of origins, “Hinduism” does not accurately describe Indian religion
before the British Raj. The term’s use to designate a religion per se sprung from the meeting
of British rule and what sociologist M. N. Srinivas called the “Brahminization” of Indian
culture. Colonizing British deemed those religious activities in India that were closer to their
own as more evolved and genuine than others. These were the hierarchical, centralized and
vaguely monotheist (or deist) theologies of Saiva and Vaisnava Brahmins. The Brahmins
themselves had been struggling with armed tantric monastic orders on one front,
unsubordinated folk religion in small communities on another, and against Muslim rule on
yet a third. The British presented an answer to all three woes. They broke the power of the
Naths, the most powerful of the monastic orders that held North Indian trade routes. They
also generally favored Brahmins to Muslims, and offered communication technologies that
would spread and streamline Brahminic religion. The propagation of Brahminical culture and
repression of contradictory folk practices included putting down the “superstitious” practice
of Hatha Yoga.
This is partly because Hatha Yoga and affiliated systems, while often sectarian, emerged out
of the busy exchange between Shaivite, Vaishnava, Buddhist, Jain, and other tantric virtuosos
on the periphery of religious society. One could therefore with similar success claim that
yoga is a Buddhist practice, or a shamanic one. Yoga has always been a changing discipline:
as David Gordon White and others point out, the semantic field of the word yoga is highly
contingent upon when and where the word was used. Its intellectualized application in
Panini’s Yoga Sutras is not what it meant in its (quite rare) Vedic and early epic uses. Yoga
was a path to divine afterlives and superpowers for early Tantrics and a psycho-physical heal-
all for Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989), who is popularly considered the grandfather
of contemporary yoga practice.
Then again, Krishnamacharya’s teachings themselves bear the influence of the YMCA and
its calisthenic appropriation of yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At
many times throughout the development of yoga, there existed more disagreement among
practitioners within the same general sect of Hinduism than among, say, Buddhist and Hindu
tantrics, as to the meaning and practice of yoga.
It is through early Hindu Nationalist organizations like the Arya Samaj and Brahmo
Samaj that yoga emerged as a “Hindu” practice. This new yoga, however, was made to
conform to the still-Brahminic inclinations of party leadership, as well as to the esotericism
of European supporters like the Theosophical Society. Purged of its mixed roots, yoga came
to represent Hinduism to the world through celebrity gurus such as Swami Vivekananda and
Swami Shivananda. Thus the re-invention of a “Hindu” Indian history, along with nationalist
revolutionary movements and a freshly-minted yoga, combined to foster the complex
relationship between Hindu nationalism and yoga that exists today.
Obviously, just because yoga is not summarily Hindu does not mean that it is culturally
neutral. In India, controversy around the political foray of Swami Ramdev, whose morning
yoga show boasts over 20 million viewers and whose party, Bharat Swabhiman, aims to
dominate an entire section of Indian parliament by 2013, suggests how much yoga and its
origins have become a loaded issue in Indian politics. Ramdev’s entire platform appears to be
a nationalistic interpretation of yoga, and has been embraced by the Hindu conservative
Bharatya Janata Party.
While the Hindu American Foundation may not be a Hindu nationalist organization,
the take on yoga that it has chosen to espouse owes its bulk to the emergence of Hindu
nationalism, and to the colonial conditions out of which such nationalism arose.
Paradoxically, it would seem that claiming yoga as essentially Hindu cedes a vibrant and
important practice with Indic roots to the influence of routine colonial reduction. While it
may fit nicely with many an Orientalist construction of what yoga ought to be, this is nary
more than fantasy. Conversely, if we must acknowledge debts in our yoga practice, we might
do well to pranam not only Hinduism, but also Islam, Theosophy, Swedish gymnastics, and
the YMCA—just to name a few.
Comment
From: Ashok Chowgule, Vice President, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, India.

January 13, 2010
I would like to submit my comments to the article "Is Yoga Hindu?", by

Roman Palitsky, which has appeared on January 11, 2010 at:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/3978/is_yoga_hindu/
In the discussion on the Hindu origin of Yoga, it is rarely mentioned

that Christian churches are against Yoga because they accept that it
originates from within Hinduism, and so they are afraid that the
practitioner will accept the essence of Hinduism, which is diametrically
opposite to what Christianity is all about.
Given that some of the non-Christian Yoga practitioners deny the Hindu
connection, reminds me of a story.
In a small town, construction started for a bar and night club right
opposite one of the prominent temples. The devotees met the owner and
pleaded with him that such an activity would be most inappropriate in
the place chosen by him. The owner said that he had all the necessary
permission and was not doing anything illegal.
Having failed to convince the owner, the devotees started a prayer

sessions in the temple asking the deity to intervene on their behalf.
Nothing happened until the day before the place was to open up for
business, when there was mighty thunder storm and a bolt of lightning
struck the night club and destroyed it. The devotees were very happy
until the owner filed a case against them in the local court for
destroying his livelihood.
Taken aback, the devotees stoutly said that they had nothing to do with
the turn of events. The judge heard both the sides diligently, and then
said: "I am in a very difficult situation here. The owner of a night
club believes that there is something called divine intervention, while
the temple devotees deny any such thing."
On a MORE serious note. It would seem that the essential contention of

the author is that Yoga has "been influenced by Buddhism, Jainism,
Sufism, television, military calisthenics, Swedish gymnastics, and the
YMCA-as well as radical Hindu nationalism."
The first point to be noted is that Yoga has to exist PRIOR to its being
influenced by other ideas and persons. And prior to these other
influences coming into play, it was Hinduism that has influenced Yoga,
and this is what the Hindu American Foundation is asking everyone to
recognise.
Secondly, no idea, to remain vibrant and relevant, can ignore the
changes in thinking over time. Present teachings of Greek philosophers,
like Aristotle and Socrates, do consider the thoughts of many others
that followed them. Does that mean, as per Palitsky, that we should
stop teaching the essential ideas of these Greek philosophers as
something that does not belong to the Greeks?
Palitsky says that the essential argument of HAF is that 'the Take Yoga
Back movement is not about ownership, but rather about origins', is a
'seductive' line. Why so? Is he saying that HAF is being economical
with the truth, and that they have some sort of a hidden agenda? If so,
let him so in clear terms, rather than beating around the bush.
The first response by Dr Deepak Chopra to the article by Dr Aseem Shukla

(a member of HAF) was titled "Sorry, your patent on yoga has run out".
This is a very materialistic way to look at the issue, and one has to
wonder if Dr Chopra has absorbed the spiritual aspects of Yoga to the
extent that he could be called a Yogi. Dr Chopra's article is available
at:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/deepak_chopra/2010/04/sorry_your_p
atent_on_yoga_has_run_out.html
Incidentally, in the response, Dr Chopra wondered if Dr Shukla has 'a

fundamentalist agenda in mind'. This is also in line with the
contention of Palitsky that 'radical Hindu nationalism' has influenced
Yoga today. One wonders why the aspects of electoral politics in India
is brought in the discussion on the topic of the origin of Yoga. It
seems to me that some of the teachers of Yoga in the West feel
threatened by the campaign by HAF. If so, I would like them to bear in
mind what Swami Vivekanad said about a 100 years ago, namely:
"We are Hindus. I do not use the word Hindu in any bad sense at all, nor
do I agree with those that think there is any bad meaning in it. In old
times, it simply meant people who lived on the other side of the Indus;
today a good many among those who hate us may have put a bad
interpretation upon it, but names are nothing. Upon us depends whether
the name Hindu stands for everything that is glorious, everything that
is spiritual, or whether it will remain a name of opprobrium, one
designating the down-trodden, the worthless, the heathen. If at present
the word Hindu means anything bad, never mind; by our action let us be
ready to show that this is the highest word that any language can
invent. It has been one of the principles of my life not to be ashamed
of my own ancestors. I am proud to call myself a Hindu, I am proud that
I am one of your unworthy servants. I am proud that I am a countryman of
yours, you the descendants of the most glorious Rishis the world ever
saw. Therefore have faith in yourselves, be proud of your ancestors,
instead of being ashamed of them. I am one of the proudest men ever
born, but let me tell you frankly, it is not for myself, but on account
of my ancestry."
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_3/Le
ctures_from_Colombo_to_Almora/The_Common_Bases_of_Hinduism#top]
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
Comment by Chitra Raman
From: "synektix" <[email protected]>
To: <undisclosed recipients:>
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2011 11:44 AM
Subject: Article by Roman Palitsky
The other frogs in the well are beginning to join in the chorus.
Palitsky has corrected an embarrassing error, depriving me of the pleasure of pouncing on it.
In an earlier version of this article, he had mistakenly identified Panini , not Patanjali, as the
author of the Yoga Sutras !
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/3978/is_yoga_hindu/#letters
ARTICLE
Is Yoga Hindu?
By Roman Palitsky
January 11, 2011
My response ( don’t know if they will post it on the site)
Subject: Permission to speak, O Learned Ones
WOW. Roman Palitsky begins by asking "Is Yoga Hindu?" and a few paragraphs later
that question becomes "Is Hinduism Hindu?" In her posted response to the article, Andrea
Jain proclaims "Yoga has no essence." What marvelously penetrating insight! If it were not
for American academicians such as yourselves, how would we Hindus ever know if we, in
fact, exist? How would we know, unless you corroborated it, if at all we could claim ANY of
our spiritual traditions as our own? Thank you SOOO much for telling us who we are, and
explaining to us how we got to be that way! We Hindus should be eternally grateful for the
way India's friendship, openness, generosity of knowledge-sharing and hospitality to visiting
"scholars" from America is repaid!
--Chitra Raman
‘Vedanta and yoga perfect match for certain American values’
By Mayank Chhaya, Special to Hi India
December 24, 2010
There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as manifest in
Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very significantly influenced the
West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds a meticulously constructed
scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.
Author Philip Goldberg’s ‘American Veda—From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation,
How Indian Spirituality Changed the West’ (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26) offers a comprehensive
account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early 19th century. In an interview with Hi
India Goldberg dwells on how and why Indian philosophy has had such a profound impact in the
West.
Hi India: To what do you attribute the fact that Indian philosophy has had as deep an impact on the
West as your book so carefully establishes?
Philip Goldberg: The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was a perfect match for certain American
values: freedom of choice and religion, individuality, scientific rationality, and pragmatism. They
appealed especially to well-educated Americans who were discontent with ordinary religion and
unsatisfied by secularism, giving them a way to be authentically spiritual without compromising their
sense of reason, their consciences or their personal inclinations.
HI: Is it as much a tribute to the openness of the West as it is to the appeal of Indian philosophy?
PG: Yes, indeed. I think the great teachers who came here from India were very much aware of that,
and they adapted the teachings accordingly.
HI: Do you think the mainstreaming of Indian philosophy, as manifest in the widespread practice of
yoga, has to do a great deal with the fact that a lot of it comes across as secular and even agnostic?
PG: Yes, I think the remarkable growth of the “spiritual but not religious” cohort of Americans
would have been unthinkable without access to the practices derived from Hinduism and
Buddhism. In addition, the philosophy was presented so rationally that its premises could be regarded
as hypotheses, and the practices were so uniform and so widely applicable that they lent themselves to
scientific experimentation.
HI: Is there a sense among Americans drawn to Indian philosophy that it is dogma free and therefore
non-threatening?
PG: Yes, and premises that might be taken as dogma were usually presented by teachers as ideas to be
verified by one’s own experience, not as take-it-or-leave-it or believe-it-or-else doctrine.
HI: The Bhagvad Gita, for instance, is essentially a distilled, unemotional, remarkably modern code of
conduct that is shorn of any denominational doctrines. Do you think that helps the cause of Indian
philosophy?
PG: You bet. And not just a code of conduct, but also a manual for self-realization. People of all faiths
and no faith have cherished it for that reason.
HI: Does the fact that Hinduism is not institutionalized, codified, congregational or instructional help
in its spread?
PG: Certainly that’s true of the Hindu-based teachings that caught on with Americans, which were not
even called Hinduism as such. The fact that Hinduism, even in India, is decentralized, diverse, non-
institutional, etc., made it convincing that anyone can adopt the teachings without converting to a
foreign religion.
HI: One detects two distinct trends in your book in support of your primary contention about how
Indian spirituality changed the West. One trend is at the operational level where words such as
mantra, guru, karma and pundits have so seamlessly become part of the mainstream lexicon. The
other trend is much deeper in terms of internalizing the core values of Indian philosophy. Do you
think people in America are conscious of this?
PG: Some are conscious of it, and therefore grateful to the Indian legacy. Others are not: it’s seeped
into the American consciousness in subtle but profound ways.
HI: You speak about Americans accepting everything, from falafel to philosophy, depending on the
circumstances. What do you think made the circumstances right for them to accept some of the core
philosophical concepts from India?
PG: The rise of secularism, the success of science and especially the widespread alienation from both
materialistic values and mainstream religion, which was not providing reliable methods of personal
transformation and transcendence.
HI: When you talk of “Vedization of America”, do you mean that it has been a conscious
development? Could it, for instance, also not have been a consequence of secularization/pluralization
that the rise of agnostic information technologies?
PG: If you mean, could the trends I describe be attributed to the growth of pluralism and other social
forces, independent of the Indian influence, it is very hard to say. Certainly, the combination of
factors made for a perfect storm. I tend to think that the experiential practices of meditation and
yoga, and the intellectual framework of Vedanta, accelerated, deepened and broadened what
might have been an inevitable but amorphous evolution.
HI: In your long experience studying this subject, are people surprised when you point out the
widespread influence of Indian philosophy? What are their typical reactions?
PG: The most common response I’ve had is similar to my own once I dug into my formal research for
the book: “I knew Indian spiritual teachings had influenced America, but I didn’t realize it was quite
that widespread or that profound.” They’re surprised by the subtlety of it, and by the non-obvious
streams and tributaries through which the teachings spread.
HI: Do you apprehend any organized backlash or, at the very least, pushback against once it is
popularly recognized that Indian philosophy is more deeply entrenched here than they have
understood?
PG: Not a big one, but some of it is inevitable. There has always been a backlash from both
mainstream religion – conservative Christians in particular – and the anti-religious left. Vivekananda
faced up to it in 1893, and all the important gurus were confronted by it. Right now, there’s an anti-
yoga campaign by some Christian preachers. I’d be very pleased if my book becomes a lightning
rod for such a controversy. Bring ‘em on!
HI: How do you look at trends such as people saying that yoga is a Hindu tool and ought to be
countered with a Christian yoga?
PG: That’s a more complicated issue than is often realized. The question, “Is yoga a form of
Hinduism” depends entirely on how one defines both yoga and Hinduism. That there are people
teaching Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga strikes me as a backhanded compliment to one of the great
glories of the Vedic tradition: it’s universality and adaptability. That having been said, the idea that
yoga is “a Hindu tool,” i.e., a form of stealth conversion, strikes me as a projection by Christians
of their own messianic drive to convert the “heathen.” That conversion is not in the Hindu
repertoire – and that the gurus and swamis and yoga masters are content to have their students become
better Christians – is hard for many to comprehend.
HI: Do you think that it is the intellectual underpinnings of Vedanta or the mind/body wellness
aspects of yoga which have made people more comfortable accepting them?
PG: It’s been the combination of the two, and it’s hard to separate them. Certainly, in recent years, the
popularity of yoga as a wellness system has been dominant, but that has also exposed millions of
people to at least the basic premises of Vedanta.
Box to go with the interview:

The title of the book is self-explanatory. There is no ambiguity in it. It says upfront that the author is
going to tell you how Indian spirituality changed the West. And he does so with a combination of
impressive scholarship and an engaging writing style.
“In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty
days in the wilderness. The media frenzy over the Fab Four made known to the sleek, sophisticated
West that meek, mysterious India had something of value. Our understanding and practice of
spirituality would never be the same,” is how the author begins the first chapter of the book.
Quite apart from the fact that the beginning is designed to be an attention grabber, it is obviously the
author’s considered conclusion drawn from long and comprehensive involvement in the subject.
There are many aspects to Goldberg but perhaps the most important from the standpoint of this book
is that he is someone who has internalized India.
He points out that translated Hindu texts were very much a part of the libraries of John Adams and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there those ideas permeated to Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman
among others. The timing of the book could not be more opportune in America when religious lines
are getting very sharply defined and in turn even influencing its politics.
In recounting Thoreau’s perspective about the Gita, Goldberg refers to a much quoted passage from
the book Walden. Thoreau writes, “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and
cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have
elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and
trivial.”
Goldberg’s ‘American Veda’ is precisely the kind of book that Indian American readers would do
well to add to their library to become reacquainted with the power of Indian thought.
Mayank Chhaya
'Vedanta and yoga perfect match for certain American values'
Author: Mayank Chhaya
Publication: Prokerala.com
URL: http://www.prokerala.com/news/articles/a193705.html
There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as
manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very
significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds
a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.
Author Philip Goldberg's 'American Veda - From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and
Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West' (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26)
offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early
19th century.
"The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was a perfect match for certain American values:
freedom of choice and religion, individuality, scientific rationality, and pragmatism. They
appealed especially to well-educated Americans who were discontent with ordinary religion
and unsatisfied by secularism, giving them a way to be authentically spiritual without
compromising their sense of reason, their consciences or their personal inclinations,"
Goldberg told IANS in an interview.
He said Indian teachers who came to the US were conscious of the openness of American
society and they adapted the teachings accordingly.
Explaining the mainstreaming of Indian philosophy in the US, Goldberg said, "I think the
remarkable growth of the 'spiritual but not religious' cohort of Americans would have been
unthinkable without access to the practices derived from Hinduism and Buddhism. In
addition, the philosophy was presented so rationally that its premises could be regarded as
hypotheses, and the practices were so uniform and so widely applicable that they lent
themselves to scientific experimentation."
The book begins with a claim that is deliberately designed to be an attention grabber. "In
February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those
40 days in the wilderness. The media frenzy over the Fab Four made known to the sleek,
sophisticated West that meek, mysterious India had something of value. Our understanding
and practice of spirituality would never be the same," Goldberg writes.
He points out that translated Hindu texts were very much a part of the libraries of John
Adams, the second president of the United States and one of its most respected statesmen and
political theorists, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, an eminent poet and essayist who led the
transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century. From there those ideas permeated to
author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau and poet Walt Whitman among others.
In recounting Thoreau's perspective about the Bhagavad Gita, Goldberg refers to a much
quoted passage from the book Walden. Thoreau writes, "In the morning I bathe my intellect
in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose
composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world
and its literature seems puny and trivial."
The book has two distinct trends in support of the author's primary contention about how
Indian spirituality changed the West. One trend is at the operational level where words such
as mantra, guru, karma and pundits have so seamlessly become part of the mainstream
lexicon. The other trend is much deeper in terms of internalising the core values of Indian
philosophy. Asked if the people in the US are conscious of this, Goldberg said, "Some are
conscious of it, and therefore grateful to the Indian legacy. Others are not: it's seeped into the
American consciousness in subtle but profound ways."
Goldberg also talks about the "Vedization of America". On whether it can be attributed to the
general secularisation/pluralisation significantly caused by the rise of agnostic information
technologies, he said, "If you mean, could the trends I describe be attributed to the growth of
pluralism and other social forces, independent of the Indian influence, it is very hard to say.
Certainly, the combination of factors made for a perfect storm. I tend to think that the
experiential practices of meditation and yoga, and the intellectual framework of Vedanta,
accelerated, deepened and broadened what might have been an inevitable but amorphous
evolution."
On whether he apprehends any organized backlash or pushback against Indian philosophy, he

said "Not a big one, but some of it is inevitable. There has always been a backlash from both
mainstream religion - conservative Christians in particular - and the anti-religious left.
Vivekananda faced up to it in 1893, and all the important gurus were confronted by it. Right
now, there's an anti-yoga campaign by some Christian preachers. I'd be very pleased if my
book becomes a lightning rod for such a controversy. Bring 'em on!"
On a movement in support of a 'Christian yoga' that may be gaining some ground Goldberg
said, "That's a more complicated issue than is often realised. The question, "Is yoga a form of
Hinduism" depends entirely on how one defines both yoga and Hinduism. That there are
people teaching Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga strikes me as a backhanded compliment to
one of the great glories of the Vedic tradition: its universality and adaptability. That having
been said, the idea that yoga is "a Hindu tool," i.e., a form of stealth conversion, strikes me as
a projection by Christians of their own messianic drive to convert the 'heathen'. That
conversion is not in the Hindu repertoire - and that the gurus and swamis and yoga masters
are content to have their students become better Christians - is hard for many to
comprehend."
- (Mayank Chhaya is a US-based writer and commentator. He can be contacted at

[email protected])
Vedanta, yoga ideal match for American values
Author: IANS
Publication: The Times of India
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/art-culture/Vedanta-yoga-ideal-match-for-
American-values/articleshow/7259945.cms
There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as
manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very
significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds
a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.
Author Philip Goldberg's 'American Veda - From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and
Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West' (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26)
offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early
19th century.
"The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was a perfect match for certain American values:
freedom of choice and religion, individuality, scientific rationality, and pragmatism. They
appealed especially to well-educated Americans who were discontent with ordinary religion
and unsatisfied by secularism, giving them a way to be authentically spiritual without
compromising their sense of reason, their consciences or their personal inclinations," said
Goldberg in an interview.
He said Indian teachers who came to the US were conscious of the openness of American
society and they adapted the teachings accordingly.
Explaining the mainstreaming of Indian philosophy in the US, Goldberg said, "I think the
remarkable growth of the 'spiritual but not religious' cohort of Americans would have been
unthinkable without access to the practices derived from Hinduism and Buddhism. In
addition, the philosophy was presented so rationally that its premises could be regarded as
hypotheses, and the practices were so uniform and so widely applicable that they lent
themselves to scientific experimentation."
The book begins with a claim that is deliberately designed to be an attention grabber. "In
February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those
40 days in the wilderness. The media frenzy over the Fab Four made known to the sleek,
sophisticated West that meek, mysterious India had something of value. Our understanding
and practice of spirituality would never be the same," Goldberg writes.
He points out that translated Hindu texts were very much a part of the libraries of John
Adams, the second president of the United States and one of its most respected statesmen and
political theorists, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, an eminent poet and essayist who led the
transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century. From there those ideas permeated to
author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau and poet Walt Whitman among others.
In recounting Thoreau's perspective about the Bhagavad Gita, Goldberg refers to a much
quoted passage from the book Walden. Thoreau writes, "In the morning I bathe my intellect
in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose
composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world
and its literature seems puny and trivial."
The book has two distinct trends in support of the author's primary contention about how
Indian spirituality changed the West. One trend is at the operational level where words such
as mantra, guru, karma and pundits have so seamlessly become part of the mainstream
lexicon. The other trend is much deeper in terms of internalising the core values of Indian
philosophy. Asked if the people in the US are conscious of this, Goldberg said, "Some are
conscious of it, and therefore grateful to the Indian legacy. Others are not: it's seeped into the
American consciousness in subtle but profound ways."
Goldberg also talks about the "Vedization of America". On whether it can be attributed to the
general secularisation/pluralisation significantly caused by the rise of agnostic information
technologies, he said, "If you mean, could the trends I describe be attributed to the growth of
pluralism and other social forces, independent of the Indian influence, it is very hard to say.
Certainly, the combination of factors made for a perfect storm. I tend to think that the
experiential practices of meditation and yoga, and the intellectual framework of Vedanta,
accelerated, deepened and broadened what might have been an inevitable but amorphous
evolution."
On whether he apprehends any organized backlash or pushback against Indian philosophy, he

said "Not a big one, but some of it is inevitable. There has always been a backlash from both
mainstream religion - conservative Christians in particular - and the anti-religious left.
Vivekananda faced up to it in 1893, and all the important gurus were confronted by it. Right
now, there's an anti-yoga campaign by some Christian preachers. I'd be very pleased if my
book becomes a lightning rod for such a controversy. Bring 'em on!"
On a movement in support of a 'Christian yoga' that may be gaining some ground Goldberg
said, "That's a more complicated issue than is often realised. The question, "Is yoga a form of
Hinduism" depends entirely on how one defines both yoga and Hinduism. That there are
people teaching Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga strikes me as a backhanded compliment to
one of the great glories of the Vedic tradition: its universality and adaptability. That having
been said, the idea that yoga is "a Hindu tool," i.e., a form of stealth conversion, strikes me as
a projection by Christians of their own messianic drive to convert the 'heathen'. That
conversion is not in the Hindu repertoire - and that the gurus and swamis and yoga masters
are content to have their students become better Christians - is hard for many to
comprehend."
Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts
Author: Special Report
Publication: Landoverbaptist.org
Date: March 2003
URL: http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0303/yoga.html
Freehold, Iowa - "Just last week, a young member of our church approached me with a
question," Pastor Deacon Fred told the congregation during morning services. "He asked me,
'Should Christians practice Yoga?' I paused for just a moment before slapping him so hard
across the face with the back of my hand that one of his teeth flew out into the hallway. As I
watched the man search for his tooth, and, after giving up, then scamper away like a
schoolboy sissy, I thought to myself, 'Are we going to have to bring this whole thing up about
Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about the evils of
everything Oriental, including Yoga and was being taught to children in our elementary
school! I was so distraught that I spent the entire afternoon with Landover Baptist's Director
of Christian Education, Sister Suzie Kirnhill, discussing the matter."
What Pastor Deacon Fred found is that Landover's teachings regarding Yoga were pulled
from the Sunday School curriculum during the early 1980's when it was thought that Yoga
was no longer being practiced in the State of Iowa. "Do you mean to tell me that we have a
religion like Yoga that teaches it's followers how to contort their bodies into demonic
positions with the ultimate goal of being able to place their sexual organs into their mouths,
and you are not warning our children about this!?" said Pastor Deacon Fred. Sister Kirnhill
was silent. "If this is not placed back into our curriculum and taught in graphic detail to our
3rd graders by next Sunday, then you can consider yourself, FIRED!" yelled Deacon Fred.
Creation Science teaches us that "Yoga" is a religion that sprang forth from the corrupt roots
of sexual depravity in the 1960's. A time when godless long-haired liberals were running
around our country trying to get people to turn their backs on Christ and embrace other made-
up religions. Secular scholars argue that the practice of "Yoga" is nearly 3,000 years old. We
know this to be a lie because the Bible never mentions anything about it, and the Bible is the
most accurate historical book ever written. Creation Scientists place the origins of "Yoga,"
closer to 1963 when film actress Connie Stevens is seen doing it on historically archived film.
Most beginning "yogists" are lured into taking classes with the promise of growing a better
heart and becoming healthy. It is not until the third or fourth lesson that they are told what is
really going on, and the temptation is far too great to resist. Yoga appeals to the most basic
primal instincts, and therefore is a temptation even to the Truly Saved™.
One Baptist pastor who was sent to covertly study the religion was nearly lost to the church
in 1971. It took four deacons and three Landover ladies to pry his lips off of his penis, smack
him across the back of his head with a few dozen Bibles, and drug him long enough to get
him to a safe house where it took nearly 1-year in traction to deprogram him. Yes, it's true -
ONE YEAR! to get the demon of Yoga out. Nearly a whole week longer than the time
needed by Baptist ministers to get a Catholic to stop worshipping Mary! Creation Scientists
were able to get the vital information they needed about Yoga from this Baptist minister, who
still struggles with yogatic temptations to this day!
"This is a dangerous game we are playing," said Pastor Deacon Fred last Sunday, "How the
Devil got in here and shut down our Yoga curriculum, is beyond my understanding! We are
not talking about Iowa anymore folks. This ministry reaches more people around the world in
one day that Billy Graham's Corporation reaches in ten-years! Millions of folks come to our
web site for advice on these sorts of things on an hourly basis. We want to make sure this
information gets posted up there as quickly as possible! And we are not stopping at
forbidding this elaborate worship self-arousal. We are also reminding everyone of our ban on
the seamy byproduct of this filthy religion – the product named after its kinky sexual
contortions, yogurt. If I see so much as one little tub of yogurt on the church campus or when
I inspect your refrigerators during tithe accounting, you will be slung up so bad you'll look
like you could eat your own elbow – as well as your willy!
Comment
This is a satirical piece.
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
Rebel Yoga
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
January 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/nyregion/23stretch.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&p
agewanted=all
TARA Stiles does not talk about sacred Hindu texts, personal intentions
or chakras. She does not ask her yoga classes to chant. Her language is
plainly Main Street: chaturangas are push-ups, the "sacrum" the lower
back. She dismisses the ubiquitous yoga teacher-training certificates as
rubber stamps, preferring to observe job candidates in action.
In her classes, videos and how-to book, "Slim Calm Sexy," Ms. Stiles, a
29-year-old former model with skyscraper limbs and a goofball
sensibility, focuses on the physical and health aspects of yoga, not the
spiritual or the philosophical. For traditionalists, this is heresy,
reducing what they see as a way of life to just another gym class.
But if she has deviated from the conventional path, it has not slowed
her down. Ms. Stiles, a native of rural Illinois who owns Strala Yoga in
NoHo, has built a powerful yoga brand, with no less than Jane Fonda and
Deepak Chopra among her devotees.
Critics abound. Jennilyn Carson, the blogger known as Yogadork, cites

"deep practitioners who feel it is a disrespect to what the practice is"
for Ms. Stiles to pitch yoga as another quickie weight-loss regimen.
"It's not a few minutes a day, it's not fitness, it's a lifestyle," Ms.
Carson said.
Another detractor, who is known as Linda Sama, described "Slim Calm

Sexy" and its marketing campaign as "a complete sellout for the almighty
dollar."
"Don't even try to sell me on the `yoga for the masses' excuse; it's
pathetic, and, frankly, she should be ashamed for allowing herself to be
talked into shilling for this trash," she wrote on her blog, Linda's
Yoga Journey. "That is, if any convincing was really necessary - somehow
I doubt it. But if asked about it, I am sure we would hear the typical
higher-lighter-brighter-peace-love-dove-I'm-just-bringing-yoga-to-the-people
crap."
A third yoga devotee, speaking anonymously to protect her job in the

industry, added: "I don't care what Tara Stiles says yoga is; it's not
about making your body beautiful."
What Tara Stiles says - with a shrug and a smile - is "Who made these
rules?"
In the decade since she came to New York, Ms. Stiles has built a
business out of breaking those rules. She rejected the city's yoga scene
as exclusive and elitist - it reminded her of the mean girls in high
school, only with incense and bare feet. She refused to pledge
allegiance to one teacher, one studio or even one style of yoga. She
charges $10 a class, a bargain in Manhattan. And her short online videos
have catchy, user-friendly titles like "Yoga for a Hangover" and "Couch
Yoga."
"I feel like I'm standing up for yoga," Ms. Stiles said. "People need
yoga, not another religious leader. Quite often in New York, they want
to be religious leaders, and it's not useful.
"Here, people want to sit and talk about yoga; it's very heady. It's
very stuck, very serious," she continued. "I was never invited to the
party anyway - so I started my own party."
Besides running the studio - which draws about 150 people to 40 classes
a week that are called simply "Strong," "Relax" and "Stralax," a
combination - Ms. Stiles posts a short video most weeks to YouTube.
There, she has a channel with nearly 200 videos that have drawn about
four million views. She stars in the yoga DVD that was part of the
fitness set that Ms. Fonda issued in December (it sold out in Target,
where it was first introduced). And "Slim Calm Sexy," published last
summer, was the No. 1 yoga book on Amazon.com until recently, she said.
None of this has made Ms. Stiles rich, but it has led to a certain
celebrity. Last summer, Ms. Stiles released an iPhone app, "Authentic
Yoga," with Mr. Chopra, and the two recently completed a video in Joshua
Tree National Park that will be released this year.
"We are both nonconformists who have incurred the wrath of traditional
yogis," Mr. Chopra said of Ms. Stiles, whom he now considers his
personal instructor. "A lot of the criticism is resentment of her rapid
success. I have been doing yoga for 30 years. I have had teachers of all
kinds. Taking lessons from her has been more useful to me than taking
yoga from anyone else.
"She is not a showoff," he added. "She is ambitious, but there is a lack

of ego."
ALL too often, Ms. Stiles said, people on the outside view yoga as
something "Jennifer Aniston does."
With her black gym socks and her down-home sensibility, Ms. Stiles is
not trying to appeal to the yoga elite or to the purist. She is going
for the firefighter from Long Island who feels intimidated by "oms" and
New Age music. The African-American 30-something from Brooklyn who is
looking for a little diversity on the mat. Or the cashier from Morris,
Ill. - the river town of 14,000 where she grew up - who drives to
McDonald's for dinner several times a week.
"One of the things I like about her is her ability to make yoga
accessible to people who might be scared of it or think it might be too
esoteric," Ms. Fonda said of Ms. Stiles.
The unorthodox approach has deep roots. Ms. Stiles described her parents
as "straight-edged hippies," independent thinkers who designed their
solar-power house long before it was fashionable and who seldom, if
ever, touched the peach schnapps, the lone bottle of liquor in the
cabinet. Dad worked at a nearby nuclear plant.
Enamored of ballet and tutus, a 4-year-old Tara announced to her mother,

who mostly managed the household, that she wanted to move to New York.
As a preteenager, she meditated in the forest. In high school, she
sidestepped boyfriends and the prom despite her cheerleader looks. "I'm
a nerd, always," she said.
Cliques were not her style. She preferred to hang out with everyone but
was best friends with no one, holding to the credo: "You should be nice
to people." "It's a pretty simple thing," she said.
AFTER high school, Ms. Stiles moved to Chicago to study ballet and was
introduced to yoga by a ballet teacher. At a dance performance, she was
spotted by someone who steered her to the Ford Modeling Agency in
Chicago.
Despite modest success in print advertisements for yoga-related products

and commercials for Pepsi and Verizon, among others, she decided that
modeling was not her passion; her peers were aghast when she arrived at
photo shoots on a skateboard wearing a plain T-shirt. She wore makeup
only when paid. Ms. Stiles may photograph sexy, but in person, she is
the cut-up sidekick, the one most likely to guffaw rather than to sashay
her way across a room.
It was modeling, though, that let her fulfill her dream of moving to New
York, at 19. And it was modeling that catapulted her more firmly into
the yogasphere. In 2006, Ford asked her to make snappy yoga videos as a
promotion for the agency and to post them on YouTube before YouTube was
a household name.
An Internet devotee, Ms. Stiles began using social media and other Web
tools to lure people to yoga, an innovative move at the time. The
YouTube videos and her modeling connections led to a yoga DVD with the
model Brooklyn Decker that has also sold well at Target, and to her own
DVD, "Yoga Anywhere: The New York Session." Ms. Stiles blogged for
Women's Health magazine and for The Huffington Post, a platform that
brought her more eyeballs; one of her 2009 posts, about Facebook
addiction, is still among the site's most-viewed, with nearly 1.2
million hits. And her iTunes podcast has even bested Oprah's in the
health category.
In 2007, Ms. Stiles left Ford and focused on teaching yoga. Parlaying
her Facebook habit into something useful, she promoted the free classes
that she offered in her tiny apartment on Bleecker Street and in her
boyfriend's place in the Flatiron district. At first, a trickle of
people showed up. Eventually, she was packing 22 people into the living
room and a couple more in the entryway and bathroom. She also taught
private sessions, eventually charging up to $200 an hour.
Going private brought her into contact with a Page Six clientele. "In
New York, you know, some women have their nanny, their cook and their
yoga teachers," Ms. Stiles said. "I realized it was a status symbol."
It led to the opening of Strala - a word she said she and her husband
made up, but it turns out to be Swedish for "radiates light" - in 2008,
in a smaller space than she has now. Frugal and practical to the core,
Ms. Stiles did not want to overextend; now, the studio is profitable
enough that she is considering opening a second branch.
That year, she also met Michael Taylor - an Exeter-Harvard-Oxford man

with perpetually mussed hair who runs a social media Web site, Odyl - on
an ashram in upstate New York, where she had sneaked in M&M's. The two
married at City Hall, then traveled with her extended family to Negril,
in Jamaica, where she persuaded her uncles, both farmers, to do yoga by
the sea. The couple share a cramped loft around the corner from Strala
that is bedecked year-round with Christmas lights.
"He was normal, he's straight, he does yoga," she said, with a laugh
that comes easily and often. "I'm done for."
MS. STILES pads around her 3,500-square-foot yoga studio most days in
her socks and sweatshirts, talking to everyone who walks in. There are
13 teachers on staff, but she does about a quarter of the classes. The
studio also has its own blog. And Ms. Stiles is faithful about returning
e-mail from YouTube viewers and about trying to answer online comments.
"My life is a bunch of people inside the computer," she joked, as she
checked Facebook again, shuttling over to a friend's page to see the
latest pictures of a dog and later a freakishly giant rabbit owned by
another friend.
The next morning, setting up her Flip video camera on a tripod in the
studio, Ms. Stiles recorded a short yoga session to post on the Strala
Web site, something she does regularly. This one was aimed at college
students studying for midterms. Relaxation was the theme; a round of
cat-cows and stretches followed.
"I get letters from Army and Navy guys who do yoga online - people who
wouldn't be caught dead in a yoga studio," she said.
Ms. Stiles's down-to-earth demeanor sometimes clashes with her sexy
cover-girl look; some of her ads for yoga wear, including one for
American Apparel, have raised eyebrows among the traditionalists, who
say it cheapens yoga. Comfortable in her body the way dancers often are,
Ms. Stiles wears short shorts and tank tops in some of her videos. The
look is far from crass but is eye-catching, and it has attracted the
attention of a menagerie of the lewd and the weird. Foot fetishists
adore her.
But Ms. Stiles, who is beanpole thin, makes no apologies. "We should not
be hiding behind our bodies," she said. "Our bodies should be
empowering."
Getting ready to take a class at Strala one afternoon, Amy Kantrowitz, a

43-year-old regular, settled onto the small waiting room bench. In New
York, she said, yoga enthusiasts are often pushed to join tribes in
terms of studios, styles and teachers.
"People live in different countries here, in terms of yoga," said Ms.

Kantrowitz, who lives around the corner and works as a consultant for
nonprofit organizations. "It's like Brooklyn and Manhattan. The
intensity of the yoga scene has increased dramatically in the last three
years. This studio is the first place I have felt comfortable; I've been
able to settle here. It doesn't feel like it's all 26-year-old former
dancers."
Among yoginis, Ms. Stiles's own training remains an enduring mystery.

Someone's yoga lineage - whom you trained with and where - is often
sized up as closely as a thoroughbred's pedigree. It can impress, or
not. But Ms. Stiles, who said she has a 200-hour certification but
refused to say from where because she does not want to sanction the
program (it is also absent from her bio), believes much of the training
available in New York and elsewhere does little to actually prepare
someone to teach yoga, and can give people a false sense of confidence.
"I did training in New York City to teach yoga," she said. "It was
absolute crap. It's not useful."
Yet, she offers teacher training, of a sort, at Strala. It costs $2,500,

although she plans to lower it to $1,500, and it takes place over four
weekends; 25 students have completed the course so far. Asked about this
seeming contradiction, she said she was responding to demand. And, she
added, her training program emphasizes practical knowledge and looking
inward for strength, not toward a guru or leader for empowerment.
Ms. Stiles is nondenominational in terms of her style of yoga, as well.

Walking around the studio as people dipped into a series of freestyle
sun salutes during a recent class, she used a soothing voice and good
verbal cues to teach. She demonstrated poses often. The classes are not
hard or boring; they move at a relatively slow and comfortable pace. And
there is never any pressure, subtle or overt, to push harder.
Like many teachers today, she takes a hands-off approach, rarely

physically adjusting a person's position in a pose. Some people do not
like to be touched (and liability issues also loom large). But this can
make it hard for new practitioners to know what they are doing wrong,
which can sometimes lead to injury or frustration. In a live class,
there is no "pause" or "rewind" button, which makes studying a position
more difficult.
"Now you can take a deeper twist, or not," she told the class in her
mellow style as students dropped into a lunge. "No big deal."
Lisa Boudreau, a former Merce Cunningham dancer who teaches both

privately and at Strala, said, "People are always smiling here; I like
that.
"The people who are purists have their own place," she added. "So what's
the big deal?"
Ms. Stiles's inbox is full of pitches nowadays. She recently did a

fashion shoot for Lucky, which was profiling her. She flew to Los
Angeles for the Fonda videorelease. Another book deal is on the table,
and she and Mr. Chopra are planning other projects together.
But Christmas was with family. Ms. Stiles brought Mr. Taylor home to
Illinois, where they spread sleeping bags on the living room floor and
managed to return to New York just before the blizzard.
"There are no rules in life," Ms. Stiles said. "It's a mind-set that
limits people dramatically."
Comment
What Yoga achieves is to open up the mind of the person. For this, a
fit body is a necessary condition. The various asanas of Yoga are not
complete unless the mind is accompanying the process.
What various opponents of Hinduism are concerned about is that Yoga does
indeed open up the mind. This state will then make the person question
the dogma he has been fed so far. And so will move away from the dogma.
Even if not consiciously, the way the Yoga asanas are performed, the
mind does participate. When not done consciously, the effect on the
mind takes longer - but it will eventually happen.
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
From yoga to Julia Roberts, Hinduism goes mainstream
Brett Buckner
The Star Anniston Star
Jan 29, 2011
http://annistonstar.com/bookmark/11170199-From-yoga-to-Julia-Roberts-Hinduism-goes-
mainstream
Julia Roberts shouldn’t be the icon conjured up when envisioning humanity’s oldest living
religion.
And yet the star of Eat, Pray, Love, about a woman’s spiritual journey through India and
other places, became just that when she revealed that she, her husband and their three
children were Hindu.
Not since George Harrison introduced the world to Indian mysticism in the 1960s has the
6,000-year-old faith experienced such headlines.
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, J.D Salinger, pop star Katy Perry and NFL
running back Rickie Williams all practiced some form of Hinduism. Britney Spears had her
4-month-old son blessed in a Hindu temple.
It was Gandhi who transformed the Hindu ideal of ahimsa, nonviolence toward all living
beings, into a political and social movement that later inspired Martin Luther King Jr.
Hinduism has a rich, though rather low-key, American history, but that’s starting to change
thanks to such high-profile devotees as Julia Roberts.
“Popular stars talking about Hinduism only helps,” said Vandna Kashyap, a Hindu mother of
three in Anniston. “Many people are interested in movie stars and their beliefs. They can
identify more with what American movie stars describe about the religion and its practice
than from a foreigner.”
Growing up in an area dominated by Christianity, Vandna Kashyap’s 17-year-old daughter,

Nisha, got used to the questions: Do you believe in heaven? Do you go to church? As a child,
being Hindu made Nisha feel “weird.” But now the Donoho High School senior has learned
to embrace what once made her different.
“Soon I realized that I am unique,” she said. “I have a background and a story, a religion so
different from those around me. I think it’s fun when people ask me about my culture and
religion. I feel like I have something special to share.”
Today, many of the philosophies, sacred practices and even some of the 33 million Hindu
deities have achieved a pop-culture cachet.
It’s nothing to see a housewife practicing yoga on a Wii, to buy icons of Shiva the Destroyer
at Pier 1 or a T-shirt from Target emblazoned with the “ohm” symbol, signifying the rounded
wholeness of Brahman.
Having aspects of Hinduism fall into the pop-culture vernacular is a blessing, said Sam Shah,
president of the board of trustees for the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Birmingham.
“Hindu faith is known as sanatan faith,” he said. “This means it is a universal faith for all
human beings without considering any color, cast, faith and origin. Hindu faith tells me that
we are brothers and sisters under the fatherhood of God — it can be any Krishna, Ram, Jesus,
Mohammed or Buddha.
“Let us all enjoy the heavenly earth.”
‘India is in the limelight’
While 76 percent of Americans continue to identify as Christian, the more than 2.2
million Hindu Americans — a fraction of the nearly 1 billion on Earth — are making
their presence known, though largely under the religious radar.
“From the practical — yoga, meditation, vegetarianism — to the more esoteric — belief in
karma and reincarnation … core concepts of Hinduism are not only being embraced by
Americans, but are slowly being assimilated into the American collective consciousness just
as Judeo-Christian values were a generation before,” said Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the
Hindu American Foundation.
But assimilation doesn’t necessarily translate into understanding. “Hinduism is often

misunderstood or misrepresented,” said Vandna Kashyap. “It can be confusing. Hinduism is
not a monotheistic religion, as most other religions are. Hinduism is just a way of life.”
While it might be fashionable to get a henna tattoo or practice yoga, these are merely
glimpses into the culture of Hinduism and do not fully represent the depth of this ancient
religion or its people … but it’s a start, Kashyap said.
“By the same token, India was only known for its snake charmers and cows roaming its
streets,” she said. “India has a much deeper, more vast, very ancient culture. It’s immense
dance forms, many spices, different cloths, vivid rich saris, amazing temples, incredible
sculptures … the list goes on.
“I’m glad that people are becoming more and more aware of that, even if it stems from the
fascination with the Bollywood stars or the fashion.
“India is in the limelight … more people are traveling (there) and learning about its rich
culture and heritage. That’s nice to see.”
Conflicts with Christianity
In India, yoga was free, practiced in public parks and ashrams as part of the Hindu
commitment to an austere life. It was led by yogis, holy men in loincloths who abstained
from alcohol, prayed, meditated and chanted for hours a day.
Today, more than 30 million Americans practice some form of yoga, an industry that
generates an estimated $6 billion.
Jill Timmons considers yoga a “godsend.”

Every morning, after dropping off her three kids at school and clearing away the breakfast
dishes, the 41-year-old changes into her workout clothes and turns on the flat-screen TV in
the family room.
Using her Wii Fit video game console, Timmons spends upwards of 45 minutes practicing
yoga, crediting it for helping her lose 20 pounds and giving her “the flexibility of a teen-age
cheerleader.”
But she won’t go so far as to call it a spiritual exercise. “It’s about what works for me,” she
said. “I don’t necessarily feel closer to God because I practice yoga in front of the TV, but I
do feel more in tune with my body. That helps to center my thoughts on other things.”
While yoga is not a religion in the traditional sense, it is considered a spiritual path
designed to reach the divine, which could fundamentally put it at odds with
Christianity, said Rajiv Malhorta, founder of Infinity Foundation, in a recent essay, “A
Hindu View of Christian Yoga,” written for The Huffington Post.
“Yoga’s metaphysics center around the quest to attain liberation from one’s conditioning
caused by past karma,” Malhorta wrote. “Karma includes the baggage from prior lives,
underscoring the importance of reincarnation. While it is fashionable for many Westerners to
say they believe in karma and reincarnation, they have seldom worked out the contradictions
with core biblical doctrines.”
Yoga transcends creeds
But most who teach and practice yoga believe its benefits transcend individual
pronouncements of faith.
“The practice of yoga is a philosophy or way of life, but not a religion,” said Mariya Bullock,
founder of the Anniston Yoga Center. Bullock has been practicing yoga since she was 11
years old. But it was at the age of 26, after sustaining a lingering back injury following a
marathon in Frankfurt, Germany, that she recommitted her life to yoga.
“There is no need to attach a religious label to yoga, anymore than there is a need to attach a
religious label to penicillin,” said Bullock, who is a Christian. “Regardless of one’s religious
affiliation, the medication will do its work without bias.”
But C.O. Grinstead, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Oxford, believes that there is
only one path to inner peace.
“In the Christian society today, we are substituting various things for peace, tranquility,
conformity,” Grinstead said. “Why do we need to go to ‘substitutes’ to find calmness and
a peaceful spirit? What happens to us is that when we hear this new thing, solution or
practice, then we quickly run after it rather than to the Lord, who is the Prince of Peace
… Why do we need to use yoga when we have Jesus?”
Cheryl Moody has been practicing yoga for some 25 years, spending the last three years as an
instructor at the Anniston YMCA. Most who come to learn from her are seeking not only to
gain strength and flexibility but also a sense of community, which is fostered in yoga classes.
“Yoga is a mind/body/spirit practice done with intention, so you practice it in a more
present way than other, more traditional forms of strength training,” Moody said.
“Yoga means to yoke or unite your breath with movement; this clears the mind as well as
strengthens the body.
“Yoga also offers the opportunity to quiet all that internal chatter.”
Contact Brett Buckner at [email protected] Hinduism 101
From about 1500 BC, they threaded the passes of the Hindu Kush mountain range, spilling
across the vast wedge of earth bordered by the seas and massive walls of ice and rock.
As they wandered this new world, mingling their own and native beliefs, they praised the sun
for giving them fire and light, praised the air for giving them life, praised the earth for
remaining firm beneath their feet. Their sacred lore, or Vedas, extolled the gifts of nature as
gods, yet asked, “To which god shall we dedicate our offerings?”
The many could not exist without the One.
“I have seen him … beyond the darkness,” exclaimed the Vedic. It was a revelation that
would soon give rise to the Ultimate Reality
In the beginning there was neither naught nor aught:
Then there was neither sky nor atmosphere above …
Then there was neither day nor night, nor light, nor darkness...
Only the Existent One breathed calmly, self-contained.
The central idea of Hinduism is the concept of Brahman, the Supreme Being, the God above
all gods, the source of universal life.
The worshiper might seek favors or blessing from any of a multitude of deities within the
Hindu pantheon, which numbers some 33 million gods, but each is an aspect of the all-
embracing, “thousand-headed” Brahman.
“Truth is One,” the Vedas proclaimed. “They call him by different names.”
Next in importance comes the trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva
the destroyer.
Brahma is held above all others in popular rites, but Vishnu and Shiva are venerated in
hundreds of guises. Vishnu, beloved protector of the world, has 10 chief avatars, or forms in
which he descends to earth. Among them are Rama and Krishna, heroes of India’s two epics,
the Rammayana and the Mahabharata. Other avatars include the historical Buddha and
Kalkin, a savior yet to come.
Shiva, god of destruction, is also the restorer of life and lord of the cosmic dance of creation.
With no founder or uniform dogma, what is generally believed to be humanity’s oldest living
religion essentially started itself.
Its name, “Hinduism,” derives not from doctrine but geography: the Sanskrit word sindhu or
indus, means “ocean” or “river.”
Over six millennia, new cults and philosophies have enriched it, waves of reform have
challenged it. Other religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, have brought their witness to
India and strengthened, rather than weakened, this tolerant, diverse faith.
Today, Hinduism is practiced by upwards of 1 billion people worldwide, 98 percent of which

live in India.
— Brett Buckner
On heaven and hell
Author: Yogacharini Maitreyi
Publication: The Hindu
URL: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2011/01/30/stories/2011013050320600.htm
Yoga is the art and science of resonating with light
A s I was having lunch with a student and friend, he mentioned a question that was on his
mind. The question was about heaven and hell. The answer he got earlier was that when one
dies one can go into seven planes of consciousness according to their karma and then one is
reborn accordingly. He had asked this question to a person he had taken as his guru and was
now disillusioned by his guru's activities. That was creating a mini hell for him.
I have seen that one need not die to see heaven and hell. One can create a living hell in one's
life. More than the external situations, the interpretation and internalisation of situations can
create a living hell. Or one can create a heaven where one is in tune with cosmic order,
fairness and grace.
I love the quote about a religious and spiritual person. “A religious person is one who
believes in and is afraid of going to hell and a spiritual person is one who has been to
hell and back”
When one gets pulled into or falls into lower planes of consciousness, then sadhana or
spiritual practice and the goodness of people helps one slowly climb out of the pit. That is
what the whole yogic sadhana (physical and mental practices that focus on the ultimate
reality) is about.
Nara and Naraka
In the Yogic viewpoint, Nara is the word for misalignment of the koshas (sheaths, coverings,
layers/dimensions of our being). We have pancha (five) koshas and, due to various thoughts
and activities that are out of alignment with the bliss consciousness or the harmonious
consciousness, one can get out of alignment. This manifests as disappointments, accidents
and a general feeling that things are not falling into place. Even a mechanical device like a
car needs its four wheels to be aligned. We, being multidimensional, need much more.
Another name for man is also Nara. So this implies that, as humans, we are essentially
misaligned with the divine and also there could be a misalignment between the body,
emotions and mind. I am sure all of us have been in situations where the head and heart are in
conflict and, if the conflict is not resolved, it can cause much loss of energy and further
misalignment.
The term for extreme misalignment is Naraka. This means if we are under constant pressure,
abuse our systems or allow another to abuse our systems, then we run the risk of extreme
misalignment or naraka. Naraka also means hell. It is no coincidence and you can speak to
many abuse victims to know the living hell they have been through. Of course the inflictor is
in a greater or deeper hell to even think of inflicting that naraka on another.
Emotional attachment
The yogic viewpoint is that unhealthy attachments cause us to go off balance or out of
alignment. I have seen this first hand especially if I am attached to a person with a pattern of
life that is unhealthy or out of alignment. The more subtle one is, the more painful the
experience of being pulled in a direction that is against one's grain. It is important to become
aware of what and who we are unconsciously attached to. This can be our biological families,
friends or spiritual families as well. Hence it is important to keep in mind to be involved and
loving yet detached. People can be vehicles of the divine and we must be aware not to get
attached to their personalities or other aberrations that can also come through. In fact this
friend whose guru turned out to be not-so-straight was told that one is a guru drohi (traitor) if
one questions what the guru says or does or does not have gratitude. I told him to be grateful
that he got this hard knock and to be more discerning next time. It is very easy to take a
concept and misuse it. When one is discerning one can stay away from those who have an
innately desensitised or restless nervous system. This discernment is cultivated by cultivating
a refined life.
Vibrations
It is interesting to see the effect of sound vibrations on matter. Masaro Emoto has
documented it on water. Though he has faced criticism for inaccuracy, the gist of what he is
trying to convey is that positive and soothing words and thoughts have a positive effect on
water and therefore us. This can also be seen in simple experiments where grains of sand or
rice flour are exposed to frequencies and this forms patterns that are both symmetrical and
look harmonious.
The yogic viewpoint is that everything is vibration. The AUM is the primordial vibration and,
hence, when one resonates with this they feel whole or start resonating with the completeness
of this sound. This sound - like all sound - has the capacity to influence matter and us.
That is why we loosely use the term ‘I like this person's vibration or energy' and ‘I don't like
that person's energy'. We sense something that is not just apparent like social class or dress
sense but an intrinsic sense of what that person holds. The more sensitive we become the
more buried layers we become aware of ourselves and others.
When we feel good, positive and light we are less likely to snap or pull someone down.
However on days when we are down, overworked and in extremely misaligned states we can
pass on our depressing feelings onto others. Even if we did not say anything, just one's
presence is enough. This means the vibratory state of our being can be passed on to another.
The more the person is attached to you the easier it is for them to absorb it. The reverse is
also true. This means if we are on a lighter and more alive vibration then that also impacts
others. Our being is enough to make others feel all is well. Our being is enough to make them
feel loved and be love.
That is how positive music, people, thoughts and emotions can uplift us.
I came to Chennai for the music season and felt the emotions rise and dissolve as I was
watching a good classical dance performance. When the mind is absorbed in another one can
feel the emotions that are generated. Dance, especially Indian classical dance, offers the space
for all these emotions to come to the surface and consciously be expressed. Thus it is not only
a great catharsis for the dancer but for those immersed in and watching the dance as well.
One can shift one's vibration by the thoughts one thinks as well as being aware of ones
feelings. Even dark feelings can be processed and released to take us to higher vibrations.
The tools and awareness in yoga help us consciously generate this higher thinking and lighter
sparkling emotions. Thus all of yoga impacts the vibration of our being.
Planes of Consciousness
The yogis have classified seven hells and seven heavens on a broad basis (though other sub
divisions are listed), depending on the vibratory states of the plane. Now this corresponds to
the vibration of the person. Hence there is a vibratory match between the person and the place
of consciousness. This, as you can see, is not a physical place but a vibratory state that
reflects in external circumstances. Thus it is fascinating to see how by shifting one's vibratory
state, one can change one's external circumstances.
We don't have to literally die to see this. We can figuratively die to an old state of being and
rise to a place of consciousness that is more harmonious. This can be done through the
practice of yogic principles and practices. Or if we get attached to habits, people, principles
or practices that are of a lower vibration we can get pulled into states of hell even as we live.
A living hell or paradise on earth
Do we want to create a living hell or paradise? Just as with any other science, this also has a
step by step methodology. That is the whole yogic journey. One learns to savour it and smell
the flowers along the way, to commune as well as hibernate when needed. One learns to do
what is necessary to be in alignment.
- Yogacharini Maitreyi is a practical mystic who teaches yoga and creates conscious
community around the world. E-mail: [email protected]; www.arkaya.net
The Technique
The entire yogic process takes us to higher vibratory planes. However this specific set of
jyothi or light kriyas helps one to resonate more with the light or harmonious vibratory states.
Stand with a straight yet relaxed back with open chest, relaxed shoulders and gentle deep
breathing. Hold the intention or say internally: I resonate with and radiate light
Breathe in and bring your arms up softly imagining your arms to be wings. Let your arms be
above and as far back behind as they can go
Breathe out and softly bring your hands down in front
Be aware of not just the movement but the space around you as well
Do nine rounds and repeat as per your needs

Fusion yoga for kids
Author: Swapnil Rawal
Publication: The Indian Express
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/fusion-yoga-for-kids/743647/0
Introduction: London-based Lara Baumann is holding a yoga workshop for underprivileged

children in the city on Sunday
For Lara Baumann practising yoga is as necessary as having a meal and it is this passion for
yoga that has brought her back to India to impart her knowledge to the people of the country
where it originated.
Baumann, a London-based yoga instructor, and her student Anita Vaswani are arranging a
yoga workshop for a group of underprivileged kids on Sunday. “The idea is to give yoga back
to the country where it started and where I learnt it. Practising yoga hasn’t quite caught up in
every section of India yet. There are celebrities who practise it and some elderly people as
well, but they are in minority. Yoga should start early on in life when the bones are not fully
developed,” said Baumann.
She has discovered a method of yoga practice which she calls quantum method yoga, which
is a fusion of yoga and ayurveda. “Quantum yoga is a dynamic flow of exercise which is
designed according to individual needs. Kids have to be taught differently, while it differs
from adults in various ways,” Baumann explained.
To make it interesting for the 20 kids associated with Akanksha NGO who will take part in
the yoga session, Baumann has thought of a new way. “I have designed the whole session as
a story revolving around Shaktiman, the Indian superhero, on how he saves the world. It
would make it really interesting for the kids as I hear Shaktiman is hugely popular among the
kids here. Also Shakti or energy is the theme,” she said.
Vaswani, who recently graduated and would start teaching from Sunday, is an entrepreneur
from New York has shifted base from the US to Mumbai five years ago. Though she has had
stints with yoga since childhood, she got “hooked on” to it two years ago.
“It is fabulous to bring awareness about yoga and how it is important for us to embrace yoga
as a lifestyle in India. It is important to bring awareness to the fact that all of us should
benefit from the positivity of yoga, including the youth of India,” Vaswani said.
Born to an Indian mother, Vaswani had been coming to India in her spring break and that is
when she was introduced to this form of exercise. “Coming to India then, all you could do
was read Archie comics and stay at home. During that time yoga gurus used to come to teach
my mom and I also learned it,” she added.
For her, yoga has proved to be a healer especially after she lost her mother at an early age.
“Though a cliché, yoga helped me come out from the dark and it is special to me as it was
close to my mother as well,” she said.
Vaswani added, “Life in Mumbai is stressful, which is not the case in New York or Boston,
where I come from. There is organised stress there, while here it is totally stressful. In that
yoga makes you mentally stronger and physically fit.” Baumann and Vaswani want to take
such an initiative to promote yoga to the next level, with more kids from the affluent to the
underprivileged section.
Fight emerges over yoga's religious roots
Author: Wes Little
Publication: CNN.com
URL: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/25/fight-emerges-over-yogas-religious-roots/
Sheetal Shah, an official with the Hindu American Foundation, hears a lot about the physical
practice of yoga these days - but not much about its religious roots.
So her group, which seeks to provide what it calls "a progressive voice for American
Hindus," recently mounted a "take back yoga" campaign, including appearances at
conferences and attempts to raise media awareness of the practice's Hindu origins.
For Shah, who is the Hindu American Foundation's senior director, yoga is primarily a moral
and spiritual philosophy, a fact she says has been lost as the popularity of physical yoga has
boomed in the West. "There has been a conscious de-linking between Hinduism and yoga," in
the United States and elsewhere, she says.
Yoga is mentioned in many of the ancient Indian texts that form the basis of the religion now
known as Hinduism, which claims to be the world's oldest religion - and which is the third
most-practiced faith on the planet.
One main source of yoga philosophy is the sage Patanjali, who lived in the 2nd century B.C.
and whose Yoga Sutras describe a philosophy comprising 8 limbs, one of which is the
physical poses, or asanas, which are commonly referred to as yoga in the West.
Other elements of Patanjali's yogic philosophy are concepts like the yamas, moral vows that
include chastity and nonviolence.
In a yoga class offered by the Hindu Temple Society of North America in a New York
temple, yoga is taught as a spiritual practice in which the physical asanas are an essential
component. But the practice is supposed to lead to meditation.
"Yoga is really a spiritual discipline," says Uma Mysorekar, the Hindu Temple Society of
North America's president. "From its origin in Hinduism, yoga really originated from a
Sanskrit word yuj, which means union."
That union is supposed to happen, she said, "between individual being or the soul with
Paramatman," or cosmic being.
According to a 2008 study commissioned by Yoga Journal, there are roughly 16 million yoga
practitioners in the United States. Those people spend $5.7 billion dollars a year on yoga
classes and gear.
Most of that yoga is marketed as physical exercise as a health practice. Some Sanskrit
terminology is usually used, and many practitioners in a non-religious context say they sense
a vaguely spiritual aspect in the activity.
But most American practitioners wouldn’t go nearly so far as to label yoga as a religious act
or even to relate it to a specific religious tradition.
"Yoga is a great thing, no matter what style you do, how you come about it, why you come
about it, what you end up with spiritually from it," says Donna Rubin, the founder of Bikram
Yoga NYC, a New York chain of yoga studios offering yoga in the style of Bikram
Choudhury, a contemporary Indian yogi who now lives in Los Angeles. "So to start
nitpicking or criticizing this type of yoga or that type of yoga or what it's not doing or what it
should be doing, I don't really see the point of that."
Bikram yoga involves a set series of postures performed in a heated room.
"Bikram has developed this specific series so that it's more accessible," said Christopher
Totaro, a Bikram Yoga NYC instructor. "It's more palatable to a wider demographic of
people by pulling that religious part or separating that religious part from it."
Among those that have taken up yoga in the United States are devout followers of Western
religions.
Atlanta, Georgia's Northside Drive Baptist Church holds a weekly yoga class.
Amanda Gregg, who instructs the class, says that she is respectful of Hinduism but argues
that yoga didn't "come from" Hinduism as much as it developed alongside the religious
tradition.
"Although Hinduism and yoga grew out at the same time of the Indian subcontinent and there
are references to yoga in the Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita, that doesn't mean that
Hinduism has the exclusive hold on yoga," she said, referring to sacred Hindu texts. "Sort of
like Jews don't have the exclusive hold on prayer."
Some churches attempt to "Christianize" yoga by adding Bible verses to the practice, but
Northside Drive Baptist Church does not.
The Hindu American Foundation, meanwhile, says that while yoga is not just for Hindus, it
can't be totally divorced from its religious roots.
Shah says the organization's campaign is helping to gain wider acceptance for that view.
"People are now starting to put yoga and Hindu in the same sentence, in the same paragraph,"
she says. "They may not be agreeing with (our) stance but they are thinking about it they're
talking about it."
"People who had never even thought of this are starting to explore this idea that maybe there
is some sort of connection," she says.
Bikram may lose rights on Hot Yoga
Author: Kounteya Sinha/TNN, New Delhi
Publication: Times of India
Dated: February 6, 2011
Intro: India Makes Digital Library Of 1,300 Asanas To Help Patent Offices Curb Such
Claims
India is all set to give hot yoga a cold shoulder.
In order to stop self-styled yoga gurus from claiming copyright to ancient asanas—like
Bikram Choudhury’s Hot Yoga that’s a set of 26 sequences practised in a heated room—
India has completed documenting 1,300 asanas, which will soon be uploaded on the
country’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), making them public knowledge.
Around 250 of these asanas have also been made into video clips with an expert performing
them.
According to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Union health
ministry’s department of ayush, “once the database is up online, patent offices across the
world will have a reference point to check on everytime a yoga guru claims patent on a
particular asana”.
CSIR’s Dr V P Gupta, who created TKDL, told TOI, “All the 26 sequences which are part of
Hot Yoga have been mentioned in Indian yoga books written thousands of years ago.
However, we will not legally challenge Choudhury. By putting the information in the public
domain, TKDL will be a one-stop reference point for patent offices across the world. Every
time somebody applies for a patent on yoga, the office can check which ancient Indian book
first mentioned it and cancel the application.”
Nine well-known yoga institutions in India have helped with the documentation. “The data
will be up online in the next two months. In the first phase, we have videographed 250
asanas—the most popular ones. Chances of misappropriation with them are higher. So if
somebody wants to teach yoga, he does not have to fight copyright issues. He can just refer to
the TKDL. At present, anybody teaching Hot Yoga’s 26 postures has to pay Choudhury
franchisee fee because he holds copyright on them,” Dr Gupta added.
TKDL will have photos and explanation of the postures. Dr Gupta said, “A voice-over will
also point out which text mentions the posture. The information will be available in several
international languages. We have screened through several ancient books like Srimad
Bhagvat Gita, Vyas Bhashya, Yogasava Vijana, Hatha Praditika, Gheranda Samhita, Shiva
Samhita, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and Sandra Satkarma to exactly document all known
asanas and yoga references.” Till now, it is estimated that the US patent office alone has
issued over 200 yoga related copyrights. Experts say yoga has become a $225 billion market
in the West. Americans supposedly spend about $3 billion a year on yoga classes. Yoga is a
favourite among Hollywood stars. Oprah swears by it, so does Madonna, Sarah Jessica
Parker, Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jane Fonda, Tina Turner and
Angelina Jolie.
Yoga's Stress Relief: An Aid For Infertility?
Author: Catherine Saint Louis/NYT
Publication: Economic Times
Dated: February 7, 2011
Kimberly Soranno, a 39-yearold Brooklynite undergoing an in vitro fertilization cycle as part

of her quest to become pregnant, had gone to her share of yoga classes, but never one like
that held on a recent Tuesday night in a reception area of the New York University Fertility
Centre. There were no deep twists or headstands; just easy "restorative" poses as the teacher,
Tracy Toon Spencer, guided the participants - most of them women struggling to conceive -
to let go of their worries.
"Verbally, she brings you to a relaxation place in your mind," Soranno said, adding, "It's
great to do the poses, get energy out and feel strong. But the most important part for me was
the connection to the other women."
Besides taxing the mind, body and wallet, infertility can be lonely. Support groups have long
existed for infertile couples, but in recent years, so-called "yoga for fertility" classes have
become increasingly popular. No study has proved that yoga has increased pregnancy rates in
infertility patients. But students of yoga-for fertility classes say that the coping skills they
learn help reduce stress on and off the mat. For many, it's a support group in motion.
"As important as the yoga postures was the idea that women could come out of the closet
with their infertility and be supported in a group," said Tami Quinn, the founder, with Beth
Heller, of Pulling Down the Moon, a company with holistic fertility centers in Chicago and
the Washington area. "If you say come to my support group, women going through infertility
are like, 'I don't need some hokey support group' or 'I'm not that bad.' But with yoga they are
getting support and they don't even realise it." Holly Dougherty, 42, didn't want to talk about
her drug-infused slog through fertility treatment that began seven years ago. "I didn't tell
anyone," said Dougherty, with the exception of her parents.
This changed after she started going to yoga-for-fertility classes taught by Spencer at World
Yoga Center in Manhattan in 2005. The gentle poses helped take her mind off her setbacks,
and each week, she found the community that she hadn't realised she needed.
"Being able to open up in a safe environment with support and encouragement of others on
the journey, everyone became each other's cheerleader," said Dougherty, now a mother of
two who still socializes with students from Spencer's class. "I learned to become so open
about it." Smoking, alcohol, caffeine and some medications can hurt fertility, as can being
overweight or underweight, said Dr William Schoolcraft, a medical director of the Colorado
Center for Reproductive Medicine, whose main branch is in Lone Tree. As for improving
one's chances with massage, diet or yoga? "That's where the data gets murkier," he said.
"We will never promise that you will get pregnant by doing yoga," Quinn said. "We can tell
you many women who have done yoga have gotten pregnant. But there's no clinical data
supporting the fact that yoga increases conception rates. The last thing we would want to do
is give false hope." Stress, however, has been shown to reduce the probability of conception.
Alice Domar, who has a Ph.D in health psychology and is the director of mind-body services
at the Harvard-affiliated center Boston IVF, said of yoga: "It's a very effective relaxation
technique, and a great way to get women in the door to get support. It's a way to get them to
like their bodies again. But the relief can be quiet as well. Elaine Keating-Brown, 38, an
elementary-school teacher in Manhattan who is in her last trimester after in vitro fertilization,
found the yoga classes she took with Laura O'Brien, then at NYU, helped her silence a
tireless negative voice in her head. Her fertility-related worries felt endless, from "What
happens if it doesn't work?" to "financially, it's not exactly cheap," Keating-Brown said. But
"once you're in the yoga room, you haven't got all that anymore," she said, "you're
concentrating on you, and put those thoughts aside, put your body in a good place, and come
out of class feeling a real feeling of relaxation and it is.
On Clerics’ advice to Muslims: Stay away from yoga camps
Author: Sultan Shahin
Publication: New Age Islam
URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=4108
Ever since I read about some Mullahs asking Muslims in India and Malaysia to stay away
from yoga camps, I was wondering what could be so threatening about Yoga. Is our faith so
brittle that we would cease to remain Muslim if we just learn to do yogic exercises, now
recommended by doctors, particularly cardiologists and surgeons after heart by-pass surgery
or to those with high blood pressure? In fact Yoga is useful to patients of an assortment of
illnesses, and also as a preventive health-care technique. If practised regularly yogic
meditational techniques can lead to beautiful and extremely rewarding spiritual experiences
too.
Now the cat is out of the bag. Maulana Nadeem-ul-Wajidee tells us: “Muslims must
abstain from Yoga Camps as the Faith cannot be endangered for the sake of physical
fitness. After all, the protection of Faith is more important than the health and physical
beauty.”
Now how does our faith get endangered by Yoga? Well, the yoga teacher makes us
occasionally chant “Om” and at least one teacher sometimes recites verses from Islam’s
earliest scriptures, the Vedas.
I have no cure, at least in the short run for our Mullah’s cave mentality, their deep-seated
prejudices, amounting to hatred of Islam’s earlier scriptures. If Allah and the Holy Quran
cannot make them respect His earlier prophets and their revealed books, despites repeatedly,
scores of time, instructing them to do so, who am I to presume these people can be cured of
their cave mentality. But learning Yoga may be an urgent requirement for some Muslims. So
some of us could learn it from Nastik Hindu teachers and then ourselves teach it to our
people. Having leant Yoga after my surgeon’s advice following a heart by-pass surgery, I can
assure you that chanting Om is not at all necessary. You may do yoga without a chant
altogether or you may supplant it with the word Allah or Allahu or whatever and it would
work equally well. Reading from religious scriptures is not at all necessary, but if you wish
you can very well read verses from the Holy Quran while teaching Yoga. Islamise Yoga, if
you have to, but learn it, practise it and teach it to fellow Muslims, and of course, to fellow
human beings.
Comment
Sultan Shahin is right when he says: “If practised regularly yogic meditational techniques can
lead to beautiful and extremely rewarding spiritual experiences too.” Yoga is not merely for
the physical body, but also for the mind. It opens up the mind to absorb the spiritual
experiences that are all around us. In the procress, the mind starts to evaluate what is told in
a critical manner. Often to expand the teachings to take oneself to the next level – and this is
not just in spiritual matters, but also in secular ones. Sometimes to question the teachings –
both spiritual and secular.
It is this questioning that is the threat to monotheistic religions, where the clerics have a
strong hold on the followers. And hence Maulana Nadeem-ul-Wajidee is right whe he says:
“Muslims must abstain from Yoga Camps as the Faith cannot be endangered for the sake of
physical fitness.” The question does endanger the faith in the way the clerics want to teach it.
The chantings that are part of Yoga are an assist to concentrate on what one is doing.
Replacing the regular ones with another chant (or even no chant) does not alter the process of
opening of the mind. But what happens AFTER the mind is opened is what is important.
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
Not as Old as You Think
Author: Meera Nanda
Publication: Open The Magazine
URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-think
…nor very Hindu either. There is telling evidence to debunk this nationalistic myth
No one denies that Hinduism’s most sacred and ancient texts, including the Bhagvad Gita,
describe different kinds of yogic practices. But what does this ancient and sacred tradition of
yoga have to do with what people all around the world do in yoga classes in gyms and fitness
centres today?
To most Indians, such questions are nothing less than sacrilegious. Yoga is for them what
apple pie and motherhood are for Americans: a living symbol of their way of life.
Indians tend to affirm their claims on yoga by trotting out the familiar icons of the ‘5,000-
year-old Vedic tradition,’ which supposedly stretches from the Pashupati seal of the (actually
very unVedic) Indus Valley civilisation to the Bhagvad Gita and the venerable Yoga Sutras
of Patanjali. Yoga, Indians like to solemnly declare, is ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’ and all the
great yoga masters, from Swami Vivekananda to BKS Iyengar to Baba Ramdev of our own
time, have only restored or reinstituted an ancient practice. It is also commonplace to hear
Indians—even those who are not particularly spiritual themselves—blame Americans and
other ‘decadent’ Westerners for reducing their spiritually rich tradition to mere calisthenics.
Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the saffron flag over American-style yoga,
which consists largely of yogic asanas and stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby,
Hindu American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal campaign to remind
Americans that yoga was made in India by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but
Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who learned to discipline their bodies in
order to purify their atman. The purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all
yoga, including its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of
life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.
There is only one problem with this purist history of yoga: it is false. Yogic asanas were
never ‘Vedic’ to begin with. Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic
asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and reformers—including the
great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis. Moreover, what HAF
calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their spiritual
underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas
and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to counter
Western images of effete Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha yoga took on
many elements of Western gymnastics and body-building, which show up in the world-
renowned Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from honestly acknowledging
the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a
smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.
It is the hidden history of modern postural yoga that is the main theme of this essay. But first,
some background on the great ‘take back yoga’ movement.
YOGA IN AMERICA
Yoga is to North America what McDonald’s is to India: both are foreign implants gone
native. Not unlike the golden arches that are mushrooming in Indian cities, the urban and
suburban landscape of the United States is dotted with neighbourhood health clubs, spas and
even churches and synagogues offering yoga classes.
Some 16 million Americans do some form of yoga, primarily as a part of their exercise and
fitness routine. When everyday Americans talk about yoga, they mostly mean hatha yoga,
involving stretches, breathing and bodily postures.
Many styles of postural yoga, pioneered by India-origin teachers—the Iyengar and Sivananda
schools, the Ashtanga Vinyasa or ‘power yoga’ of Pattabhi Jois, and ‘hot yoga,’ recently
copyrighted by Bikram Chaudhary—thrive in the United States. The more meditational forms
of yoga, popularised by the disciples of Vivekananda, Sivananda and other swamis, are less
popular. Americans’ preference for postural yoga over meditational yoga is not all that
unique: in India, too, hundreds of millions follow Baba Ramdev, India’s most popular tele-
yogi, who teaches a medicalised, asana-oriented yoga with little spiritual or meditational
content.
By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the origins of what it teaches. On the
contrary, in a country that is so young and so constantly in flux, yoga’s presumed antiquity
(‘the 5,000-year-old exercise system’, etcetera.) and its connections with Eastern spirituality
have become part of the sales pitch. Thus, doing namastes, intoning ‘om’ and chanting
Sanskrit mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many yoga
studios use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of ‘om’ and other paraphernalia of
the Subcontinent to create a suitably spiritual ambience. Iyengar yoga schools begin their
sessions with a hymn to Patanjali, the second-century composer of the Yoga Sutras, and some
have even installed his icon. This Hinduisation is not entirely decorative either, as yoga
instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy and scriptures to get a licence to teach
yoga.
‘TAKE BACK YOGA’
One would think that yoga’s popularity and Hinduisation would gladden the hearts of Hindu
immigrants.
Wrong.
The leading Hindu advocacy organisation in the United States, the aforementioned Hindu
American Foundation or HAF, is hardly beaming with pride. On the contrary, it has recently
accused the American yoga industry of ‘stealing’—even ‘raping’—yoga by stripping it of its
spiritual heritage and not acknowledging its Hindu roots. Millions of Americans will be
shocked to learn that they are committing ‘intellectual property theft’ every single time they
strike a yogic pose because they fail to acknowledge yoga’s ‘mother tradition,’ namely
Hinduism. HAF’s co-founder and chief spokesperson, Aseem Shukla, exhorts his fellow
Hindus to ‘take back yoga and reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual heritage.’
symbols and rituals in yoga and other cultural institutions in the US. They still find Hindu-
phobia lurking everywhere they look. They want Americans to think of yoga, the Yoga Sutras
of Patanjali and the great Vedas when they think of Hinduism, instead of the old stereotypes
of caste, cows and curry. They would rather, to paraphrase Shukla, that Hinduism is linked
less with holy cows than Gomukhasana (a particularly arduous asana); less with colourful
wandering sadhus and more with the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali. It seems this yoga-
reclamation campaign is less about yoga, and more about the Indian diaspora’s strange mix of
defensiveness and an exaggerated sense of the excellence of the elite, Sanskritic aspects of
Hindu religion and culture.
The ‘who owns yoga’ debate gained worldwide attention last November, when The New
York Times carried a front-page feature on the issue. But the dispute started earlier, with a
battle of blogs, hosted online by The Washington Post, between HAF’s Shukla and New Age
guru Deepak Chopra. Shukla complained of the yoga establishment shunning the ‘H-word’
while making its fortunes off Hindu ideas and practices. He accused the yoga and New Age
industry, including Indian gurus like Deepak Chopra, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and others, of
using euphemisms like ‘Eastern wisdom’ and ‘ancient Indian’ to repackage Hindu ideas
without calling them by their proper name. Chopra, who does indeed shun the Hindu label
and calls himself an ‘Advaita Vedantist’ instead, declared that Hinduism had no patent on
yoga. He argued that yoga existed in ‘consciousness and consciousness alone’ much before
Hinduism, just like wine and bread existed before Jesus’ Last Supper, implying that Hindus
had as much claim over yoga as Christians had over bread and wine. Shukla called Chopra a
“philosophical profiteer” who does not honour his Hindu heritage, while Chopra accused
Shukla and HAF of a Hindu-fundamentalist bias.
NEITHER ETERNAL NOR VEDIC
This debate is really about two equally fundamentalist views of Hindu history. The
underlying objective is to draw an unbroken line connecting 21st century yogic postures with
the nearly 2,000-year-old Yoga Sutras, and tie both to the supposedly 5,000-year-old Vedas.
The only difference is that, for Chopra, yoga existed before Hinduism, while Shukla and
HAF want to claim the entire five millennia for the glory of Hinduism. For Chopra, yoga is a
part of ‘timeless Eastern wisdom’. For the HAF, ‘Yoga and the Vedas are synonymous, and
are as eternal as they are contemporaneous.’
The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor
synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the
late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism,
in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played
as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took
place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely
along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin,
India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga
renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-
building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other
Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has
been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as
‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression
of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is
thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.
WHAT VEDIC ROOTS?
Contrary to the widespread impression, the vast majority of asanas taught by modern yoga
gurus are not described anywhere in ancient sacred Hindu texts. Anyone who goes looking
for references to popular yoga techniques like pranayam, neti, kapalbhati or suryanamaskar
in classical Vedic literature will be sorely disappointed.
The four Vedas have no mention of yoga. The Upanishads and The Bhagvad Gita do, but
primarily as a spiritual technique to purify the atman. The Bible of yoga, Patanjali’s Yoga
Sutras, devotes barely three short sutras (out of 195) to physical postures, and that too only to
suggest comfortable ways of sitting still for prolonged meditation. Asanas were only the
means to the real goal—to still the mind to achieve the state of pure consciousness—in
Patanjali’s yoga.
There are, of course, asana-centred hatha yoga texts in the Indic tradition. But they definitely
do not date back 5,000 years: none of them makes an appearance till the 10th to 12th
centuries. Hatha yoga was a creation of the kanphata (split-eared) Nath Siddha, who were no
Sanskrit-speaking sages meditating in the Himalayas. They were (and still are) precisely
those matted-hair, ash-smeared sadhus that the HAF wants to banish from the Western
imagination. Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent on postural yoga, it is
these caste-defying, ganja-smoking, sexually permissive, Shiva- and Shakti-worshipping
sorcerers, alchemists and tantriks, who were cowherds, potters and suchlike. They undertook
great physical austerities not because they sought to achieve pure consciousness,
unencumbered by the body and other gross matter, but because they wanted magical powers
(siddhis) to become immortal and to control the rest of the natural world.
Far from being purely Vedic, hatha yoga was born a hybrid. As Amartya Sen reminded us in
his recent address to the Indian Science Congress, universities like Nalanda were a melting
pot where Buddhist Tantra made contact with Taoism from China. By the time Buddhism
reached China through Nalanda and other centres of cultural exchange along the Silk Route
in the north and the sea route in the south, Taoists were already experimenting with qigong,
which involved controlled breathing and channelling of ‘vital energy’. Taoist practices bear
an uncanny similarity with the yogic pranayam, leading scholars to believe that the two
systems have borrowed from each other: Indians learning exercise-oriented breathing from
Taoists, and Taoists in China learning breathing-oriented meditation from their Indian
neighbours.
But this Taoist-Buddhist-Shaivite synthesis was only the beginning. As we see below, hatha
yoga was to absorb many more influences in the modern era, this time from the West.
FABRICATING ANCIENT TEXTS
The problem for historians of modern yoga is that even these medieval hatha yoga texts
describe only a small fraction of modern yogic postures taught today. BKS Iyengar’s Light
on Yoga alone teaches 200 asanas, while the 14th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika lists only 15
asanas, as do the 17th century Gheranda Samhita and Shiva Samhita.
Given that there is so little ancient tradition upon which to stand, unverifiable claims of
ancient-but-now-lost texts have been promoted. The Ashtanga Vinyasa system of Pattabhi
Jois, for example, is allegedly based on a palm-leaf manuscript called the Yoga Kurunta that
Jois’s teacher, renowned yoga master T Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), unearthed in a
Calcutta library. But this manuscript has reportedly been eaten by ants, and not a single copy
of it can be found today. Another ‘ancient’ text, the Yoga Rahasya, which no one has been
able to trace, was supposedly dictated to Krishnamacharya in a trance by the ghost of an
ancestor who had been dead nearly a millennium. Such are the flimsy—or rather fictional—
grounds on which rest Hinduism’s claimed intellectual property rights to yoga.
This sorry attempt to create an ancient lineage for modern yoga is reminiscent of the case of
Vedic mathematics. In that case, Swami Shri Bharati Krishna Tirtha, the Shankaracharya of
Puri, insisted that 16 sutras in his 1965 book, titled Vedic Mathematics, are to be found in the
appendix of Atharva Veda. When no one could find the said sutras, the Swami declared they
appear only in his own appendix to the the Atharva Veda and not any other! This ‘logic’ has
not prevented Vedic maths from emerging as a growth industry, attracting private spending
by well-heeled Indians seeking to boost brainpower and public spending by state
governments that have introduced it in school curriculums.
SECRETS OF THE MYSORE PALACE
New research has brought to light historical documents and oral histories that raise serious
doubts about the ‘ancient’ lineage of Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga Vinyasa and Iyengar yoga. Both
Jois (1915–2009) and Iyengar (born 1918) learnt yoga from T Krishnamacharya from 1933
till the late 1940s, when he directed a yoga school in one wing of the Jaganmohan Palace of
the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wodiyar IV (1884–1940).
The Maharaja, who ruled the state and the city of Mysore from 1902 till his death, was well
known as a great promoter of Indian culture and religion. But he was also a great cultural
innovator, who welcomed positive innovations from the West, incorporating them into his
social programmes. Promoting physical education was one of his passions, and under his
reign, Mysore became the hub of a physical culture revival in the country. He had hired
Krishnamacharya primarily to teach yoga to the young princes of the royal family, but he also
funded the travels all over India of Krishnamacharya and his protégés to give yoga
demonstrations, thereby encouraging an enormous popular revival of yoga.
Indeed, Mysore’s royal family had a long-standing interest in hatha yoga: Mummadi
Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799–1868), Wodeyar IV’s ancestor, is credited with composing an
exquisitely illustrated manual, titled Sritattvanidhi, which was first discovered by Norman
Sjoman, a Swedish yoga student, in the mid-1980s in the library of the Mysore Palace. What
is remarkable about this book is its innovative combination of hatha yoga asanas with rope
exercises used by Indian wrestlers and the danda push-ups developed at the vyayamasalas,
the indigenous Indian gymnasiums.
Both Sjoman and Mark Singleton, a US-based scholar who has interviewed many of those
associated with the Mysore Palace during its heyday in the 1930s, believe that the seeds of
modern yoga lie in the innovative style of Sritattvanidhi. Krishnamacharya, who was familiar
with this text and cited it in his own books, carried on the innovation by adding a variety of
Western gymnastics and drills to the routines he learnt from Sritattvanidhi, which had already
cross-bred hatha yoga with traditional Indian wrestling and acrobatic routines.
In addition, it is well established that Krishnamacharya had full access to a Western-style

gymnastics hall in the Mysore Palace, with all the usual wall ropes and other props that he
began to include in his yoga routines.
Sjoman has excerpted the gymnastics manual that was available to Krishnamacharya. He
claims that many of the gymnastic techniques from that manual—for example, the cross-
legged jumpback and walking the hands down a wall into a back arch—found their way into
Krishnamacharya’s teachings, which he passed on to Iyengar and Jois. In addition, in the
early years of the 20th century, an apparatus-free Swedish drill and gymnastic routine,
developed by a Dane by the name of Niels Bukh (1880–1950), was introduced to India by the
British and popularised by the YMCA. Singleton argues that “at least 28 of the exercises in
the first edition of Bukh’s manual are strikingly similar (often identical) to yoga postures
occurring in Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga sequence or in Iyengar’s Light on Yoga.” The link again
is Krishnamacharya, who Singleton calls a “major player in the modern merging of
gymnastic-style asana practice and the Patanjali tradition.”
SO, WHO OWNS YOGA?
The HAF’s shrill claims about Westerners stealing yoga completely gloss over the
tremendous amount of cross-breeding and hybridisation that has given birth to yoga as we
know it. Indeed, contemporary yoga is a unique example of a truly global innovation, in
which Eastern and Western practices merged to produce something that is valued and
cherished around the world.
Hinduism, whether ancient, medieval or modern, has no special claims on 21st century
postural yoga. To assert otherwise is churlish and simply untrue.
- Meera Nanda is a visiting professor of history of science at the Indian Institute of Science
Education and Research, Mohali
Meera Nanda’s Ignorance Revisited
Author:
URL: http://www.sandeepweb.com/2011/02/15/meera-nandas-ignorance-
revisited/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Serious
lySandeep+%28Seriously+Sandeep%29
About two years ago, writing about how Meera Nanda proudly strutted her ignorance, I
observed two things at the outset:
Perhaps it takes only a Meera Nanda to have the guts to strut her ignorance with such
confidence. It took me a few days to digest what she actually wants to say.
Now, two years later, we see that she’s lost none of these two distinguishing traits that mark
her as a writer–I’d have said “intellectual” and “scholar” but she’s herself left enough records
to show otherwise—of ignorant and confounding mass of words. Exhibit N, 12 Feb 2011:
Not as Old as You Think.
The byline in itself is enough to prevent you from reading the ignorant nonsense of oceanic
proportions. It says Yoga is not “very Hindu either. There is telling evidence to debunk this
nationalistic myth.” But I did myself a disservice by swimming through her verbal scum
because scholarly falsehoods are more dangerous.
One of the first things that confronts you when trying to write a rebuttal to any piece of
Meera Nanda is: how the hell do I respond? As you sift through her textual muck, you detect
a few patterns, which all lead up to the whole picture:
1Hinduism is bad
2 Hindutva is worse
3There’s nothing positive about either/both
4 Nationalism is dangerous
5 Everything associated with Hinduism is negative/bad/dangerous by default
Her current piece though is novel and deceptive because it preempts “objections” by
“Hindutva fanatics” and “nationalists.” Here’re the “objections:”
Indians tend to affirm their claims on yoga by trotting out the familiar icons of the ‘5,000-
year-old Vedic tradition,’ which supposedly stretches from the Pashupati seal of the (actually
very unVedic) Indus Valley civilisation to the Bhagvad Gita and the venerable Yoga Sutras
of Patanjali. Yoga, Indians like to solemnly declare, is ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’ and all the
great yoga masters, from Swami Vivekananda to BKS Iyengar to Baba Ramdev of our own
time, have only restored or reinstituted an ancient practice. It is also commonplace to hear
Indians—even those who are not particularly spiritual themselves—blame Americans and
other ‘decadent’ Westerners for reducing their spiritually rich tradition to mere calisthenics.
Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the saffron flag over American-style yoga,
which consists largely of yogic asanas and stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby,
Hindu American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal campaign to remind
Americans that yoga was made in India by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but
Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who learned to discipline their bodies in
order to purify their atman. The purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all
yoga, including its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of
life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.
Here are just a few problems with this: she doesn’t present any evidence to her claim that the
Pashupati seal is un-Vedic. Equally, she doesn’t cite any article or authority that says that
BKS Iyengar and Ramdev have restored the ancient practice." She also doesn’t include any
evidence to support her claim that the HAF’s definition of Hindus who “made Yoga in India”
were the “Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages.” This done, she claims with
same arrogant air of confidence that
There is only one problem with this purist history of yoga: it is false.
What follows this is pure and naked nightmare. Of the textual variety. Here’s how it begins.
Yogic asanas were never ‘Vedic’ to begin with. Far from being considered the crown jewel of
Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and
reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and
jogis.
Really? Who even claimed that asanas were Vedic, to begin with? The mention about “Hindu
intellectuals and reformers,” Swami Vivekanada, et al is a case study in selective quoting.
I’ve dwelt on this issue earlier so it doesn’t merit repetition here. But the real question to ask
is this: why did he and others “look down upon” asanas? Because they’re mere aids, which if
relied upon exclusively, can be disastrous. As I’ve said at least thrice in the past, while
debunking the spiritual profiteer Deepak Chopra, asanas are not Yoga and vice versa.
However, in Meera Nanda’s clever-by-half spin doctoring,
Moreover, what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their
spiritual underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the
akharas and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to
counter Western images of effete Indians.
This is barefaced falsehood. The Chandogya Upanishad dating back to at least the 1st
Century BCE, says that:
A hundred and one are the arteries of the heart, one of them leads up to the crown of the head.
Going upward through that, one becomes immortal. (8.6.6)
The Crown of the Head is the Sahasrara Chakra of the Kundalini Yoga. One wonders how
you can have this conception without first having a system of Yoga that defines and explains
it. But Meera Nanda propounds that it’s perfectly logical to build the third floor without first
laying a foundation. And in a bizarre twist of facts and history, she claims that this
“separation” started in the 19th and 20th Indian akharas by Indian nationalists! The rape of
yoga is precisely that. Here’s the thing: no Hindu has a problem with gurus and gyms
teaching asanas. But to call that as Yoga outrages people. But there’s worse:
Far from honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians
simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.
Sure. Most Hindus don’t have a problem acknowledging the West’s contributions to asanas.
We come from a culture that has honoured the contributions of the Kushans, essentially as
“foreign” a race as it can get. And I have little doubt in my mind that had Newton lived in
India, he’d have been honoured as a sage, a Rishi. But what this comment from Nanda shows
is how her intellectual integrity works. We don’t fail to notice how cleverly she equates Yoga
with Asana, an intellectual treason that she shares with the demigods of the Marxist-Secular
pantheon and peddlers like Deepak Chopra. “Modern Yoga” eh? Yoga—and I shall never tire
of repeating this—is a unified system of which asana is simply a minor component. And
Yoga is derived from the Vedas. As an aside, I recommend reading Sarvesh’s really excellent
and in depth piece that conclusively demonstrates how you cannot delink Yoga from
Hinduism. There’s nothing like “modern Yoga.” And then she does a sudden zig-zag and
states that the main theme of her essay is to unearth the “hidden history of modern postural
yoga.”
Thus far, we have been handed these menu items on her grand feast:
1 Yogic asanas
2 Vedic Yoga
3 Asanas divorced from their “spiritual underpinning”
4 Modern Yoga
5 Modern Postural Yoga
I challenge you to detect one, exactly one logical thread that connects and leads to these
conclusions. This is followed by a no-brainer rant on the HAF, which among other things,
makes veiled attacks on everybody from BKS Iyengar to Baba Ramdev without—sigh, as
usual—a shred of evidence. However, this rant gets interesting towards the end:
Many yoga studios use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of ‘om’ and other
paraphernalia of the Subcontinent to create a suitably spiritual ambience. Iyengar yoga
schools begin their sessions with a hymn to Patanjali, the second-century composer of the
Yoga Sutras, and some have even installed his icon. This Hinduisation is not entirely
decorative either, as yoga instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy and scriptures to
get a licence to teach yoga.
Meera Nanda inadvertently drops the boulder on her own feet. The sinister reference to
“Hinduisation” apart, she lays bare what she has chosen to “criticize.” Did she wonder why
Yoga instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy to qualify? I leave the reader to
figure the answer out.
And then she launches a tirade against the Take Back Yoga campaign of the HAF, which is
similar in tone and content to the previous sections until we get here:
symbols and rituals in yoga and other cultural institutions in the US.
This is a classic case of giving the dog a bad name. If you read several of the HAF’s
campaigns, the truth is otherwise: the HAF is more concerned about the way in which these
symbols and rituals are represented, and not with their growing visibility. And further,
They still find Hindu-phobia lurking everywhere they look. They want Americans to think of
yoga, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the great Vedas when they think of Hinduism, instead
of the old stereotypes of caste, cows and curry. They would rather, to paraphrase Shukla, that
Hinduism is linked less with holy cows than Gomukhasana (a particularly arduous asana);
less with colourful wandering sadhus and more with the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali.
The same technique applied again. If you scan news reports of the last 10 years at least, you
find that the debates that raged on Sulekha (very popular then) were about how the US
academia and media distorted Hindu concepts and portrayed India in general and Hinduism
in a negative light. Then the California textbook controversy where US school children were
taught that Hindus worshipped monkeys. If you were a Hindu parent living in the US, how’d
you react is a question Meera Nanda never asks. In the same vein, Nanda doesn’t talk about
the instant, manufactured outrage when even a frission of perceived insult to Islam occurs in
the US. Still further,
It seems this yoga-reclamation campaign is less about yoga, and more about the Indian
diaspora’s strange mix of defensiveness and an exaggerated sense of the excellence of the
elite, Sanskritic aspects of Hindu religion and culture.
It’s obviously too much to expect Meera Nanda to understand or even have an iota of
knowledge about Yoga but we don’t fail to notice her contempt for what she brands is the
“excellence of the elite, Sanskritic aspects of Hindu religion and culture.” Any aspect about
Hindu culture, tradition and philosophy requires a holistic and “360-degree” view if you
sincerely want to understand it. Thus, if you want to understand Yoga darshana (Philosophy),
you must at the least have a superb command of Sanskrit and the Vedas. Else, you’ll spout
retarded nonsense like “this yoga-reclamation campaign is less about yoga…and an
exaggerated sense of the excellence of the elite, Sanskritic aspects of Hindu religion and
culture.” Going by the sheer amount of bile she’s generated about “elite” and “Sanskrit,” we
wonder if she favours disbanding a quest for excellence.
What follows is truly mind-numbing for the sheer leap of logic.
This debate is really about two equally fundamentalist views of Hindu history. The
underlying objective is to draw an unbroken line connecting 21st century yogic postures with
the nearly 2,000-year-old Yoga Sutras, and tie both to the supposedly 5,000-year-old Vedas.
Wait, don’t let the acrid stench disgust you yet. Meera Nanda has shown nothing that proves
that this debate is about “fundamentalist views of Hindu history.” All she has given us so far
is some incomprehensible terminology: ref the menu items from #1 thru #5 above. As for her
note about drawing an unbroken line, again, she hasn’t shown that Yoga didn’t exist in the
Vedas or that Yogic postures/asanas are not Yoga. Actually, the fact is the exact opposite:
today’s Yoga is the same as it was at the time it was conceived, in the Vedas. No amount of
word play and semantic masturbation will make the truth a falsehood. Not especially when
even a drop of evidence is absent.
Oh wait, actually she presents “evidence.” Here:
Anyone who goes looking for references to popular yoga techniques like pranayam, neti,
kapalbhati or suryanamaskar in classical Vedic literature will be sorely disappointed.
This is so absurd that it’s brilliant. Some of the immediate places that somebody desirous of
learning Asanas and Pranayama will go to are the following:
An exponent of these physical practices
An instruction manual
An audio tape/CD that explains these instructions
A VCD/DVD
“Classical Vedic literature” won’t even figure on such a person’s list. But he’s not Meera
Nanda. Even more brilliance ensues.
The four Vedas have no mention of yoga. The Upanishads and The Bhagvad Gita do, but
primarily as a spiritual technique to purify the atman.
By mentioning Vedas and Upanishads as separate works, her erudition has truly dazzled the
Heavens. One doesn’t wish one’s enemy to be in Meera Nanda’s position. Her claim that the
Upanishads do mention Yoga simply means she has negated herself. It’s kinda shocking that
Meera Nanda as a visiting professor isn’t aware that the Upanishads are part of the Veda.
Equally, her other claim that Upanishads mention Yoga “primarily as a spiritual technique to
purify the atman” is again a falsehood because:
Asana had already acquired a technical sense during mahAbhArata, and even before, from
upaniShadic times. That patanjali does not need to define Asana itself, but simply add more
specific qualifiers to it, also shows that the concept of specific Asanas was already a common
knowledge. Such names of Asanas as padmAsana, daNDAsana, bhadrAsana, svAstikAsana,
and vIrAsana, vajrAsana etc. were so very common and well known among the Hindus
already from very early days. By as early as the 6th century we find the yoga authors not only
mentioning them by name, but in a sense that it was such a common knowledge that simply
indicating a few names appended by ‘etcetera’ is sufficient to indicate them all.
This also punctures Nanda’s other preposterous claim that
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, devotes barely three short sutras (out of 195) to physical postures,
and that too only to suggest comfortable ways of sitting still for prolonged meditation…
And then she writes something that so horribly stretches the limits of ludicrousness that you
wonder how this even got published in a mainstream, serious magazine.
Hatha yoga was a creation of the kanphata (split-eared) Nath Siddha, who were no Sanskrit-
speaking sages meditating in the Himalayas. They were (and still are) precisely those matted-
hair, ash-smeared sadhus…Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent on postural
yoga, it is these caste-defying, ganja-smoking, sexually permissive, Shiva- and Shakti-
worshipping sorcerers, alchemists and tantriks, who were cowherds, potters and suchlike.
They undertook great physical austerities not because they sought to achieve pure
consciousness, unencumbered by the body and other gross matter, but because they wanted
magical powers (siddhis) to become immortal and to control the rest of the natural world.
How does one even take this seriously much less respond to it? What next? Some oppressed
or tribal guy who conceives a new posture to ejaculate without intercourse or masturbation?
Some backward lady who can transform herself into a snake at will? More nonsense follows:
Far from being purely Vedic, hatha yoga was born a hybrid. As Amartya Sen reminded us in
his recent address to the Indian Science Congress, universities like Nalanda were a melting
pot where Buddhist Tantra made contact with Taoism from China…Taoists were already
experimenting with qigong, which involved controlled breathing and channelling of ‘vital
energy’. Taoist practices bear an uncanny similarity with the yogic pranayam, leading
scholars to believe that the two systems have borrowed from each other: Indians learning
exercise-oriented breathing from Taoists, and Taoists in China learning breathing-oriented
meditation from their Indian neighbours…But this Taoist-Buddhist-Shaivite synthesis was
only the beginning.
And then she uses this ridiculous and misleading “premise” to somehow link it to BKS
Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, et al.
The problem for historians of modern yoga is that even these medieval hatha yoga texts
describe only a small fraction of modern yogic postures taught today. BKS Iyengar’s Light
on Yoga alone teaches 200 asanas, while the 14th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika lists only 15
asanas, as do the 17th century Gheranda Samhita and Shiva Samhita.
Even if we grant her her nonsense, we can’t overlook her falsehood yet again. What she fails
to mention is the fact that there are a few “basic” asanas and that a small variation in any of
these asanas can be given a new name. For example, Matsyasana (Fish pose) is, broadly
speaking, a variation of the Padmasana (Lotus pose) as it’s impossible to do Matsyasana
without first doing Padmasana. This way, you can experiment and come up with your own
variation and give it a name. Because BKS Iyengar teaches 200 asanas and the Gheranda
Samhita teaches 20 doesn’t prove anything. If anything, it simply proves the all-inclusive
nature of the system of Yoga (notice, I’m not using the word Yoga here). Meera Nanda
follows this up with an attack on Iyengar, Jois, and their common guru, Krishnamacharya on
the grounds of fabricating and/or inventing ancient texts. This is a charge they should answer
if they want to. But the point is, why does Meera Nanda hold them as a kind of final authority
on Yoga or asanas? She doesn’t stop there. She unearths some research by a Swede student
and some Mark Singleton, who as far as my research has informed me, have no credentials
that establish them as authorities on the subject. The “research” basically talks about how
Krishnaraja Wodeyar III and IV hired Krishnamacharya to teach “Yoga routines” to the
princes and how his “Yoga routines” incorporated some exercises and techniques borrowed
from the West. Note again her use of “Yoga routines” instead of asanas as if the two are
interchangeable.
Her monumental nonsense concludes thusly:

Hinduism, whether ancient, medieval or modern, has no special claims on 21st century
postural yoga. To assert otherwise is churlish and simply untrue.
This “conclusion” is basically the same refrain found in her entire piece. What we really have
is this: a presumptuous article written in dense and cryptic prose containing a mass of
accusations hurled liberally at people and organizations, and backed by almost no or false
evidence by a person thoroughly ignorant of the subject she’s writing about. In other words,
it’s a mere smear-pamphlet. Not only does this raise questions about her academic credentials
but, and more seriously, damages the credibility of Open magazine as a publication that
carries unbiased, factual, and well-researched articles.
A comment at the Open magazine article
This viewpoint has been popularized of late by Mark Singleton, also referred to in this article.
Singleton is not a "US scholar", whatever that means. He is from the UK -- the author of this
article should do a little research before writing.
The theories in this article are lifted wholesale from Mark Singleton's "Body Yoga". Who is
Singleton? Singleton has no online presence that I could find anywhere, associated with any
reputable university in any capacity. He is a "scholar" simply because he self-identifies as
one in his book Body Yoga. The reasons behind the book can be gleaned from its
introduction. Singleton quite clearly comes across as a Western supremacist who is disgusted
with the idea that India should get credit for something popular in the West. His justification
is simply that he doesn't want to get into colonialist arguments. He's good at couching his
arguments in literary-speak. His book is full of phrases like "Iyengar was not available for
comment in spite of repeated requests" as though that somehow proves guilt about
something. A very unconvincing book that dozens of devout Christians practicing Yoga have
devoured because it makes them feel better.
12 February 2011 | Armchair Guy
Permalink
PS. I was mistaken about Mark Singleton -- apparently he does teach at a college in the US.
But it's not clear what makes him a "scholar". It's hard to find any peer-reviewed publications
by him, and his Ph.D. is at the divinity school -- which makes him suspect in my opinion. The
introduction in his book is telling, however.
12 February 2011 | Armchair Guy
Another comment
Thank you very much for the article. I gave up practicing yoga because my priest said it was
Hindu stuff, and Christians should avoid that. Now, I can show this piece to him, and
continue to practice yoga and get its benefits. Thank you Open, thank you Nanda
13 February 2011 | Warren Hastings
Yet another comment
I thought attacking hinduism as being a definition of being "cool" was a thing of the past. But
Open Magazine shows that is not the case. For a long time, India's pathetic economic growth
rate was pinned on the backwardness of hindus and hindusim, and not on Nehru-Indira
socialism by Meera Nanda's predecessors. Now that that theory has been proved conclusively
false, the same people move on to finding new things to denigrate hinduism. Attacking
advocates of the hindu religion like the HAF, attacking hindus and hinduism in general,
saying yoga has nothing to do with hinduism is just a business as usual.
But coming back to this article, why does Nanda spend so much time and energy on saying
yoga has nothing to do with hindus and their religion ? Well, she wouldn't have bothered
had yoga been unpopular. But fact is yoga is very popular, considered to be hip in the West,
which to Nanda is a strict no-no. So what does she do ? She says yoga has nothing to do with
hinduism or India. It is too cool to be associated with these diabolical entities - India and
hinduism. And those who say yoga is a part of hinduism are nasty fascist bigots who would
put the Nazis to shame.
Sure, and by the way, Coca-cola has nothing to do with USA. I dont know who these people
are fooling ? And I include the Open magazine editors among these people. There are enough
anti-India and anti-hindu magazines in India. I dont need to buy Open magazine to get my fill
of this behaviour. So congratulations Manu Joseph, you have just lost a reader.
16 February 2011 | Raghav Hegde
Still another comment
Meera Nanda must be laughing all the way to the bank. Hindutva-vaadis have an Achilles
heel. They react to baiting. They are like the bulls and Nanda is an adept at showing them the
red flag.
The success of an article is measured by the number of readers who read and comment on it.
The favorable or hostile nature of comments does not matter. The fact is that she has created
the wave and trapped otherwise busy people into rebutting or praising her. I am sure Open
magazine appreciates her a lot more now. Like TRPs for the TV channels, finding targets to
provoke is the way to go.
BTW, I disliked the article too, and agree largely with the rebutters.
17 February 2011 | Naras
Ashok Chowgule’s comment
The interactive Hindu
At the time of the controversy about the writings of Prof Courtright on Shri Ganesh, the
professor wrote: "In the early 1980s, when I wrote my book, the audiences for our work were
much less interactive than they are now."
This heightened awareness by the Hindus is a new phenomenon, and many in the academics
seem not to be able to deal with it propoerly. A recent example is the article by Meera Nanda
claiming that the campaign by the Hindu American Foundation to get the practitioners of
Yoga to acknowledge the Hindu origin of the Yogas, to be entirely misplaced, to use a mild
term. Her article is available at:
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-think
If one were to spend some time in the comment section, it would once again show how
interactive the Hindus have become. It is time that the academics are aware of this
interaction, and realise that some of the things that were passed on as facts (or even truths)
will not unchallenged if they do not conform to the way the Hindus see the issues. The
interactive field has gone beyond the arena of the academics, as it should be.
Namaste
Ashok Chowgule
The Audacity of Ignorance
Author: Swaminathan Venkataraman
Publication: Openthemagazine.com
Date:
URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-audacity-of-ignorance
The HAF counters Meera Nanda’s “not-so-old, nor-so-Hindu” argument about modern-day
yoga
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) started a conversation on the deepening American
embrace of yoga with letters to magazines and a position paper nearly a year ago. Struck by
the disconnect between “Hindu” and “yoga”, HAF felt compelled to argue that delinking
yoga from its Hindu roots was ahistorical, at best, and insincere and malicious at worst. The
position struck a chord, and a debate with Deepak Chopra, a frontpage article in the New
York Times, and a CNN segment later, more Americans are connecting the two.
Meera Nanda’s Open story alleging that Hindu texts have few asanas and that the yoga
master Krishnamacharya borrowed most from European gymnastics is the latest salvo against
HAF’s position, and mimics a similar rebuttal by Wendy Doniger. Nanda’s criticism of
HAF’s ‘Take Back Yoga’ (TBY) campaign as being based on a false, non-existent history
misrepresents TBY and maligns HAF as a casteist, sleazy political operation (Indo-American
Lobby? HAF is neither Indian nor a political lobby). Where she makes relevant points about
the Mysore Palace, she vastly exaggerates her case. Perhaps, as William Dalrymple said,
Nanda is “overtly hostile to many expressions of religiosity.” Whatever her agenda, her
audacious and flippant claims are both stunning and flawed.
What is Take Back Yoga?
Nanda concedes that American yogis say “Namaste,” quote from the Gita and play Kirtan
music. Why then is she so bothered by TBY? TBY makes three key contentions:
1. Yoga is more than just asana

2. Yoga is rooted in Hinduism
3. The asana-based practice of yoga found in many Western yoga studios is inspired by the
Hindu Hatha yoga tradition
An important spark for TBY came from the editorial practices of the influential ‘Yoga
Journal’ magazine, which sees asanas as integral to a broader spiritual practice. So what’s the
problem? The editors avoid the words ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’, but not ‘Christianity’, ‘Islam’
or ‘Buddhism’. Repeated references to Hindu teachings as ‘ancient Indian’ or ‘Yogic’ or
‘Eastern’ seemed disingenuous. ”Hinduism has a lot of baggage,” HAF was told. Similarly,
Deepak Chopra calls his philosophy Vedic, Yogic, Advaitin, or Sanatana Dharma, but never
Hinduism, which he calls “one-eyed” and “tribal.”
In this context, TBY asserts that Yoga is one of six orthodox Hindu darshanas and
indispensable to the practice of Vedanta. Non-Hindus can practice yoga as a secular
activity by limiting themselves to asanas alone, but many go further into chanting,
meditation, kirtan and other Hindu practices. Another driver behind TBY is the attempt to
create “Christian Yoga” by some Christians who are worried that Yoga is leading Americans
to Hinduism. Other Christians oppose Yoga outright, but it is ironic that Christian
leaders are more honest in acknowledging the Hindu roots of Yoga than Mr Chopra
and Ms Nanda.
A Brief History of Asanas
Nanda is right that Hatha Yoga is not a monolithic 5000-year-old tradition, but requiring that
everything Hindu be traceable back to Vedic times is ludicrous. Two traditions that Nanda
elicits, the Natha Yogis—Shiva and Shakthi worshipping founders of Hatha Yoga—and TS
Krishnamacharya of the Mysore Palace taught yoga in a way inseparable from Hindu
traditions.
Nanda demeans the Natha Yogis as seeking only magical powers. But the three key hatha
yoga texts tell a different tale. All three are dedicated to Lord Shiva and teach methods to
obtain samadhi through yoga. Verse 4.113 of the 14th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika
(Pradipika), written by Natha Yogi Svatmarama (whose name means “one who delights in the
Atman”) emphatically states: “As long as the prana does not enter and flow in the middle
channel and the vindu does not become firm by the control of the movements of the prana; as
long as the mind does not assume the form of Brahman without any effort in contemplation,
so long all the talk of knowledge and wisdom is merely the nonsensical babbling of a mad
man”.
The Shiva Samhita (Samhita), written in 1300-1500 CE as a conversation between Shiva and
Parvati, cautions at the start of Chapter V that material enjoyments are obstacles to
emancipation; and the Gheranda Samhita (Gheranda), a 17th century text, proclaims the truth
of oneness in Brahman (verse 7.4) and calls maya the greatest fetter, yoga the greatest
strength, jnana the greatest friend and Ego the greatest enemy (verse 1.4). No paeans to magic
here. Powers may accrue to yogis, but they are never the aim. Far from wanting to “banish
the matted-hair, ash-smeared sadhus from the Western imagination”, HAF cherishes them as
one of pluralistic Hinduism’s time-honored traditions.
Nanda argues that asanas, even pranayama, are not found in the Vedas. Inconveniently for
her, the Maitrayaniya Upanishad presents a six-limbed discipline, including pranayama,
virtually identical to Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga. She argues that while BKS Iyengar taught
some 200 asanas, Pradipika listed only 15. Indeed, not all 200 existed at first, but a clear
trend of development exists. Asana lists appear in the 6th-7th century commentaries on
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras by Vyasa (nine) and Shankaracharya (three), with “etc” following
both lists, clearly indicating knowledge of more asanas. Shankara, who wrote before the three
hatha yoga texts, also refers to “asanas mentioned in other shastras”. Pradipika 1.33 says: “84
asanas were taught by Shiva. Of those, I shall describe the essential four”, and Samhita 3.84
says: “There are eighty-four postures, of various modes. Out of them, four ought to be
adopted, which I mention below”. This indicates that at least 84 were known by the 14th
century. Finally, the Sritattvanidhi (early 1800s) illustrates 122 asanas.
Modern Yoga Traditions
The crux of Ms Nanda’s allegation is that Krishnamacharya built on the Sritattvanidhi by

borrowing from European gymnastics. First, its unclear the number of Krishnamacharya’s
innovations that were inspired by his guru versus gymnastics. His first writings featured
vinyasas (sequences of asanas synchronised with breath) that he learnt from his guru,
illustrating that the Guru-shishya parampara always had teachings not available in texts. Ms
Nanda cites Mark Singleton’s observation that “at least 28 of the exercises” in Bukh’s manual
are strikingly similar to yoga postures taught by Krishnamacharya’s students, Pattabhi Jois
and BKS Iyengar. But even if their combined repertoire has asanas that are “similar” to
gymnastics, is that enough to deny Yoga’s Hindu roots? Rather, Singleton in his book points
out that his comparison should not be construed as evidence of Krishnamacharya’s having
borrowed directly from Bukh, and in fact names an equally influential Indian tradition of
Swami Kuvalayananda, with whom Krishnamacharya spent time. Singleton concludes that
“This does not mean… posture-based yogas....are “mere gymnastics” nor that they are
necessarily less “real” or “spiritual” than other forms of yoga.”
Norman Sjoman, whom also Nanda mentions, states in his book that Iyengar’s 200 asanas are
found in two independent yoga traditions. “The asanas themselves are not unknown, for a
similar set of asanas with different names was shown by Swami Vishnudevananda, published
in his book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. He was a student of Swami Sivananda, a
Dravidian belonging to the Dikshitar family, the traditional guardians of the Chidambaram
temple. He must have inherited their traditions. Swami Yogesvarananda brought out a book
in 1970 titled First Steps to Higher Yoga containing 264 asanas”.
Many yoga traditions popular in the West, such as the Yogoda System of Paramahamsa
Yogananda (from which the Bikram School of Yoga is derived), Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini
Yoga, and Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga are not in Krishnamacharya’s lineage. Also not
examined: the 108 dance poses of Shiva containing many vinyasa movements. The Indian
Government has created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, an effort being
coordinated by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, to prevent patenting of
Yoga. Thus far, they have documented 1,300 asanas with the cooperation of nine traditional
yoga institutions.
TBY is succeeding in its quest to link yoga with the Hindu spiritual tradition from whence it
comes. This is not a facile claim of ownership. Rather TBY roots this practice within its
metaphysical framework that practitioners eventually discover on their own. Om Shanti.
- The author is Member, Board of Directors, Hindu American Foundation

The Ludicrousness of ‘Taking Back Yoga’
Author: Meera Nanda
Publication: Openthemagazine.com
URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-ludicrousness-of-taking-
back-yoga
Meera Nanda’s original essay on the origins of modern-day yoga have provoked some fairly
extreme reaction. Here she joins issue with the HAF’s Swaminathan Venkataraman, and says
“facts are stubborn things and have to be respected.”
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) is not pleased with my recent essay that questions its
campaign to claim modern yogic asanas for the glory of ‘5000 years old’ Hindu dharma.
Swaminathan Venkataraman, who sits on the board of directors of the HAF, finds faults with
my not-purely-Hindu, not-all-that-ancient and not-so-spiritual history of modern yoga.
I fully understand why Venkataraman and his fellow travellers would want to discredit the
alternative history of yoga that is being pieced together by well-respected historians and
scholars — the history that I referred to in my essay. Indeed, they have no choice but to shoot
down this history, since the entire rationale for their campaign to ‘take back yoga’ (TBY)
from Americans, Europeans, Christians, Muslims, Jews and other non-Hindus rests on the
assumption that Vedic or Sanskritic Hinduism is the mother (“the mother tradition,” to use
the HAF’s vocabulary) of all of yoga, modern asanas included. After all, how can Hindus
accuse Americans of “stealing” yogic asanas if it can be demonstrated that these same asanas
have incorporated many elements of European and American physical culture, which share
neither the metaphysical assumptions of Hinduism nor its goals of spiritual enlightenment?
How can you take back something that wasn’t all yours to begin with? No Vedic-Hindu
origin story for yoga, no TBY—it is as simple as that.
While I understand the HAF’s compulsion to stick to the myth of yoga’s immaculate birth
from assorted Hindu-Vedic sutras and shastras, facts are stubborn things and have to be
respected.
The hallowed tradition
A good place to begin is that tiny sliver of agreement that I do find in my critic’s complaint.
Venkataraman says: “Nanda is right that hatha yoga is not a monolithic 5000 years old
tradition, but requiring that everything Hindu to be traceable back to Vedic times is
ludicrous.”
My point, exactly! Indeed, my goal in writing the essay was to show that, to quote myself,
“yoga is neither eternal nor Vedic,” that “it is a fundamentalist view of history to draw an
unbroken line connecting the 21st century yogic postures with 2000 years old yoga sutras
[and] the supposedly 5000 years old Vedas” and that “a tremendous amount of cross-
breeding and hybridisation has given birth to yoga as we know it [making] yoga a unique
example of a truly global innovation…” it is precisely the evolution of yoga through the
modern era of colonialism, muscular Indian nationalism, Vedic scientism and
commercialisation of Hindu spiritualism at home and abroad that I sought to highlight in my
essay.
It is not I, but Aseem Shukla, the leading light of the HAF and the force behind the TBY
campaign, who is making the ludicrous attempt to trace modern yoga back to a monolithic
5000 years old tradition. It is Shukla who has insisted repeatedly in his many writings that
“the Vedas and yoga are synonymous and as eternal as they are contemporaneous”; that
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras composed around second century BCE have “formed the
philosophical basis of practical yoga for millennia”; and that “yoga and yogic practices date
back more than 5000 years.”
While we are on the subject of HAF’s original positions — and not the watered-down version
of Venkataraman — it is the right place to set the record straight on the question of the
mostly low-caste tantrics and hatha yogis who have always walked outside the Vedic-
Patanjali tradition. It is most touching to have Venkataraman assure us that “HAF cherishes
them as a part of Hinduism’s time-honoured tradition.” But surely there is a lot of back-
pedalling going on here, for HAF at first saw them—right alongside cow-curry-caste—as a
blot on India’s image abroad. In the opening salvo of the TBY campaign, Aseem Shukla
wanted to spruce up India’s image by replacing the “colourful and harrowing wandering
ascetics” with “the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali.”
This brings us to the hierarchy of different kinds of yoga. Venkataraman thinks I am

“maligning” HAF as “casteist” when I refer to the well-attested fact that nearly all the hatha
yoga classics are the works of Nath siddhas who, as David Gordon White puts it delicately,
“were not members of the literati” but were grassroots alchemists, sorcerers, jogis and fakirs
who sought immortality in their own bodies and in this life. The hatha yoga asanas they
developed were meant to make the body strong and immune from death—not to still the mind
to realise the pure soul, or purusa, as the Yoga Sutra teaches.
Orientalism
Well, if the HAF is already bristling at my reference to hierarchy of different kinds of yoga,
here is something else they can bristle about: their self-Orientalisation. The HAF’s campaign
to install Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra as the sacred canon of transnational yoga continues the time-
tested tradition of that paradigmatic neo-Hindu and Hindu nationalist, Swami Vivekananda.
As I have shown in great details elsewhere, Vivekananda imbibed the occultist, spiritualist
and Theosophical currents that were quite fashionable in the United States during the years he
spent there after his address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. In his
lectures on Raja Yoga, delivered before admiring audiences in New York, Vivekananda
interpreted Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras as providing a “scientific” method for “seeing God,”—
indeed, “becoming God” and acquiring “absolute power” over all of nature. His interpretation
of Yoga Sutras by no means reflected the mainstream of Hindu thought in India at that time,
but was tailor-made to provide a practical guide to Western seekers of spiritual wisdom. Very
much in tune with the scholarly fashions of his day, Vivekananda looked down upon hatha
(postural) yoga, calling it “nothing but a kind of gymnastics” which can help “a man live
long, but only [as] a healthy animal.”
Times are different now, and hatha yoga’s interest in the body has captured the global
imagination—thanks largely to Indian yoga-masters and swamis who set up ashrams and
schools in the West. Naturally, far from looking down upon asanas as Vivekananda did in his
time, Hindus in general and the HAF as their advocate take pride in their popularity. Yet, the
typical neo-Hindu tendency of “spiritualising” all things of Indian origin remains strong: so
the HAF “only” tries to “take yoga back” and subordinate it to a very similar set of spiritual
ends that Vivekananda spelt out.
The underlying attitude is that the secularised, health and fitness oriented postural yoga is
somehow inauthentic, fallen, tainted with Western decadence and devoid of psychological
and spiritual meaning. Hindu purists seem incapable or unwilling to credit non Hindu
Americans and other yoga practitioners with their own ability to integrate the asanas they do
with their own sense of spirituality. Thus the HAF takes on the role of a stern parent who has
to teach a wayward child what his/her real interests, aims and beliefs ought to be – and all of
them, invariably, turn out to be what the “5000 years old” tradition teaches! The old prejudice
– or rather chauvinism – of “Hindu India” as the guru of all nations is what animates the
ideologues of the HAF.
Historical facts
Let me address the concerns Mr Venkataraman has expressed about the accuracy of the
factual claims I have made in my essay.
I will admit one error of fact right away. Thanks to Venkataraman and the legion of others
who have expressed their displeasure in the comments on the original article, I realise that I
was plain wrong about pranayam, or breath control, when I wrote that “anyone who goes
looking for references to… pranayam, neti, kapalbhati or suryanamaskar in classical Vedic
literature will be sorely disappointed.” In fact, there are plenty of references to pranayam, or
pranayam-like practices, in Vedic literature, including the Maitri Upanishad and the
Bhagavad Gita. I was clearly careless here.
As for the rest, I stand by what I have stated in my original essay.
My critics, including HAF through Mr Venkatraman, have already indulged in endless rounds
of nitpicking, and I don’t want to respond by picking some more nits. I will rest my case by
citing what Koernraad Elst , a much-beloved figure among the gentle Hindu traditionalists
and fire-breathing Hindu nationalists alike, has to say. (I never imagined that I will ever be on
the same side as Mr Elst, but in this instance, he happens to be right on the mark). In his take
on this who-invented-yoga debate, this is what he writes on his website:
I don’t think any other asana postures, except those for sitting up straight, have been recorded
before the late-medieval Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradkipika and such. In the
Bhagavad Gita, Krishna calls on Arjuna to “become a yogi,” but he gives no instructions in
postures and breathing exercises. Libertines practising the whole range of Kama Sutra
postures got more exercise in physical strength and agility than the yogis of their age who
merely sat up straight and forgot about their bodies.
Those who live in glasshouses…
In an article titled The Rape of Yoga, Aseem and Sheetal Shah of the HAF lament that the $6
billion dollar strong American yoga industry has “appropriated the knowledge of countless
yogis without so much as a nod of gratitude toward Hinduism, the faith that gifted them with
this treasure.”
My advice to Shukla, Shah and the rest of the Hindu-American community: take a deep
breath and get over it. Those who live in glasshouses don’t throw stones on others. In this
world where people travel, and ideas travel at the speed of light, we all live in glasshouses.
As the recent disclosures by Norman Sjoman and Mark Singleton, which I have summarised
in my much-attacked article, have shown, modern postural yoga has borrowed key
movements, rhythms and sequences from the Western traditions of body-building,
gymnastics, drills and dances.
Modern yoga was, of course, put together in India, by Indians, but with a whole lot of
Western input. So let us not be so touchy and such purists about its Vedic-Hindu origins. Let
us enjoy the mongrel that this thing called modern yoga is.
All power to mongrels!
- Meera Nanda is a visiting professor of history of science at the Indian Institute of Science
Education and Reserach, Mohali
Disguised Hinduphobia
Author: Swaminathan Venkataraman
Publication: OpenTheMagazine.com
Date: March 7, 2011
URL: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/disguised-hinduphobia
Meera Nanda should learn to get her facts about the Hindu tradition straight, and from
original sources.
Meera Nanda was offered an opportunity to rebut my article, “The Audacity of Ignorance”,
and Goebbels would be delighted that his spirit is alive and well after all—repeat a lie a
hundred times and render it true. Nanda does not attempt countering the plethora of scriptural
evidence I offered that definitively place yoga within the Hindu tradition and trace the growth
of asanas over the centuries, but she is generous in heaping scorn on Hindu Americans and
pretending that makes for another argument. Fortunately, in the era of blogs, Facebook
and X-Tape exposes, Nanda’s tactics can only go so far.
Obfuscate, Confuse and create a Strawman
Nanda repeatedly fails to acknowledge that “Take Back Yoga” (TBY) is all about the willful
blindness in the West to the Hindu roots of Yoga, even the spiritual side of it. When I started
writing my previous article on February 12, I casually looked up the website of the Yoga
Journal given their role in sparking the HAF’s campaign. The ‘Daily Insight’ on their website
said (all parentheses are Yoga Journal’s):
“At its core, Sivananda Yoga is geared toward helping students answer the age-old question,
"Who am I?" This yoga practice is based on the philosophy of Swami Sivananda of
Rishikesh, India....In 1957, his disciple Swami Vishnudevananda introduced these teachings
to an American audience.... summarising Sivananda's system into five main principles: proper
exercise (asanas); proper breathing (pranayama); proper relaxation (Savasana, or Corpse
Pose); proper diet (vegetarian); positive thinking (Vedanta) and meditation (dhyana)...”
And the Yoga Journal refuses to label this Hindu, even as issue after issue pays copious
respects to meditation-like practices in mystical Christianity or Sufi Islam. Is it any
wonder that Hindus find it disingenuous? Does Nanda believes that Vedanta is also non-
Hindu? It is stunning that HAF even needs to make such an obvious point but here we are.
HAF also started TBY for Hindu children in the U.S. When they go to school and say they
are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are
you?’, ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’, ‘Does the Red mark on your forehead represent
blood?’ etc. Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism. It is not that we are
embarrassed by our respect for cows, curry or karma, it is that HAF’s advocacy informs the
American dialogue that we are so much more.
“But this is an American problem, why bother me with it?”, Indians can rightfully ask.
Absolutely, which is why we launched the campaign in the US. It was Nanda who chose to
write in India. Note that TBY talks not just about asanas, but rather about Yoga in its
entirety as a spiritual practice, including asanas. This is what Aseem Shukla meant by
Yoga being rooted in the Vedic tradition.
This would have been clear if only Nanda had perused HAF’s original paper on Yoga, but
then the problem with some ‘scholars’ is that they ignore original sources, cherry-pick
secondary or tertiary renditions, and selectively quote or misrepresent translations. For
example, had Nanda consulted the Hatha Yoga scriptures, she would not preposterously
continue to characterise Natha Yogis as “sorcerers, jogis and fakirs” who did not care for
moksha. She says Natha Yogis only wanted to make their bodies strong. But how could they
Ms. Nanda, if asanas came only in the 20th century? You cannot have it both ways.
Hiding a Pumpkin in a Plate of Rice
Nanda says she finds a “tiny sliver of agreement” in my contention that requiring everything
Hindu to be traceable back to Vedic times is ludicrous. Thank God for small mercies. But she
wrongly claims this supports her position. Making an ostensibly magnanimous concession of
her error in claiming Vedas have no mention of pranayama, Nanda claims to stand by
everything else she said. What exactly does she stand by? That European gymnastics is
central to modern yoga? Then why did she fail to respond to the central thesis of my rebuttal
that lays this claim to rest? I provided detailed references tracing the evolution of asanas
within Hindu tradition over the centuries, from the Upanishads to 6th to 7th century
commentaries on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, to hatha yoga scriptures of the 14th to 17th
centuries and the Sritattvanidhi of the early 1800s.
She also does not respond to many other facts that I presented, such as Shiva’s 108 dance
poses containing many vinyasas (perhaps European sculptors descended into India in the
Middle Ages or Bharatanatyam was inspired by Native American foot stomping?). What
about the fact that Krishnamacharya learnt vinyasas from his Guru who lived near Mount
Kailash? Hinduism’s guru-sishya tradition has always had numerous teachings not found in
any text (the Vedas themselves were an oral tradition). Or the fact that the Indian
Government has recorded nearly 1300 asanas by consulting Hindu scriptures and yoga
institutions to preclude foreign patents? Are there any counter-claims from the Swedish
Government? Perhaps Nanda won’t allow Hindus to claim anything post-Vedic as their own.
What next? Shankaracharya as Buddhist and Bhakti saints as Christians?
Nanda is also quiet when I point out that Norman Sjoman, who first studied
Krishnamacharya’s work in the Mysore palace, acknowledges that the 200 asanas and
vinyasas of BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois are independently found in other traditional
Yoga schools. Mark Singleton also names Swami Kuvalayananda, with whom
Krishnamacharya spent time, as having influenced Krishnamacharya’s work. All said,
Singleton finds 28 asanas out of 200 taught by Krishnamacharya’s school (which itself is
only one among numerous schools of Yoga) as having “similarities” with European
Gymnastics. Nanda wants to use this to pull the entire Hatha Yoga tradition out of Hinduism.
Nauseating vulgarity seems to pass for scholarship these days.
The Hindu origins of Yoga asanas are so obvious that Meera Nanda’s arguments only remind
me of a popular Tamil saying which roughly means “Don’t attempt to hide a whole pumpkin
inside just a plate of rice”.
Disguised Hinduphobia
‘Scholars’ of Nanda’s ilk have always disliked Swami Vivekananda. Being profoundly
alienated from their heritage and considering anything traditional as mere superstition, they
are no doubt discomfited that a Sanyasi who proudly called himself Hindu was able to
convey Vedanta in a manner that the West loved, and in immaculate English to boot. Nanda
claims that “His (Vivekananda) interpretation of Yoga Sutras by no means reflected the
mainstream of Hindu thought in India at that time“. Huh? Has Ms Nanda read commentaries
on the Yoga Sutras by Shankara and Vyasa? Maybe she believes that Shankara and Vyasa are
not mainstream? Or perhaps again, they were European transplants?
Yes, Vivekananda did consider moksha a higher goal than physical fitness. So what? Why
does that imply Hatha Yogis are not Hindu? The same Vivekananda also once told Indian
youths, who lacked a culture of physical fitness, that they can be closer to God through
football than the Gita ! It is a time-honored Hindu tradition that teachings are always tailored
to the needs of the student.
Finding her argument in tatters on substantive grounds, Nanda, like a true demagogue,
takes refuge in criticising HAF. After all, why bother arguing when you can just shoot the
messenger? One senses that Nanda’s real problem is simply the emergence of an
articulate, credible, and professional Hindu voice that is bringing authentic, apolitical
Hindu perspectives into the public sphere.
Why would Nanda feel that way? Since she quotes Koenrad Elst, here is Elst himself
shedding light on her motives while critiquing one of her works: “I will conclude with an
observation on what seems to be her sincere declaration of interest. Among the points that
‘worry’ her, she mentions this as the final one: ‘The more prominence Hinduism gets
abroad, even for wrong reasons like the new age and paganism, the more prestige it
gains in India’. Here, she really lays her cards on the table. It is very good that...she does not
try to be clever and claim to speak for ‘true Hinduism’ against a ‘distorted Hinduism’...
Instead, she clearly targets Hinduism itself, deploring any development which might make
Hinduism ‘gain prestige’. Let us see if I can translate that correctly: wanting something or
someone to suffer rather than to prosper is what we call ‘hate’. She hates Hinduism, and her
academic work is written in the service of that hate.” Ita vero!
Admitting Defeat?
Meera Nanda finally acknowledges HAF’s point even if she wont admit it, “...hatha yoga’s
interest in the body has captured the global imagination—thanks largely to Indian yoga
masters and swamis who set up ashrams and schools in the West”.
These swamis did not come to the US as physical fitness instructors. They taught asanas
as part of a spiritual practice aimed at realising one’s true nature, call it self-realisation,
brahman, nirvana, moksha or yes, even the ‘kingdom of heaven within’. Many Americans
who turned away from institutional Christianity found solace in these teachings and in the
pluralistic, non-proselytising outlook of Hinduism that is able to see Jesus as a saint and
interpret his teachings in a Vedantic light. That is why Yoga studios are full of Hindu
symbols, chants, kirtans, and quotes from scriptures.
But what does TBY ask of non-Hindus who practice asanas but eschew meditation, chanting,
kirtan etc. and who don’t read Yoga Sutras, the Gita, or other Hindu scriptures? TBY asks for
recognition that the concept of asanas arose as, and remains, an integral part of Hindu
spiritual practice. Strictly speaking, even when Yoga is practiced solely as exercise, it
cannot be completely delinked from its Hindu roots. As BKS Iyengar says in a foreword
to an English translation of Hatha Yoga Pradipika, “Hatha yoga…is commonly
misunderstood and misrepresented as being simply a physical culture, divorced from spiritual
goals…Asanas are not just physical exercises: they have biochemical, psycho-physiological
and psycho-spiritual effects.”
Nanda gratuitously advises Hindu Americans to, “take a deep breath and get over it.” So, in
the same spirit, here is mine: Nanda should learn to get her facts about the Hindu
tradition straight, and from original sources. And learn to accord the same respect to
Hinduism as to other religions. The days of the Hindu community cowering before self-
appointed pseudo-scholars are over.
US Army incorporates yoga in training
Author: Indo-Asian News Service
Publication: NDTV.com
Date: March 7, 2011
URL: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/us-army-incorporates-yoga-in-training-89909?cp
The US Army has introduced yoga for the first time in its physical fitness regimen.
The changes in its "combat readiness test" are being made as part of an overhaul of its fitness
programme for the first time in 30 years, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
The training will incorporate the elements of yoga and benefits of rest among other workouts.
The new regimen, announced March 1, will be carried out in phases.
"There have been all kinds of rumours about what this is and what it isn't. People have said,
'It's yoga-like, it's like Pilates' ... And frankly, it is all those things," the Monitor quoted Gen.
Mark Hertling, deputy commanding general for initial military training at the US Army's
Training and Doctrine Command, as saying.
He pointed out that tough training leads to stress, fractures and other injuries. Hence, the new
doctrine extols the virtues of breaks on long marches. This new training is a departure from
how the army tests its soldiers.
"We've only done push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run," for the past 30 years, said Hertling,
but "none of those address the kinds of things soldiers are asked to do in combat".
To address this issue, shuttle runs and long jumps have been added to the fitness programme,
he said.
Look Who's Meditating Now
By Irina Aleksander
The New York Times
March 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20TM.html?scp=1&sq=Transcendental%20Me
ditation%20brand&st=cse
[Caption] POSTER BOY Russell Brand with David Lynch at the December Met fundraiser
for Mr. Lynch's foundation, which promotes Transcendental Meditation. Evan Sung for The
New York Times
RUSSELL BRAND, the lanky British comedian, has made a career of his outrageous antics.
While a host at MTV UK, he went to work dressed up as Osama bin Laden. At the network's
annual music awards, he likened Britney Spears to a "female Christ." And he was fired from
the BBC after leaving raunchy messages on the voicemail of a 78-year-old actor, a comic bit
that even his country's then-prime minister felt compelled to denounce.
[Caption] David Lynch explains Transcendental Meditation at his fundraiser. Evan Sung for
The New York Times
It is jarring then, to say the least, to hear Mr. Brand, 35, speaking passionately and sincerely
about the emotional solace he has found in Transcendental Meditation, or TM. Yet there he
was in December, onstage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as his new wife, the pop
singer Katy Perry, waited backstage), describing how TM has helped him repair his psychic
wounds.
"Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug

addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life," Mr. Brand said of the
technique that prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-
three syllable mantra, so that practitioners can access a state of what is known as
transcendental consciousness. "I literally had an idea drop into my brain the other day while I
was meditating which I think is worth millions of dollars."
Mr. Brand was the M.C. at a benefit for the David Lynch Foundation, an organization that
offers TM at no cost to troubled students, veterans, homeless people, prisoners and others.
Like many other guests in the room, Mr. Brand has been personally counseled by Mr. Lynch,
the enigmatic film director, who has been a devout practitioner of TM, founded in 1958 by
the spiritual leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, since its first wave of popularity in the late '60s.
That is when Mia Farrow, after her divorce from Frank Sinatra, joined the Beatles in the
Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh, India; when George Lucas started meditating and was
rumored to have based the Yoda character in "Star Wars" on the Maharishi (the resemblance
is eerie); and when the talk show host Merv Griffin, after being introduced to the technique
by his tennis buddy, the actor Clint Eastwood, invited the Maharishi to be on his show in
1975.
Since then, the celebrity endorsement, and therefore the enrollment numbers, had quieted
down. That is, until the last three years when, according to the national Transcendental
Meditation program, enrollment tripled.
At Trinity College in Hartford, the women's squash league began meditating together after
every practice last year. The Doe Fund, an organization that assists the homeless, has begun
offering TM to its residents along with computer skills and job training. And Ray Dalio, the
billionaire hedge-fund manager of Bridgewater, has long credited the success of his funds to
his daily practice.
The Transcendental Meditation program attributes the spike to a series of recent studies that
suggest TM can help reduce blood pressure and stress, and to the relatively recent
affordability of TM. (The adult course, which had ballooned from $75 in the '60s to $2,500 in
2007, dropped, because of the economy, to $1,500 in 2008.) No less important has been Mr.
Lynch's foundation, started in 2005, for which enlisted celebrities like Mr. Brand,
interrogated often by news outlets about their diets and alternative lifestyle remedies, have
been preaching about the technique.
"It's like, imagine the ripples on top of an ocean," Dr. Mehmet Oz, who meditates in an
armchair in an enclave off his bedroom, said at Mr. Lynch's benefit. "And I'm in a rowboat,
reactively dealing with the waves and water coming into my boat. What I need to do is dive
into the deeper solace, the calmness beneath the surface."
The actress Susan Sarandon meditates once a day for 20 minutes in bed. "It helps me chill out
and focus," she said. (Ms. Sarandon said she doesn't practice TM specifically, but was at the
benefit to gather insight.)
The singer Moby, another guest, has meditated in the back of a taxicab. "Transcendental
Meditation has given me a perspective on agitation," he said. "That it's a temporary state of
mind and I don't necessarily need to take it that seriously." Moby said the technique helped
him quit drinking more than a year ago. "I used to think that TM was for weird old hippies,"
he added. "But then I heard that David Lynch was involved, and that made me curious."
ON the afternoon before the benefit, Mr. Lynch, 65, arrived at the museum, holding hands
with his wife, Emily Lynch, 32, and was escorted by a museum employee to a green room
downstairs. Mr. Lynch, like a cartoon character, has maintained the same uniform for
decades: a pressed white shirt under a boxy black suit and a hedge of gray hair. He scooped
up a soggy egg-salad sandwich from a tray and explained what brought him to the practice.
"I was not into meditation one bit," Mr. Lynch said, in his laconic Missoula, Mont., drawl
that years of living in Los Angeles has failed to dilute. "I thought it was a fad. I thought you
had to eat nuts and raisins, and I didn't want any part of it."
Mr. Lynch was persuaded by his sister, Martha, when he began having marital difficulties
with the first of his four wives, Peggy, in the early '70s. "I had a whole bunch of personal
anger that I would take out on her," he said. "I think I was a weak person. I wasn't self-
assured. I was not a happy camper inside. Two weeks after I started, my wife comes to me
and says, ‘This anger, where did it go?' I felt a freedom and happiness growing inside. It was
like -- poooft! -- I felt a kind of smile from Mother Nature. The world looked better and
better. It's an ocean of unbounded love within us, so it's real hard to get a conflict going."
(Still, a year later, the couple divorced.)
It's easy to shrug off such utterances as hokey, New Age prattle --who can forget Jeff
Goldblum's flaky character in "Annie Hall" on the phone, complaining that he'd forgotten his
mantra? -- but less so when the person reciting it has dreamed up his most widely admired,
vivid films on the days when he was dropping out of consciousness for at least 30 minutes a
day.
"Artists like to say, ‘I like a little bit of suffering and anger,' " he said. "But if you had a
splitting headache, diarrhea and vomiting, how much would you enjoy the work and how
much work would you get done? Maybe suffering is a romantic idea to get girls, but it's an
enemy to creativity."
As he continued to explain the practice, Mr. Lynch was becoming excited. And he was
making sound effects again. "It's like a key that opens the door to the treasury within," he
said. "Here's an experience -- poooft! -- total brain coherence. It's what's missing from life
today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy, peace. Things like tension,
anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear -- poooft! --
all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people
that experience and -- poooft. Man, it's beautiful."
[Caption] Transcendental Meditation practitioners in Lower Manhattan.
Donna Alberico for The New York Times
[Caption] McCrea Davison and her Trinity College squash teammates meditate daily.
Shana Sureck for The New York Times
Sharing that experience is the purpose of Mr. Lynch's foundation. Money raised at the
December benefit -- along with private contributions -- pay TM program fees to teach the
technique in schools and prisons and to other groups that apply for a grant. (Some public
school parents have resisted on the premise that TM is believed by some to be rooted in
Hinduism; the organization maintains that it's not a religion and that there is no inherent
belief system.)
In the last decade, independent studies have found that the technique may reduce
hypertension, obesity and diabetes in patients with coronary heart disease (Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles) and can be beneficial to brain function and cognitive
development (American University). But Sara Weber, the chairwoman of the Contemplative
Studies Project of New York University's postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis, expressed some skepticism.
"Believe me, it's a great relaxation and everyone needs to relax, and probably relaxing makes
everyone feel better and promotes some of those things," Dr. Weber said. "And some people
can deal with what arises just by calming down. But other people who have been through
trauma disassociate and go into a deadened space where they don't feel. So what happens if
that breaks down in the middle of one of those bliss sessions?"
In her experience, Dr. Weber said, the technique could even have adverse side effects. "Some
people report falling apart," she said. "They can have very intense and bad emotional
experiences."
Back at Mr. Lynch's benefit, Robert Roth, the vice president of Mr. Lynch's foundation --
known to TM's celebrity clients as, simply, Bobby -- was sharing a table with Mr. Brand and
Ms. Perry. Mr. Roth insisted that the celebrity muscle of the evening was for fund-raising
purposes and wouldn't have much sway over bringing in clients. "No one is going to meditate
twice a day because a Hollywood filmmaker is doing it," Mr. Roth said.
Though it helps with publicity, the Hollywood community's embrace of the technique could
in theory cheapen TM's message, in light of that particular group's capricious spiritual tastes -
- Madonna and the kabbalah or Tom Cruise and Scientology.
Indeed, at least one guest at the benefit had already moved on from TM.
"I tried it 10 years ago," said Rose McGowan, the actress. "It was fantastic, but now I do fight
training. For me, personally, it's the only thing that gets me out of my mind. I think even
David Lynch would approve."
US-style yoga upsets balance at Indian festival
Author: AFP
Publication: The Independent
Date: March 9, 2011
URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/usstyle-yoga-upsets-
balance-at-indian-festival-2236448.html
The blonde Californian in her 40s writhed rhythmically in low-cut white trousers as she
performed her "power flow yoga", to the shock of traditionalists.
By the time Shiva Rea, famed for inventing the high-energy Yoga Trance Dance, had
completed her demonstration at a yoga festival in northern India, some 20 people had left the
room.
"This is not yoga, it's just a show, but to succeed in California, this is what they have to do,"
griped Austrian yoga teacher Florian Palzinsky, 42, as he watched the Santa Monican.
For thousands of years, yoga has been expressed through gradual control of the body, breath
and mind.
But criticism of Rea's spirited show at the week-long International Yoga Festival in Rishikesh
underscored the growing and sometimes acrimonious split between purists and practitioners
of new, innovative forms of the art.
Rishikesh, nestled in the Himalayan foothills, shot to world prominence when the Beatles
visited in 1968 to learn about transcendental meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
helping to popularise ideas about Indian spirituality.
Now hundreds of visitors, most of them foreigners, come each year to the festival from
dozens of countries, bringing their yoga mats to learn about breathing, posture, chanting and
nutrition from experts in all types of yoga.
The classes start at 4:00 am and go on until sunset.
"Yoga doesn't flow in our veins like it does in Indians so I came here to go back to basics,"
said French yoga teacher Juliette Allard, 38, who has been coming to the festival for the past
three years.
German nutritionist Daniela Wolff, 50, said that she felt happiest with the festival's tradition-
minded Indian teachers, such as the spry 103-year-old Indian guru Swami Yogananda who
gave his course every morning at 6:00 am sharp.
"They are genuine, do not use fancy words, there is no music. Most importantly, they don't
need to prove anything to anyone," Wolff said.
For Japanese yoga teacher Hikaru Hashimoto, the Americans "are very gifted at making yoga
evolve - at changing and inventing new styles that will spread throughout the world".
"But India is the first country of yoga. The basis of yoga is here," he insisted.
Nevertheless, the more unconventional practitioners succeeded in drawing the spotlight at the
festival, such as white-robed American Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa - born May Mary Gibson but
now a devout Sikh.
Khalsa has given private lessons to stars such as Madonna, Cindy Crawford and Courtney
Love, teaching Kundalini Yoga - a meditative form of stretching - and urging people to find
the sunshine "in your hearts".
What really matters is that people "want to feel better, be closer to ourselves", she said.
"That's what yoga is."
But Khalsa scandalised some festival-goers when her group held hands and chanted the word
"Hallelujah" for 10 minutes, waving their bodies.
Tears poured down some faces of the group and others looked ecstatic after the session, but
their emotional response did not impress critics.
"I've practised yoga for 20 years. To me, it's superficial, there's no depth - it's like playing
sports," said Indian yoga teacher Kamal Deep Ohlan, 35.
"Today, yoga has become a business when it should be a discovery of one's inner self, a
philosophy."
Can yoga be dangerous? Some think so
Author:
Publication: Rediff.com
Date: April 8, 2011
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-can-yoga-be-dangerous-some-
think-so/20110408.htm
Yoga's connection with Hinduism is a cause of worry for some, finds Arthur J Pais
"Be still and know that I am God," is the mantra Susan Bordenkircher, who has taught classes
ranging from step and kick boxing to body sculpting, uses while teaching Christian yoga.
Used by hundreds of instructors across America, Christian yoga combines the classic yoga
postures with Christian meditation.
Alabama-based Bordenkircher was not happy with traditional yoga because she knew it
was connected with Hinduism, especially the chanting of Om. She then developed a
regime of hatha yoga stretches and poses with Christian meditations. Her students "quiet the
mind," she says, and "come to God with no baggage."
Author of Yoga for Christians, her classes are "taught in an environment that's Christ-
centered", she has often said.
Christian yoga incorporates readings from the Bible, especially from the New Testament,
Christian praise music, and a narrative that is Christ-centered. At the Breath of Life Christian
yoga class, the instructor tells the students to "Open to His grace. Surrender your heart to The
King".
================================
'It's what you take with you to the mat'
Yahweh Yoga, based out of Chandler, Arizona, has taken the concept of bhakti yoga and
reshaped it by implementing Christian beliefs. It offers certifications to yoga instructors
nationwide in the practice of Christian yoga. There is no Sanskrit chanting here but Christian
music and prayers.
Its mission statement reads, "Yahweh Yoga is passionate about growing, educating and
enabling individuals to improve their physical, mental and emotional health while deepening
their relationship with God."
Danna West, a member of First Methodist Church in Canyon, was quoted as saying in an
interview that yoga 'is a methodology, not a religion. My classes start off with a scripture
reading, and we listen to Christian music. It is very Christ-centered.'
West said Christians can take their faith with them to focus on in any yoga class, Christian-
based or not. "It's what you take with you to the mat," she added.
Christian yoga has been spreading. Last year, many churches in the southern Gulf states
offered Christian yoga to offset the tension and worries caused by the massive oil spill.
But if Christian yoga is so different from traditional yoga, why should it still be called yoga, a
reporter for Christian Broadcasting News asked.
'Yoga does not belong to any religion'
Author:
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-yoga-does-not-belong-to-any-
religion/20110411.htm
Yoga is a spiritual practice of self-improvement and bringing an individual closer to God,

instructor Becky Crigger tells Arthur J Pais
Becky Crigger, mother of two young girls, goes to her Episcopalian church in Blacksburg,
Virginia regularly. She also practices yoga every day, starting with Om and other chants she
knows are deeply connected with Hinduism. Her children know a few yoga postures too, she
says. Her husband of nine years knows what yoga is, but may follow her some day, she adds,
chuckling.
"I don't see any contradiction between yoga and my Christianity," she says, echoing the
thoughts of Huston Smith, one of the most respected of religious writers in America (Why
Religion Matters), who has been practicing yoga for over six decades. He also does namaaz
several times a day and worships at a liberal church on Sundays near his home in Berkeley,
California.
"The times in church when I have felt the most moved by joy in God have been after a
period of deep yoga practice," Crigger asserts. "I love all religions. I have studied
Buddhism and Hinduism in depth, and while there are many important differences between
religions, I do not consider any of them to be 'wrong'. In the deepest understanding of God,
we are all united."
"What is the fuss over Hinduism and yoga," asks Crigger, who runs In Balance Yoga
studio and has taught yoga in cities in Virginia, North and South Carolina and
Tennessee.
"You cannot deny it has come from Hinduism. And what is wrong in acknowledging
that? Hinduism is a beautiful religion. Hinduism is one of the world's oldest religions
and yoga is the world's oldest spiritual practice. So, of course, yoga is associated with
Hinduism. But that does not mean that yoga belongs exclusively to Hinduism. It does
not belong to any religion, but rather enhances any belief system by bringing the
practitioner closer to his or her beliefs," she says.
---------------------------------------------
'Balance the spiritual aspects of yoga with the physical'
Crigger, who teaches a variety of yoga exercises including hot yoga, vinyasa yoga and
prenatal yoga, has never been to India. But she is guided by -- among several people who she
says deeply know Indian philosophy, Hindu religion and traditions -- Graham Schweig. He is
associated with the Hare Krishna movement and noted for his translation of the Bhagvad
Gita. He is also an instructor at her yoga studio.
Raised in an Episcopalian family, Crigger, who has taught middle and high school English
and language arts, has a master's in education from Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tennessee. She has minored in religious studies and at one point considered divinity school.
A trained dancer in the Western canon, she says she explores "the energy of dance and
rhythm" in her yoga practice, particularly when teaching in the vinyasa style.
"I have recognised for many years the importance of balancing the spiritual aspects of
yoga with the physical," she says, speaking softly with a southern accent. "My classes are
vigorous and challenging but at the same time they offer an element of surrender and letting
go."
Yoga in America: A checkered history
Author: Arthur J Pais
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-chequered-history-of-yoga-in-
america/20110414.htm
If you thought Swami Vivekananda was the first one to suggest yoga to Americans, think
again, says Arthur J Pais
Stefanie Syman, a journalist and yoga aficionado for over 15 years, asserted in her book The
Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America that yoga 'has been the aspect of Asian culture
most widely and readily assimilated' in the United States, outside of food.
Syman named Henry David Thoreau as one of the earliest American yogis. Vivekananda
came to America in 1893 to address the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Thoreau
was a big influence on Mahatma Gandhi's Civil Disobedience campaign against the British.
Thoreau would often meditate from sunrise to noon, and once wrote in a letter, Syman
pointed out in her book published a few months ago, 'To some extent, and at rare intervals, I
even am a Yogin.'
Thoreau, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists in 19th century
Concord, Massachusetts, had enormous interest in Hinduism. Emerson in his long poem
Brahma glanced at Vedantic Hinduism through translations of Hindu epics.
Yoga and Indian meditation caught the imagination of millions of Americans starting four
decades ago, thanks to the efforts of yoga masters and writers B K S Iyengar and Pattabhi
Jois and yoga's popularity with Hollywood and British glitterati including Madonna, Sting,
George Harrison, Christy Turlington and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Christopher
Isherwood.
Yoga continues to win over more and more Americans year after year. Though many
Hollywood celebrities in the 1930s and 1940s were curious about yoga and Vedanta thanks to
Swami Yogananda Paramahamsa, yoga and meditation did not really start catching fire till
the 1960s.
Syman reveals that one of the first prolific American yogis was Pierre Bernard, who brought
tantric yoga into the secret-society culture in America at the turn of the 20th century. He
founded the ultra-exclusive Tantrik Order in 1905 with the forbidding cost in those days, of
$100 for a membership.
Bringing yoga to America
Bernard 'would don a dark velvet cape, pinned just below his neck, with the TO insignia -- a
winged globe framed by a gold star of David -- itself encircled by a snake eating its own tail.
In a photograph from this era, Bernard has a handlebar moustache and long sideburns,'
Syman wrote.
In Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Mark Singleton wrote that Bernard
first gained attention in 1898 when, witnessed by nearly 40 doctors and surgeons, he
demonstrated Kali-Mudra, the simulation of death.
Syman describes a later photo of a similar event: 'Bernard's body is lax and blood dribbles out
of his nose, as a physician, in black cutaway coat fingers his wrist, looking for but not finding
his pulse. Bernard had used pranayam to slow his heartbeat to imperceptibility.'
Bernard was the subject of The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America,
published last year to acclaim. It is written by journalist Robert Love, who reveals that mid-
west born Bernard original name Perry Baker began his teenage yoga studies under a Syrian-
Indian teacher, Sylvais Hamati. Rumor has it Bernard traveled to India in the 1890s.
He went on to launch yoga schools on both coasts. The police often raided his classes, thanks
to rumors that he had sex with underage girls. Researchers and yoga historians believe he was
notorious for his sex rites and philandering, and that his legacy is primarily that of a conman.
'In New York City in 1910, his private clients included Broadway star Lillian Russell,' writes
Love. 'But it was at his country ashram in Nyack, New York, that yoga became a cause
celebre for the boldfaced names of the Roaring Twenties.'
Russian-born Indra Devi brought glamour and yoga to America. 'Devi's near-immediate
success in Los Angeles reads like some strange fairy tale: A virtually unknown middle-
aged foreigner alights in the City of Angels to teach a relatively obscure type of yoga
and is almost immediately patronized by the city's biggest stars,' Syman wrote.
'But there wasn't anything particularly unusual about the course of events. Devi had lived
most of her life in the company of royalty of some sort and had the assuredness of wealth,
though she had long since dispensed with its outward manifestations.'
Married to a Czech diplomat, Devi learned yoga in Mysore from Sri Krishnamacharya, who
also taught B K S Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. Krishnamacharya had refused to teach Devi
because she was a woman, but he changed his mind at the request of the Mysore raja.
Hollywood sits up and takes notice
The stories of Americans adopting yoga and showing interest in Hinduism were big news in
the 1920s. 'Daughter of Wilson Turns Hindu' The Washington Post headline said in response
to news that Margaret Woodrow Wilson left America for an ashram in India, Syman
revealed.
Her death in 1944 was greeted with The New York Times headline: 'Margaret Woodrow
Wilson Dies a Recluse at 57 in a Religious Colony in India.'
Early celebrity adopters of yoga included Gloria Swanson, Linda Christian and Ruth St
Denis, all Devi's devotees in Los Angeles. Years later, Shirley MacLaine would openly
declare her belief in reincarnation. Goldie Hawn shared her fascination with Buddhism and
Hinduism.
The age of the guru reached its height in the 1960s, yoga historians say, thanks to the counter
culture movement in America, and many gurus including Swami Satchidananda settling
down in America or spending months here and in Europe.
Other gurus like Swami Muktananda, who counted many Hollywood celebrities among his
disciples, also made yoga highly visible in the 1970s and 1980s.
'Tens of thousands of Americans dove headlong into a spiritualised yoga'
Though several yoga teachers were involved in scandals, many Americans were meanwhile
learning about yoga directly from books and demonstration classes.
The author of many books on yoga and a popular figure at the 1969 Woodstock festival,
Satchidananda 'led the high, young multitude in chanting Sanskrit syllables,' Syman wrote.
'Tens of thousands of Americans dove headlong into a spiritualised yoga the kind that took
over your whole life, the kind that made you drop everything to follow your guru around, the
kind that got you to India, no money in your pocket and you don't even care.'
Yoga was also catching up as physical therapy in a big way starting in the 1980s. One reason
for its wide appeal, Syman -- who also reveal the shortcomings of many yoga teachers --
mused, is because 'yoga is so massive and complicated. It is so contradictory and baroque that
American society has been able to assimilate any number of versions of it, more or less
simultaneously.
Yoga has also become 'one of the first and most successful products of globalisation,'
she asserted. Robert Love said he knows why so many Hollywood artists are drawn to yoga.
'The real reason artists do it and then talk about it is that yoga works,' he wrote in an
essay.
'Look at the long careers of Madge and Sting; it seems obvious that they're doing something
right. So when Jennifer Aniston wants you to believe that yoga changed her life, there's
no reason to doubt her.'
Taxi Yoga: Road rage to road sage
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-from-road-rage-to-road-
sage/20110413.htm
Arthur J Pais talks to Andrew Vollo, who has been training New York taxi drivers in yoga
and T'ai Chi for over eight years.
Andrew Vollo, who has spent over 16 years driving a cab full time in New York, heads the
NYC Taxi and FHV Driver Institute at the La Guardia Community College in Queens. Better
known as the charm school for cabbies, it prepares hundreds for the road tests and work as a
cabbie.
It also offers lessons to drivers who have experience, but who need classes to improve their
customer relations and run a smooth operation. For over eight years, Vollo has trained taxi
drivers in yoga and T'ai Chi at the La Guardia Community College.
Some Mondays, his weekly classes have five students; some days, that number goes up to
eight. "The maximum number I have had is 15," says Vollo, who is in his fifties." The
minimum? Two. I surely don't do this as a business. I am passionate about it."
As the director of the LaGuardia Community College's educational program for taxi drivers,
he thought he could offer lessons in yoga. So over six years ago he began giving fliers to
dispatchers, taxi brokers and at driving schools.
"I was ridiculed by many," he says. "But my faith was strong, and my classes showed how
the drivers could improve their body and minds." Yet, the message ought to be louder and
reach further, he says.
'Something happened when I was about to give up'
"There are about 45,000 cab drivers in New York, and many suffer serious health problems
including hypertension and heart diseases because of their lifestyle, and aggravating
circumstances in their jobs," he explains. "From my own experiences, I know how yoga can
help."
An overwhelming number of these cabbies are from the Indian subcontinent.
Vello points out to a study of New York cabdrivers conducted three years ago by the National
Institute of Occupational Health and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance that revealed that
three-quarters of drivers suffered back pain, more than half had neck pain, and many had sore
heels, knees and feet.
Being overweight was yet another big problem. Vello has been featured in publications
ranging from The New York Times to the Daily News. "But I need to see more people in the
classes," he says, adding that each class costs just about $8. "I have even offered three classes
for $20."
Many times, he thought of discontinuing Taxi Yoga because of the lack of students. "I would
love to see at least 10 in each class," he says.
"But when I was just about to give up, something happens. There is an article in The New
York Times, and I start hoping somehow the word will spread, and people will tell the cab
drivers they know to take these classes."
'There are some who think yoga is for women'
Vollo has distributed pamphlets on his Taxi Yoga classes at temples, gurdwaras and mosques
in New York. They promise to help in areas including fighting road rage. He has mass-mailed
hundreds of pamphlets, too. One of his fliers says: 'No more Road Rage. Become a Road
Sage!'
"I think there is a certain amount of fear about yoga," says Vollo, whose grandfather migrated
to the United States from Naples, Italy. "A large number of cab drivers in New York are
Muslim, and they are wary of doing anything connected with Hinduism. And then there are
some who believe yoga is for women."
He has had a few Muslim students, but he wants many more. "I am working on reaching out
to the taxi unions," he says. "I wish (the influential union leader) Bhairavi Desai could
appreciate what we are doing and recommend these classes." He has sought a meeting with
her.
Vollo says he knows and fully appreciates yoga's spiritual dimension. "But here, we do not
emphasise anything of that sort," he says. "We don't chant 'Om' This is not about religion and
spiritualism. It is about survival in our tough jobs."
'I tell them how to handle nasty customers'
Many cab drivers spend over 50 hours a week at the wheel. He would like to see them do
some stretching and breathing exercises in between the rides - yoga at the wheels.
It also helps not to bring in the religious aspects of yoga at a city-run college. 'While a public
college such as LaGuardia can hardly offer a class that compels worship of a deity,' wrote
The New York Times recently, 'Taxi Yoga fits into a more contemporary and amorphous
realm of mind-body harmony and meditative practice.
Vollo says Buddhism has a big influence on him, but he is still a Catholic, and attends church
services with his wife and son. Yoga classes, he asserts, will not only help the physical
health of the drivers, but also their minds.
"I also tell them how to eat better," says Vollo, who loves Indian vegetarian food. "I give
them breathing exercises. I tell them how to handle tough and nasty customers. If they can't
take care of their emotions, they become nasty cabbies, and I tell them all the time how
yoga can help them to achieve the good things."
Vollo gets help from Klee Walsh, a certified yoga instructor and recent graduate from the
Sonic Yoga school in New York. "He told me Sonic Yoga encourages students in its teacher
training program to donate their yoga to someone who can benefit from it," Vollo says. "Klee
decided that his karma yoga project would be to help bring yoga to his fellow cabdrivers."
Brand Yoga
Author: Vithal C Nadkarni
Publication: The Speaking Tree
Date: May 15, 2011
URL: http://www.speakingtree.in/public/view-article/Brand-Yoga
Introduction: What’s the secret of yoga’s popular appeal? Vithal C Nadkarni investigates
Is India’s downward facing dog yoga pose more popular than China’s crouching tiger or
flying dragon? That is like comparing chalk with cheese you might protest because more than
17 million Americans regularly do yoga today; whereas the dragon-tiger thing is just a studio
trick from Hong Kong. That makes yoga a sacred cash cow bigger than any other animal
escaped from an Oriental menagerie.
So should we be huffing and puffing out our chests with pride, if not with prana? Absolutely
not, says Aseem Shukla. The urologist co-founder of the American Indian Foundation
protests that “Hinduism has lost control of brand yoga”.
Property Theft
Shukla also charges that Hinduism has been the victim of “overt intellectual property theft by
people who have offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism”.
Some critics counter Shukla’s spin on the alleged ‘intellectual piracy of poses’ with partisan
riffs of their own: Reverend Albert Mohler Jr, President of the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, for example, notes that “the practise of yoga contradicts the commitments
Christians make when they decide to follow Jesus.”
Mohler was reviewing Stephanie Syman’s The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,
where he described America’s embrace of yoga as “a symptom of our postmodern spiritual
confusion”. And, “to our shame, this confusion reaches into the church”, he lamented in his
critique.
Pretzel Poses
Christians who insist their practise of yoga involves no meditation, spiritual direction, inward
concentration or thought element need to realise they aren’t practising yoga, Mohler added.
“You may be twisting yourselves into pretzels or grasshoppers, but if there is no meditation
or direction of consciousness, you are not practising yoga,” he said. “You are simply
performing a physical exercise.”
That’s precisely why yoga has become such an international pop phenomenon says Mark
Singleton in his Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Singleton makes the
startling assertion that contemporary yoga was invented in the 19th century as an “unlikely
mix of British bodybuilding and physical culture, American transcendentalism and Christian
science, naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics, and the YMCA”. The elements were supposedly
grafted on to a ‘rehabilitated form of postural yoga’ adapted specifically for a Western
audience.
Complex History
Such a claim “ignores the complex history of yoga,” says noted Indologist Wendy Doniger in
her review of Yoga Body. “There is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of
what people do in yoga classes today. That same history, however, also demonstrates that
there are more historical bases for contemporary postural yoga within classical Hinduism
than Singleton allows.”
To see physical and mental disciplines separate misses the very essence of yoga, defenders of
holistic yoga add. In any case, Singleton and his supporters have ignored the rich tradition of
physical culture in pre-colonial India, they charge. One of them, Surya Namaskar or
Salutation to the Sun is still extant today, writes a blogger. Along with the compilation of the
mantras, asanas, their sequencing and the whole procedure of Sun Salutes as is known today,
is attributed to the great Baudhayana, one of the well-known Vedic commentators.
Sun Salute
Samarth Ramadas (Shivaji’s Guru) is also known to have practised Surya Namaskar. This
rules out the possibility of the Sun Salutes having been imported only in the last two
centuries. Surya is still widely worshipped as the giver of health and as the father of the
doctor-god twins, Asvins, as the ultimate sustainer of life.
Yoga is simply referred to as abhyasa or practice in the Lilacharitra, the first book in Marathi
compiled in the 13th century during Yadava rule. The text also talks about yoga postures
being done as a competitive sequence.
Perfect Physique
The hero of the Lilacharitra is the legendary Sri Chakradharswami. He is reported to have
been blessed with a superb physique sculpted by sarao or repetition and mardane-madane or
massage. The book talks about both commoners and prime ministers being obsessed with
yoga, which was also said to be responsible for Sri Chakradhar’s ageless charm.
Vayastambini Vidya or the science of age-stoppage is another synonym for yoga in
Lilacharitra. That could be the real secret of yoga’s eternal and universal appeal argues the
renowned Indic scholar Mircea Elliade in his classic study, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom.
Yoga Asana, the Ancient Hindu Legacy
Publication: Bharatendu.wordpress.com
Date:
Let us examine.

vyAsa explains the meaning of pata~njali here by considering the joint of “sthirasukha” and
“Asana” to be the karmadhAraya samAsa, making the sUtra mean, “That Asana is here called
manogAtrANAmupajAyate sthiratvam, duHkham cha yena nAbhavati tadabhyaset.”
[Practice is recommended of that Asana which leads the practitioner’s mind to
immovableness and constancy, and does not cause any discomfort.]
comfort that is lasting, stable, and unwavering. (Although vAchaspati also treats the samAsa
explanation of pata~njali’s ‘sthira-sukham-Asanam’ with a list of the names of Asana-s,
“…tadyathA padmAsanam bhadrAsanam vIrAsanam daNDAsanaM sopAshrayaM
parya~Nkam krau~nchaniShadanam, hastiniShadanam, uShTRa niShadanam,
samasaMsthAnaM sthirasukham yathAsukham cha ityevamAdIni”, that is, “Asana like the
padmAsana or the bhadrAsana, vIrAsana, daNDAsana, or (squatting ) postures like
parya~Nka or sopAshraya, or postures named after krau~ncha bird, or the Camel posture or
the Elephant posture, or samAsana, or any other comfortable (instructed) posture which
provide sthira sukha”. This elaborate list, though not exhaustive as the author says these are
examples, is from at least as old as the 6th century if not older.
explained in the other shAstras, like the padmAsana etcetera.”] He even desribes, out of
these, padmAsana, bhadrAsana and daNDAsana in instructive details.
An astute reader cannot fail to notice the casualness shown here in mentioning the
representative names of the postures, when both the above authors refer to a few names of the
Asana-s, followed by ‘Adi’, etcetera, meaning that the reader is anyway easily familiar with
them.
repeating there.

‘smaranti cha’)
etcetera”]
antiquity.
comfortable seat.



Dr. Elst has wondered why only sitting postures characterize or at least dominate the
yogAsana-s, speculating that this is to do with the climatic conditions: that the Chinese
postures being in standing position because it is wet and cold out there, whereas Hindu ones
being in sitting position because of the warm climate here.

yogAsana, the very effect of it is that Asana makes his body transcend and withstand the
effects of extreme climate, both warm and cold.
by name, but in a sense that it was such a common knowledge that simply indicating a few
names appended by ‘etcetera’ is sufficient to indicate them all. We also see that even these
ancient Hindus were conscious about much further antiquity of the system of postures for
yoga, as even AchArya shaMkara remarks about its obscurely ancient origins and wide
popularity and recognition already by the time of the old layer of the upaniShada-s. We also
noted that the Asana-s, the postures, is what he takes as being a general identifying
characteristic trait of the yoga system. There are old records of not only sitting but standing,
half-standing and leaning postures being practiced, and that the yoga authors were particular
about Asana being for the very purpose to make the body of practitioner withstand the
worldly dualities like the hot and cold climate.
legacy.
In Schools, Yoga without the Spiritual
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/nyregion/in-yoga-classes-at-schools-teachers-
avoid-the-spiritual.html?_r=1&hpw#&pagewanted=all
TO “om” or not to “om”: For those who teach yoga in schools, that is a question that arises
with regularity.
The little syllable, often intoned by yoga students at the beginning and end of class, signifies
different things to different people. But with its spiritual connotations, it is a potential
tripwire for school administrators and parents, along with “namaste” and other Sanskrit
words, chanting and hands in the prayer position.
The om question ties into the wider debate over the extent to which yoga is entwined
with religion. Yoga program directors, who train and place teachers in the schools and
develop curriculums, try to avoid setting off a battle like the one that developed over the
Lord’s Prayer.
“Every school is different, and every one has their own permutations and parameters of what
you can and can’t do,” said Shari Vilchez-Blatt, founder and director of Karma Kids Yoga on
West 14th Street, which holds studio classes and sends teachers to private and public schools
in New York.
Bent on Learning, a 10-year-old program based on Grand Street that teaches 3,300 students a
week in 16 public schools, is a namaste-free zone. “No namaste,” Jennifer Ford, the
development director and one of the founders, said. “No om. No prayer position with the
hands. Nothing that anyone could look in and think, this is religious.”
The hard-line policy is stressed in the 100-hour Bent on Learning teacher training. Perhaps a
teacher accustomed to working in other settings inadvertently puts hands together in a prayer
position, for instance. “It is easily explained, and fixed,” Ms. Ford said. “We weed it out
quickly.”
Generally speaking, the money to support yoga programs comes from parent-teacher
associations, grants, fund-raising and school budgets. Bent on Learning, which holds a
glamorous annual benefit dinner with yoga enthusiasts including Gwyneth Paltrow and
Russell Simmons, pays for classes at New Design High School, a public school on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan.
Kate Johnson, a Bent on Learning instructor, teaches more than 100 students each week at
the school, in a basement room set aside for yoga. She leads the classes — an elective for
gym — through a series of stretches, standing poses and sun salutations. Sanskrit terms for
poses are used, on the theory that they are akin to French-derived terms like plié in ballet.
The class ends with students flat on their backs in corpse pose, savasana. Ms. Johnson tells
the students to take a rare quiet moment to breathe.
After class, Allyson Lobo, 15, said, “I love yoga,” adding: “It’s relaxing. It makes me feel
calm and takes me to a happy place.”
At Karma Kids, which works with more than 1,200 students in 16 schools, Ms. Vilchez-Blatt
takes a more elastic position on “om.” “We om,” she said. “I don’t look at it as spiritual.
When we say ‘om,’ it is all the sounds in the universe.” Still, she checks whether it is
acceptable to school administrators before introducing it in class.
If the answer is no, Ms. Vilchez-Blatt has creative remedies, leading chants of “peace” or, at
Chabad programs in Manhattan for children from prekindergarten through age 12, “Shal-
OM.”
Jennifer Cohen Harper, director of Little Flower Yoga, which opened in 2006 and teaches
about 700 students at 13 public and private schools, also discusses with administrators the
content of classes. She may incorporate “om” and “namaste,” which she translates as
“the light in me bows to the light in you.” The students do not do the prayer pose, instead
placing their palms over their hearts.
If any qualms are expressed, Ms. Harper edits the language or behavior in question.
“Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Do you guys do a lot of chanting?’ and you get the idea to
stay away from it,” she said.
Jessica Soo, director of the after-school program at St. Luke’s School, an Episcopal
elementary school in Greenwich Village where Little Flower teaches, has no objection to the
use of “om” or “namaste.” She noted that in addition to the Little Flower classes, a staff
foreign language teacher does yoga with students and discusses Sanskrit. “The kids are
exposed to other cultures and religions in our school,” Ms. Soo said.
At Achievement First Bushwick Elementary School, a charter school, an after-school

elective class taught by Little Flower instructors recently started when a teacher, Lisa
Vandegrift, rang a singing bowl. Such a bowl is sometimes used in religious ceremonies, but
here it had the secular goal of quieting rambunctious children and focusing their attention.
The students were led through energetic and playful sun salutations set to a song with
Sanskrit lyrics describing a high to low push-up position. “What’s that funny word?
Chaturanga!” Toward the end of the class, the students sat quietly in a cross-legged position,
eyes closed, breathing in and out. One child made a ritual gesture called a mudra, with the
backs of her hands resting on her knees and forefingers and thumbs forming O’s.
“I have no idea where she learned a mudra,” Ms. Harper, Little Flower’s director, who
was observing, said with a laugh. “We never teach mudras. Kids come with ideas from
TV.”
Ahmedabad Muslims find way around aum for yoga
Author: Javed Raja & Gopal Kateshiya
Publication: The Indian Express
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ahmedabad-muslims-find-way-around-aum-for-
yoga/869839/0
Every day at 7.30 am in Sardar Baug, a public garden in the Walled City area of Lal Darwaja
in Ahmedabad, Muslim women in burqas and men in kurta pyjamas practise yoga. As their
instructor, Chandrika Kansara, begins the session with the chanting of aum, her trainees,
almost all of them Muslims, follow her with the sound of all...aah...ou.
It is an improvisation of the sound that accompanies pranayam — the breathing exercise that
starts and ends a yoga session — disassociating it from religious symbolism and opening it to
all.
It all began in 2004 when Naresh Patel, then additional commissioner of police (Traffic),
started yoga sessions for his personnel in the Children’s Park in Sardar Baug. “Around eight
to 10 Muslim women would come for morning walk. One day, they asked if they could join,”
Patel, who retired in 2008, said.
Soon the number went up to 40, with Muslim men also joining the yoga classes. When they
decided to say all...aah..ou instead of aum as the exhaling sound in the yogic breathing
exercise, Patel saw nothing wrong.
Haji Fakiramma, a Mirzapur resident who has been attending the sessions from the
beginning, says religion does not come in her way. “I see no difference between the two
dhwanis as both start with a. I am a diabetic and practising yoga helps me keep my sugar
level and blood pressure under control,” says the 70-year-old.
“This is above religion. I produce sound of all...aah...ou because it is like invoking Allah. It
gives me more strength,” says Mehrun Patel of Shahpur.
Yoga and Islam have had a complex relationship. In 2008, top Muslim clerics in Indonesia
and Malaysia decreed it “un-Islamic”.
But in India, with the recent rise in Yoga gurus, it is packaged as part of a non-allopathic cure
for diseases. With Swami Ramdev and other gurus holding out Yoga for Muslims and
Christians as an ‘Indian’ way of addressing — and even claiming to cure — certain lifestyle
ailments, Yoga has seen a huge rise in popularity.
In 2008, Swami Ramdev even addressed imams at an all-India conference organised by

Jamiat Ulema e-Hind. Then, a fatwa issued by Dar-ul-Uloom clearly stated that there was no
harm in adoption of Yoga by Muslims, especially if words like Aum were substituted by
‘Allah’.
Not saying aum does not hinder the breathing practice, instructor Chandrika Kansara says. “It
is an exercise to inhale more oxygen. If sound of all...aah...ou does that, so be it!” says the
54-year-old.
Yoga, Potter are evil: Vatican exorcist
ANI
November 27, 2011
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Entertainment/Tabloid/Yoga-Potter-are-evil-Vatican-
exorcist/Article1-774655.aspx
Vatican’s chief exorcist has claimed that practicing yoga and reading ‘Harry Potter’ brings
evil. Father Gabriel Amorth, who has carried out more than 70,000 exorcisms in the past 25
years after being appointed by the late Pope John Paul II, surprised delegates at a conference
by revealing his dislike for yoga and ‘Harry Potter’.
“Practising yoga brings evil as does reading Harry Potter. They may both seem innocuous but
they both deal with magic and that leads to evil,” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.
“Yoga is the Devil’s work. You thing you are doing it for stretching your mind and body but
it leads to Hinduism. All these oriental religions are based on the false belief of
reincarnation,” he said.
Speaking on the subject of People And Religion at a fringe event at the Umbria Film Festival
in Terni, Father Amorth spoke of his distaste for JK Rowling’s young wizard.
“People think it is an innocuous book for children but it’s about magic and that leads to evil.
In Harry Potter the Devil is at work in a cunning and crafty way, he is using his extraordinary
powers of magic and evil,” he said.
“Satan is always hidden and the thing he desires more than anything is for people to believe
he does not exist. He studies each and everyone of us and our tendencies towards good and
evil and then he tempts us.
“My advice to young people would be to watch out for nightclubs because the path is always
the same: alcohol, sex, drugs and Satanic sects,” he added.
This is not the first time that the 85-year-old has raised eyebrows with his forthright views, as
last year he had said that the ongoing child sex scandals rocking the Catholic Church were
evidence that “the Devil was at work in the Vatican”.
Fr. Amorth on Yoga: A Passport to Hell?
Virendra Parekh
24 December 2011
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=2109
“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil. Yoga leads to Hinduism and all eastern religions
are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” proclaimed Vatican’s former chief exorcist
Father Gabriele Amorth on November 28, 2011 at a film festival in the Italian city of Umbria,
where he was invited to introduce a movie about exorcism called “The Rite”.
The remarks are nothing new or profound. They reiterate the Catholic Church’s traditional
position. Many Christians failing to find inner and deeper satisfaction in their ideology turn to
Yoga, and the Church is very much concerned. In December 1989, the Vatican’s Sacred
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a 23-page document which sounded a
warning against Yoga techniques.
Quoting from this document, Pope John Paul II, in his book “Crossing the Threshold of
Hope” (1995) repeated the warning: “it is not inappropriate to caution those Christians who
enthusiastically welcome certain ideas originating in the religious traditions of the Far East -
for example, techniques and methods of meditations.”
Vatican spokesmen have to sound a warning against this tendency towards interiority as it
could be the undoing of Church. The New Wise Men from India who visit the West go about
saying that Yoga is compatible with any theology or ideational system. While this may be
true of preliminary physical and mental practices, it is not true of higher Yoga. Higher Yoga
is organic to Sanatan Dharma.
Yoga derives from the basic intuition of Sanatan Dharma that there is a vast life hidden in
man’s inner being. We all have vast reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not
dream. The normal limits of the human vision are not the limits of the universe. By the same
token, limitations of our senses and intellect are not limits of the Reality. In the normal
course, a man is not aware of these inner realities as they cannot be known by a sense-bound
mind. But they can be realized in a purified state of consciousness, by a mind which has been
deepened, purified and illumined. Yoga formulates methods of getting at our own deeper
spiritual levels through purification of body, mind and consciousness.
Yoga enjoins a man to conquer his Kleśas or the forces that keep him bound to lower
impulses and perspectives, and to overcome love and hate (rāgadwesha), craving and anger
(kāmakrodha), delusion (moha) and ego (ahamkāra). The path is long and arduous like the
sharpened edge of a razor (Kshurasya dhārā nishitā duratyayā). But since the journey is
inward, it is always within our reach to transform our nature by controlling our chitta. And
the reward is nothing short of self-realization.
But Christianity believes differently. It says that man is a sinner and is saved from damnation
by the death or blood of Jesus Christ. Man sinned vicariously through Adam, the first man,
and was also saved vicariously through Jesus, who offered his life to propitiate a wrathful
God. The whole thing is taken literally and historically. Any attempt to present it as a
metaphor or interpret it as a parable is stoutly resisted.
Such a doctrine obviously has no need for Yoga. There is nothing hidden, nothing to be
known either about God or about oneself. Everything is already known. All one has to do is
believe. There is no need to cultivate any of the qualities that Yoga values highly. What for?
There is a readymade God, a readymade Saviour, a readymade deputy of that Saviour on
earth and a Church to take care of all your concerns. Believe, obey and the rest is automatic.
“He that believes in him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already”
(John 3:18).
This most comforting edifice, alas, rests on nothing more than authority of the Book.
Repeated, emphatic assertions, citing from the Book and books based on the Book is all that
is offered as evidence. This is a curious way of arguing. The book assumes what is to be
proved, asserts it and you cite the book as your authority or proof. Elsewhere, it would be
rejected as circular reasoning, but in a Christian preacher, it makes a bright and clinching
argument.
Yoga, on the other hand, awakens a man to realms of consciousness which are hidden in his
own self (in the cave of his heart, as the Upanishad puts it). It thus speaks of truths which are
man’s own, which are part of him, which a man seeks and finds in his deeper moments. It is a
revelation that is neither history nor historical, but open and innate to all earnest seekers of all
times and places. Here there is no role for an external agency that claims to be the sole
custodian of Ultimate Truth, no need for a Sole Saviour or his representative on earth. Here
there are no dogmas, only verifiable truths. Ehi, passa (come and see), as Buddha would say.
For sects founded on a Book, nothing could be more unpalatable than this direct call to
experiment and experience.
For Church, this is nothing but temptations offered by Satan. Father Amorth has a disarming
argument to prove the existence of Satan. “Satan is always hidden and what he most wants is
for us not to believe in his existence,” he says. So, if you deny Satan’s existence, it is proof
that you are already under his thrall. “He (Satan) studies every one of us and our tendencies
towards good and evil, and then he offers temptations,” said Father Amorth, who sees his
Church's child molestation scandal as proof that the anti-Christ has infiltrated its ranks.
Again, this obsession with Devil or Satan is nothing new. In its long history, Christianity had
little place for self-reflection. The lives of Christian saints are full of accounts of their
‘temptations’, their frequent encounters with Devil and how they worsted him. Saint Gothlac
often had hand-to-hand fights with demons. Saint Dunstan pulled Devil’s nose with a pair of
red-hot tongs. Luther threw an inkpot at him. St. Dominic, as he began discoursing to sisters
of a convent on the subject of Devil, found that “the enemy of mankind came on the scene in
the shape of a sparrow”. Of course, he was caught, and after plucking his feathers one by one,
Dominic allowed him to go saying “fly now if you can, O enemy of mankind.” On his part,
Farther Amorth claims to have performed 50,000 exorcisms before retiring in 2000. He is
both founder and honorary president for life of the International Association of Exorcists.
Such are the victories Church has scored over the enemy of God and man. Contemplative
methods find little place in all this.
As to “the false belief in reincarnation,” it is best to quote Philip Goldberg, the author of
“American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.” “At age 86, Father Amorth
will not be with us much longer,” said Goldberg in an article on huffingtonpost.com.
“Imagine his surprise if what he calls ‘the false belief of reincarnation’ is not so false after all,
and he one day returns to find that yogis (Yoga followers) and J.K. Rowling readers are more
plentiful than ever. The former surely will be, because Americans are, for the most part,
pragmatic, pluralistic and evidence driven, and yoga appeals to all those values, Vatican
paranoia notwithstanding.” That sums it up beautifully.
Acknowledgements
1. Pope John Paul II on Eastern Religions and Yoga: A Hindu-Buddhist Rejoinder by Ram
Swarup, Voice of India, New Delhi 1995.
2. Hindu View of Christianity and Islam by Ram Swarup, Voice of India, New Delhi 1992.
3. Indian Philosophy Part II by Dr. S Radhakrishnan, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London
1926.
The author is Executive Editor, Corporate India, and lives in Mumbai

Of Gita And the Hindu identity
Author: Tuhin A Sinha
Publication: IBNLive.com
URL: http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/tuhinasinha/2850/63014/of-gita-and-the-hindu-identity.html
The recent controversy surrounding the banning of the Bhagwad Gita in Russia is an
extension of various attempts in recent years to paint the Hindu religion in poor light.
That said, things ought to be put in perspective here: it needs to be clarified that the present
controversy is merely the fallout of a confrontation between the Russian Orthodox Church
and Isckon. That the former should resort to seeking a ban, that too, on the grounds of the
Gita preaching religious extremism, only exposes the illiteracy or the vindictiveness of the
concerned Church.
It's akin to me having a problem with a Church being constructed in my locality and so I file
a case seeking a ban on the Bible. Gita preaches tolerance, reason and moral discernment. A
society or individual who has a problem with these could be suffering from an acute
personality disorder.
Thankfully, as facts coming out of Russia suggest, the Russian society which has always been
warm towards India, per se does not entertain those sentiments. In fact, it is believed that the
case against the Gita might fall through at the next hearing.
The present episode, notwithstanding, what is inexplicably baffling is the general dearth of
pride that an Indian government shows in reacting to such instances of sacrilege.
Remember India's most famous painter in recent years made a career out of mocking Hindu
gods and Goddesses. A fashion designer in Australia recently had her lingerie creation
adorned with Goddess Laxmi. These instances continue to happen because the Indian
establishment shows little pride or initiative in safeguarding the sentiments, leave alone the
interests, of India's majority population.
For instance, in the present episode, ISKCON devotees in Russia had written in November to
the Prime Minister's Office, asking that the government use high-level ministerial visits to
Moscow, ahead of Manmohan Singh's own trip, to ensure the Gita was not banned. A less
indifferent PM would have had no reason not to take this up with the Russian authorities. If
we couldn't have done this with a friendly nation, I'm sure we can never do it with a Pakistan
or China.
What is no less amazing is the silence of India's normally vocal intellectual class. And hence
I would take this discussion a step further here: has the Hindu identity become an ambiguous
one with no single binding element to evince a common sense of belonging among the
different blocks?
If so, it's time to consider a makeover for the religion. That makeover could start with
nomenclature. Let the Hindu merely be called a Bharatiya, a name that emanates from the
name of the land which is home to more than 100 million Hindus.
In hindsight, a more judicious naming of both 'India' and 'Hindu' could have addressed many
of the recurring problems that the country and the religion keep confronting.
Yoga: One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Author:
Publication: Blog.Beliefnet.com
Date: June 3, 2011
URL: http://blog.beliefnet.com/omsweetom/
Over the past week, I’ve been reviewing the comments in response to my last blog which
continued to bring to light the Hindu roots of yoga. It seems like the main issue many yoga
practitioners have is that “yoga is not a religion” and any attempt to link it to one is seen as
contrary to the principles of yoga. This, of course, is at the crux of the Hindu American
Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign: the misunderstanding of Hindu philosophy. The
perception of Hinduism, particularly in the West, is that of a religion replete with colorful
rituals and multi-limbed gods and rooted in a callous caste system. Based on that exoticized
description of my faith, I can understand the skepticism at the idea that the calming, spiritual
practice of yoga is rooted in Hinduism.
But let’s step back for a moment and take a look at the Hinduism that was taught to me at
home. Like yoga, Hinduism is experiential in nature and it is up to each one of us – based on
our inherent nature and temperament – to find our own path to achieve unity with Brahman
(or the Divine). In the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna expounds upon
four paths, or yogas – bhakti yoga, karma yoga, jnana yoga, and dhyana yoga (which in the
past 150 years or so is more commonly referred to as raja yoga). The four yogas can be
succinctly summarized as the path of loving devotion to God, the path of selfless action and
service, the path of knowledge, and the path of meditation and self-control, consecutively.
While each of these paths are unique, they are by no means mutually exclusive. One chooses
to follow a particular path based upon her temperament, but is able to and should draw from
the others. Central to all yoga is the goal of growing closer or uniting with Brahman.
Dhyana yoga (aka raja yoga) is also referred to ashtanga yoga, and for those who are familiar
with all eight limbs of the practice, the connection is apparent.* Asana, the most popular of
the limbs and the one that most people associate with the term “yoga”, is not an end in and of
itself. The intent is to prepare the body and mind to be seated in meditation for long periods
of time. In fact, in the chapter on dhyana yoga in the Gita, Krishna even goes so far as to
outline the basics necessary for meditation:
“In a clean place,

one should establish
for oneself a firm seat…
There, having the mind actively

focused upon a single point,
with thought and
sense controlled,
Sitting on a seat,
one should practice yoga
for purification of the self.
With an aligned body,

head, and neck -
keeping these steady,
without movement;
Focusing the vision toward
the tip of one’s nose
without looking about
in any direction…
Controlling the mind

with thought
focused upon me -
one should be seated
while absorbed in yoga,
holding me as the highest.”
(BG, 6.11 – 6.14)
Forget focusing on a single point, for most of us, sitting cross-legged and still for any
significant length is an impossible feat when our backs are aching or our feet are falling
asleep. The need to move and reposition ourselves is much more immediate than the need to
focus. But as most practitioners will agree, even a few rounds of simple surya namaskar on a
daily basis will allow the body to remain comfortably seated and aligned for longer periods of
time. Asana makes the body limber and flexible and improves circulation; all vitally
important in our efforts to meditate. It is a great tool for us to use. But it is just that – one of
many tools in our bag designed to assist us on our journey towards the Divine.
The beauty of Hinduism lies in its acknowledgement and acceptance that one size does not fit
all, and that there aren’t there any exclusive, membership only lanes. People are inherently
different in their temperaments and abilities, and life can be complicated. For that reason,
Hinduism provides multiple paths, or yogas, from which seekers can choose and holistically
tread. Bhakti, karma, jnana, dhyana…the choice is yours.
*For those who are not familiar, the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga are yama, niyama, asana,
pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.
Om! Yoga therapy to remove all disorders
Author: Jayashree Nandi, TNN
Date: July 1, 2011.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Om-Yoga-therapy-to-remove-all-
disorders/articleshow/9056009.cms
BANGALORE: Yoga is no longer a traditional fitness workout. The National Institute of

Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences (Nimhans) not only has a 45-minute yoga package to treat
psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia, but has started comparing its curative
effects with general medicine.
Doctors at Nimhans say their studies reveal evidence of biological changes in the body
brought about by yoga. They prescribe yoga therapy along with medication in major
ailments, while using yoga therapy alone for less serious disorders.
Nimhans is currently doing rigorous clinical trials on the impact of yoga in treatment.
Doctors are also measuring biological parameters in patients after yoga therapy. This project
has been taken up as the scientific community has still not accepted the role of yoga despite
even mainstream doctors prescribing it with allopathic treatment.
"In all our investigations, there is a high degree of evidence that yoga in different forms does
have a curative effect in diseases like depression, memory loss in elderly persons,
schizophrenia and others. We worked out specific protocols for yoga for specific neurological
problems. The degree of improvement is comparable to that of medicine," said programme
director, Advanced Centre for Yoga, Nimhans, Dr B N Gangadhar.
Benefits of yoga
Nimhans worked out 12 hypothetical leads, and for some, experts have found evidence.
* Yoga reduces cortisol levels (cortisol is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland.
It's released in response to stress and low level of blood glucocorticoids)
* Yoga increases brain derived neurotrophic factor (BNDF). The protein encoded by this
gene is a member of the nerve growth factor family. Expression of this gene is reduced in
patients suffering from Alzheimer's and Huntington. It may regulate stress response
* Yoga helps reduce TNF alfa (tumour necrosis factor)
"We found that chanting of Òm' reduces activity of sensors which have become hyperactive
in patients suffering from depression. About 35-40 patients come to our centre every day.
We've developed a 45-minute package that should be practised daily. We found certain
biological parameters also change with yoga practice. It's not merely faith in a traditional
therapy; it's much more than faith," Dr B N Gangadhar said.
Case study
The yoga university ( Bangalore and Jigani) recently found evidence that it can reduce sugar
levels and help control it in a case of juvenile onset diabetes Type 1 of 14-year-old Rakshith
S. He suffered very high sugar levels and severe glaucoma for 18 months but now his sugar
level has stabilized thanks to 21 days of intensive yoga therapy. It's a matter of pride for
Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samstha University.
Rakshith was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 12 after complaints of giddiness and
tiredness and being very hungry most of the time. In September 2009, he was diagnosed with
fasting blood sugar level of 340 mg/dl and post-prandial blood sugar level of 525 mg/dl.
"Doctors asked me to take insulin. I used to inject it. Despite using high doses, blood sugar
level didn't come to normal," he said.
When he came to SVYASA, his insulin dosage was 24 units in the morning and 24 in the
evening. A holistic approach that included asanas, pranayama, suddhi kriyas or detox
methods, meditation and sattvic food was put in place. But Rakshith had glaucoma in which
the intraocular pressure rises, so he couldn't do all the asanas.
His therapist Rupali Ashok Zamvar said: "We saw tremendous improvement and stability in
his sugar level after therapy. His insulin dosage was gradually reduced. We gave him instant
relaxation, quick relaxation and deep relaxation techniques. Diet also played a major role."
Treatment training
Dr R Nagarathna: Yoga expert
The department of AYUSH launched a country-wide Stop Diabetes campaign. In it, we train
yoga practitioners to treat diabetes patients. Extensive research over 20 years reveal that
blood sugar reduces with yoga and good cholestrol increases. It has a calming effect on body
and mind. We have seen improvements in those suffering from hypertension, obesity, heart
diseases and cancer.
||नमो योगाय योगेश्वराय योगसिद्धाय योगशास्त्राय योगासिराजाय नमो नमः||

आलोक्य िर्व शास्त्रासि सर्चायव च पुनः पुनः, इदमेकम िुसनष्पन्नम योगशास्त्रम परम्मतम
Let us examine.

“Aana” to be the karmadhAraya samAsa, making the sUtra mean, “That Asana is here called
them.
repeating there.
‘smaranti cha’)
etcetera”]
antiquity.
comfortable seat.




yogAsana, the very effect of it is that that Asana makes him body transcend and withstand the
effects of climate, both warm and cold.
legacy.
On pata~njali And His Works
URL: http://bharatendu.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/patanjali/
|| namaH bhagavate pata~njalaye ||
“…we know little about the yoga author Patanjali. We know of Patanjali the grammarian and
have good reason to date him to the 2nd century BC. Apart from the name, we have no solid
reason for assuming that he was the author of the famous Yoga Sûtra as well. Possibly an
anonymous author tried to give his own book a wider readership by attributing it to an ancient
authority”,
So writes Dr. Koenraad Elst.
We feel much indebted to Dr. Elst for his monumental intellectual services in the causes of
Hindu survival and revival; we are something like a fan of his. But then what he says is quite
disturbing, besides dissidence being our second nature, so here goes:
While what he says above has long remained the majority Indologist view in contrast to the
Hindu tradition of identifying a single author to the famous mahAbhAShya and yogasUtra-s,
but so far even those who opposed the traditional position had only thought it as a simple
case of eponymy of two authors having confused the later commentators to conflate them into
a single personage. Therefore with his suggestion, Dr. Elst is breaking new grounds, that the
real author of the yogasUtra simply stuck the famous name of the renowned
mahAbhAShyakAra to his own petty product for marketing considerations.
Those familiar with the yoga-sUtra-s (YS) would be easily shocked by the flippant conjecture
which not only borders on slander towards the yoga-sUtra author, but also trivializes the
essential worth of the work which is considered one of the cornerstones of the Hindu
philosophy. YS, although tiny in size, can be seated next only to the bhagavad-gItA on the
copious shelf of all the Hindu philosophicals ever composed. In fact, to the popularity of the
yoga-sUtra Dr. Elst himself indirectly alludes in a separate earlier blog note where he wrote,
“While numerous Asian philosophical texts remain untranslated, a few suffer from a surplus
of translations: the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Yijing, the Daodejing, and also Patañjali’s Yoga
Sūtra.”
The popularity, and even more, the practical worth of the YS account for, and fully justify,
not only its numerous translations but also the width and diversity of various commentaries
produced on it throughout the ages from old to modern. Indeed like the numerous
translations, in the matter of commentaries too, yoga-sUtra can be comfortably placed next
only to the bhagavad-gItA, since excepting probably the latter no other book of philosophy
has been commented upon so many times in so many ways and by so many people as diverse
as vyAsa to AchArya rajanIsha and shaMkara to svAmI vivekAnanda, and rAjA bhoja deva
to Aurobindo, so that there is not a single class of commentary known in the saMskRîta
universe, from TIkA to vyAkhyA, vArtika to vRîtti, bhAShya to bodhinI, and vivaraNa to
dIpikA, that has remained not utilized in the study of the pAta~njala yoga-sUtra-s.
But we are asked to believe that the author of this yoga-sUtra, who is counted by the Hindu
philosophical traditions in the same class of the dArshanika-s as kapila, gautama, kaNAd,
jaiminI and bAdarAyaNa, was simply ignorant or unsure about the worth of the work he was
composing, so that he had to resort to such a gimmick as to fake it as having come from
another person!
Now, first off, if the “real author” of the yoga-sUtra-s had to use another’s name, wouldn’t it
be natural for him to pick up the name of an “authority” from the same subject matter to
which his own work belongs? Why would a yoga author pick up a grammarian’s name?
There are of course surer known situations where authors applied another’s name to make
their work popular, but at least the name thus used belongs to a recognized authority of that
field. The best example would be some collections of nIti that come with the name of
chANakya, although the author of artha-shAstra had nothing to do with these books. His
name is chosen by the real authors/editors of these books, as chANakya is an established
authority of nIti. We can see this phenomenon more clearly in the medieval Hindi literature,
where we find a certain spurious poetries bearing the names of “tulasIdAsa” and
“bhUShaNa” are clearly written by others and given the renowned name of these poets.
However, even in these cases, such works at least belong to their respective subject matters
and genre. If an author of yoga had to, at all, utilize someone else’s name for propagating his
own petty work, he had better choices available than that of a “grammarian’s” name.
Wouldn’t have the name of an earlier established authority on yoga (or sAMkhya) been more
practical to pick for him for the YS, say, “kApilya-yoga-sUtra” or even better the
“hairaNyagarbha-yoga-sUtra” or “vArShagaNya-yoga-sUtra”? (The hiraNyagarbha being the
known original teacher on yoga whose redacted treatise was apparently long lost by the time
of YS-author, and who is mentioned by name as the original yoga-teacher in the
mahAbhArata. vArShagaNya being another ancient authority, named in yoga texts like the
vyAsa-bhAShya.)
There is another possible issue in accepting the view that yoga-sUtra author deliberately
picked the grammarian’s name for his own work. It is known to the students of the
saMskRîta vyAkaraNa that after the initial century of popularity, mahAbhAShya had
gradually lost its readership and went largely out of circulation, until later when it made a
comeback. kalhaNa records in rAjataraMgiNI as well as bhartRîhari in vAkpadIya, this rise
and fall of pata~njali-the-grammarian’s popularity, where he says that unlike their own times
when mahAbhAShya was widely popular, in the “old days” the circulation of pata~njali’s
bhAShya was limited to the households only of South India, where too it was like just
another book shorn of all its glory, and it was hardly ever heard of, until being reintroduced
by the efforts of a certain scholar and a king whom they mention by name. This receded
popularity of pata~njali’s grammar makes it very unlikely for the “yoga-sUtra author” to
have been in that era and having used the pata~njali’s name. Being after that period is also
unlikely, as bhartRîhari is already familiar with YS, and even before, the jaina scholar
umAsvAti has already quoted from it. And if it is before that period, then we go too close to
the compilation of mahAbhAShya itself, dated with certainty to the mid second century BCE,
which makes most objections of Indologists against accepting the traditional view of
identifying both the works to have come from the same author fall flat in themselves.
We have to thus abandon the baseless conjecture that the author of yoga sUtra is not
pata~njali but some imposter who assumed this name only to deliberately attribute his work
to pata~njali the grammarian.
Now whether these books are written by one person named pata~njali, or two different
eponymous persons, is next for us to examine.
There are not just these two, but at least four major works that carry the name of pata~njali as
their author:
1. mahAbhAShya (MB), the most authoritative work on the grammar of saMskRîta that
perfected the pANini’s system, and considered one of the most important milestones in the
intellectual development of the Hindus. By virtue of producing this work, pata~njali gains
place in the traditional muni-trayI, the Sage Triad, of saMskRîta language, alongside
pANinI and kAtyAyana. In size, MB’s canvas nearly approaches the width of mahAbhArata,
while it likewise retains a perfectly lucid and systematic flow and content as a work of
instruction. Notably MB is the only commentary on any subject-matter ever written, to have
been given the prefix of ‘mahat’, The Great. So, even as all the other commentaries, esteemed
as those are and written by such luminaries as the AchArya-s shaMkara, vyAsa and sAyaNa,
those are still entitled as mere bhAShya-s, while the title of mahA-bhAShya is reserved for
the product of pata~njali alone. For many centuries the education of a man in India was not
considered complete without its study. Although being only a commentary in itself, MB came
to exert such tremendous influence over generations of Hindu linguists and grammarians that
several commentaries, glosses, expositions and critiques were written on it. Notable among
these being the oldest TikA of bhartRîhari now only extant in parts, besides vAkpadIya of
his which is entirely based on MB, pradIpa written by kaiyaTa upAdhyAya of kAshmIra,
three works siddhAnta-ma~njUShA, shabdendu-shekhara and pradIpodyota written on MB
by nAgojIbhaTTa, shabda-kaustubha by bhaTTojI, and vaiyAkaraNa-bhUShaNa of koNDA-
bhaTTa. All of these produced over centuries, and varying in scope and purpose, are entirely
devoted to the analysis and study of pata~njali’s mahAbhAShya.
2. yoga-sUtra (YS), a short compilation, all of 195 terse crisp and memorable formulae,
providing a complete synopsis of yoga not only as a philosophy but more as a systematic
practical process. The significance of YS is not in bringing forth new techniques or methods
– indeed it uses the material which existed before it and makes some quotations in verbatim –
but its true significance is in being the first work to impersonally lay down the overarching
foundational superstructure of yoga as a precise well-defined system. YS has been
unanimously considered an authority by the yogis of all lineages, indeed by the proponents of
all major spiritual traditions within the Hindu society, and it has remained extremely popular
throughout all the periods, much commented upon and quoted from. There are several
famous commentaries available, which include the most popular exposition being the yoga-
bhAShya by vyAsa in the 7th century, tattva-vaiShAradI by vAchaspati mishra in the 8th
century, yoga-sUtra-vAkya-vivaraNa of a similar date ascribed to AchArya shaMkara, and
rAja-mArttaNDa-vRîtti by rAjan bhoja-deva the pramAra in first half of the 11th century.
Besides these, there are dozens of many other important commentaries from varying view-
points and in numerous styles, like maNiprabhA of rAmAnanda yati, yoga-siddhAnta-
chandrikA and sUtrArtha-bodhinI both by nArAyaNa tIrtha, vRîtti by nAgojI bhaTTa,
yoga-dIpikA of bhAvA gaNesha, and a very important yoga-vArttikA of vij~nAna bhikShu
from the 16th century, not to mention a complete explosion in the translations, expositions
and commentaries on the yoga-sUtra witnessed in the last two centuries, which works can
easily number in the hundreds.
Besides the above two, pata~njali is also attributed with the authorship/codification of the
following important branches of the Hindu knowledge.
3. charaka saMhitA (CS), the oldest available systematic and organized presentation of
medicine and therapeutics as a holistic philosophy. The work is counted as the first of the
three pillar of Ayurvedic literature, the next two being the saMhitA-s respectively of suShruta
and vAgbhaTa to complete the brihat-trayI, the Grand Trilogy, of the Hindu medicine system.
As is well known and declared by the work itself, most of the ideas that CS presents were
pre-existing, having came down to its author from a variety of sources and very ancient times
through various teachers whom it enumerates. The novel contribution of CS is in
systematizing, organizing, and expanding those ideas into a holistic philosophy. Like YS and
MB, CS is also an authoritative work on its subject matter, much commented upon and
translated throughout the ages. The first recorded commentary, although now available only
in some fragments, is the 6th century charaka-nyAsa by bhaTTAra harichandra, a 9th century
nirantara-pAda by jejjaTa from kAshmIra, followed by the most authoritative commentary on
it charaka-tAttparya-dIpikA by chakrapANi datta of 11th century, and charaka-tattva-
pradIpikA by shivadAsa sena in the 15th century. From very old times, CS was also well
known to the Greco-Latin practitioners of medicine, referred as the Sharaka Indianus,
recorded from at least the 7th century. Al-Biruni also mentions the work to have been an old
authority on therapeutics and that it was already widely translated and available in the Arabic
by his time.
4. nidAna sUtra (NS), one of the ten authoritative and established shrauta-sUtra-s on sAma-
veda belonging to the kauthumi shAkhA. The references from such sources as the bRîhad-
devatA and RîgvedAnukramaNI indicate the existence of two independent recensions of the
nidAna sUtra-s: the one attributed to bhAllavI is no more extant, and the other which reaches
us is authored by pata~njali. Divided in ten prapAThaka-s of thirteen khaNDa-s each, the
specific purpose of the nidAna-sUtra is to provide concise, short and memorable instructions
to the performers of the sAmaveda rituals about the accurate specifications of the rituals. A
small portion of the NS, the opening seven khaNDa-s in the first prapAThaka, also forms an
independently circulated work in itself, known as the pAta~njala cHandovichati, which deals
with the specifications of the meters of the sAmavedic mantra-s. Since accuracy in observing
the meters makes for one of the very crucial points, cHandovichati is an important work of
instruction. The significance of nidAna sUtra is reflected by the attention given to it by
several commentators on the vaidika performances like sAyaNa, varadarAja, dhanvI, deva-
yAj~nika, rudra-skanda and agni-svAmI, who have all freely quoted from the NS, some also
mentioning pata~njali with great reverence as its author. In addition, entire commentaries
have also been written on the cHandavichati portion independently, notable being tattva-
subodhinI by tAta-prasAda of an unknown date, and a late but complete TikA by
hRîShikesha sharman.
Besides these works there are some more not so well known works that indirectly imply
pata~njali as their author. This includes a notable paramArtha-sAra (PS), a very short work of
all but 85 verses in AryA meter, hence also called AryA-pa~nchAshIti, and which explains
the sAMkhya principles in a vaiShNava-vedAntika framework. There are some more obscure
works like metallurgical loha-shAstra and a medicinal handbook vAtaskanda-vaidyaka,
whose author is also indirectly named as pata~njali. All of these however carry no allusion to
the author of the earlier mentioned books, nor do any commentators or traditions recount
these under the authorship of the famous yoga-sUtra-kAra or the mahAbhAShya-kAra. About
the author of the earlier mentioned ones however, traditions and the commentators do speak
about the identity of their author as a single sage named pata~njali.
The oldest reference about these books having been authored by one single pata~njali comes
from bhartRîhari’s vAkpadIya, dating at least from the 600s of the C.E. This celebrated
bhartRîhari was very closely connected with the studies on pata~njali, especially from the
grammar stand point. In fact, he credits his own teacher to have re-introduced the studies of
pAta~njala mahAbhAShya throughout India which had otherwise become by his time, as
noted before, obscure and found only in the households of south, reduced there too to just
being “another book”. bhartRîhari had also written a TIkA on MB, which is now not
available except for some fragments as noted earlier. In vAkpadIya, he expresses his
gratitude towards the sage like this:
kAya-vAg-buddhi-viShayA ye malAH samupasthitAH / chikitsA-lakShaNAdyAtma-

shAstraiteShAM vishuddhayaH (vAkpadIya, bramha-kANDa 1.147/8)
[“All that was unclean in the Body, Speech, and in Mind; has been cleansed away by (your)
treatises respectively on the Medicine, Grammar, and Spirituality.”]
Now Indologists like J H Wood of Harward and others following him are not satisfied that
the above refers to pata~njali at all or that it really means what is written above. But,
considering the overwhelming symmetry in the references that would now follow, the above
could not have but referred to pata~njali alone and to his contribution in the different fields.
Chronologically next reference comes from the TIkA on charaka-saMhitA by chakrapANi-

datta in the 11th century, who prays to pata~njali, the sage who prepared all these shAstra-s:
pAta~njala mahAbhAShya charaka pratisaMskRîtaiH / manovAkkAya doShANAM hartre-

hi-pataye namaH (charaka-tAttparya-dIpikA, ma~NgalAcharaNa)
[To Him, who by preparing the pAta~njala-(yoga-sUtra-s), the mahAbhAShya, and the
refinements over the charaka-saMhitA has wiped out all the afflictions that affect respectively
the Mind, the Speech, and the Body; to that Master, we pray.]
Here chakrapANi is very explicit in saying that the CS was only refined/redacted by
pata~njali, and thereby is noted as last in the sequence. Interesting to note is that the title
pAta~njala, i.e. “Of pata~njali”, is reserved not for MB, but for the work dealing with
spirituality. Some Indologists have felt a little room for doubt here, whether this book, simply
called pAta~njala here, refers to YS or some other work dealing with spirituality. Notably, in
the same century as chakrapANi, Al-Biruni also alludes in his India, to a work called
pAta~njal, earlier translated in Arabic as Qitab Patanjal by himself. Some scholars had
speculated, going by the synthesis of Al-Baruni, whether he was not referring to some other
book that was attributed to pata~njali albeit indirectly, such as the paramArtha-sAra, which
would meet the Al-Biruni’s description to large extent. However, a single manuscript of
Qitab Patanjal of Al-Biruni has been discovered and published later in translation, which
confirms that pAta~njal really meant pata~njali’s YS and no other work (See Shlomo Pines
and Tuvia Gelblum).
However, there is an even better and more direct proof that pAta~njal i.e. “Of Patanjali” is
the epithet used for YS alone, and not even for the MB. A near-contemporary of both
chakrapANi-datta and Al-Biruni, the illustrious rAjan bhoja-deva the pramAra provides a
remark which makes it clear that not only it is yoga-sUtra-s alone that went by the name of
pAta~njala but also reinforces the contemporary Hindu belief of a single pata~njali being the
author of YS alongside the mahAbhAShya and charaka-saMhitA. bhojadeva, multifaceted as
his talents were, seems to have much idolized the sage-author of such diverse interests. In the
opening of his commentary on the pata~njali’s yoga-sUtra, the learned rAjan thusly places
himself with the sage pata~njali:
shabdAnAmanushAsanam vidadhatA pAta~njale kurvatA \ vRîttiM rAja-mRîgA~Nka

saMg~nakAmapi vyAtanvatA vaidyake \ vAkchetovapuShAM malaH ShaNabhUtAM
bhatreva yenodadhRîtastasya shrI-raNa-ra~Nga-malla-nRîpate vAcho jayantujjvalauH ||
[Victorious be the radiant utterances of that Sovereign, The Wrestler on the Arena of
Battlefields (this being the name of another work by bhoja deva as well as one of his regal
titles), who has by preparing a work on grammar, by writing this commentary on pata~njali’s
work, and by composing rAja-mRîgA~Nka, a work on medicine, has wiped out all the
defilements respectively afflicting the Speech, the Mind, and the Body, just like as was done
by the Sovereign of all the Serpents (alluding to Adi-sheSha personified in pata~njali )]
So here, “pAta~njala” comes to unambiguously mean the famous yoga-sUtra-s and no other
work. bhoja seems to be not only aware of several commentaries done on this work before his
time, but says he has referred to all those that were present. Indeed he tries to even remain
critical about the text: one sUtra in the fourth book he considers being a later interpolation,
and refuses to comment upon it.
In the next century, circa 1187 CE as per Max Muller, saDgurushiShya the vaidika
commentator on kAtyAyana’s sarvAnukramaNI, refers to sage pata~njali, who is the author
of all these books, mahAbhAShya, nidAna sUtra and of course the yoga-sUtra-s. In praise of
kAtyAyana he says:
yatpraNItAni vAkyAni bhagavAnstu pata~njaliH / vyAkhyachcHAntaviyena

mahAbhAShyena harShitaH / yogAchAryaH svayaM kartA yogashAstra nidAnayoH
[Being greatly pleased by this vArttikA written by the descendant of shAntanu (alluding to
kAtyAyana), bhagavAn pata~njali, himself being a great teacher of yoga and the celebrated
author of yoga-sUtra-s as well as of the nidAna-sUtra-s, decided to further elucidate on these
grammatical rules in his mahAbhAShya.] (See Prof. Kailash Nath Bhatnagar, Introduction in
the Nidana Sutra of Patanjali, Lahore, 1939)
Writing from kAshmIra in the same century, grammarian kaiyaTa upAdhyAya holds a
similar view, and expresses it with a beautiful opening verse of his bhAShya-pradIpa, a
commentary on the MB:
yogena chittasya padena vAchAM malaM sharIrasya cha vaidyakena

yo.pAkarottaM pravaraM munInAM pata~njaliM prA~njalirAnatosmi (bhAshya-pradIpa,
opening)
[The impurities of chitta by yoga, of speech by the (MB’s) pada-s, and those of the body by
the treatise on medicine; That First of all the muni-s, sage pata~njali, who has removed all
these impurities, to Him I bow with joined palms]
We find the same view continuing down to the later centuries among the grammarians.
nAgojIbhaTTa writing in the late 16th century speaks thus in his vaiyAkaraNa-siddhAnta-
ma~njUShA: Apto nAma anubhavena vastutattvasya kArtsyena nishchayavAn /
rAgAdivishAdapi nAnyathAvAdI yaH sa iti charake pata~njaliH. The same scholar says in
his paspaSha adhikaraNa of MB, “yoga-sUtre-pata~njalokte” as well as elsewhere “taduktaM
charake pata~njalinA sendriyaM dravyaM nirindriyamachetanam”, implying throughout, that
the three works, YS, MB, and CS were authored by the same pata~njali.
In the 18th century, rAmabhadra dIkShita dedicated a whole work in compiling a

biographical sketch of pata~njali, entitled pata~njalicharitam, where he holds the author of all
these works to have been one single pata~njali, and remarks:
sUtrANi yogashAstre vaidyakashAstre cha vArttikAni tataH / kRîtvA pata~njalamuniH

prachArayAmAsa jagadidaM trAtuM
[yoga-sUtra-s, followed by the treatise on medicine, and then the grammatical rules, Sage
pata~njali created and propagated all these three in the world]
So we can easily see that for a long time, starting at the least with bhartRîhari in the sixth
century, all the way down to rAmabhadra dIkShita in the Eighteenth, pata~njali was
considered to have been a single author of all the diverse books, and this has remained a firm
tradition and a widely held view among the Hindus for over a millennia.
It is not until the 19th century that we come across such views being inserted in the
saMskRîta dictionaries like vAchaspatyam and Shabda-kalpa-druma that the two
pata~njali’s are different:
vAchaspatyam: “ayaM cha yogashAstrakArAt bhinna iti saralAyAmasmAbhissamarthitam|

anayorabheda iti pAshchAtya vaiyAkaraNAH ” [And this pata~njali is different from the
author of the yogashAstra, this is the simple view we hold. Conversely that they are the same
was a view held the later grammarians.] Also, shabda-kalpa-druma: “keShAnchinmate
yogasUtrakAra pata~njalerbhAShyakRît pata~njalirbhinna eva| anayorabhedatAm tu
nirdishanti pAshchAtyAH” [Some consider the yoga-sUtra author pata~njali to have been
different from the mahAbhAShya author pata~njali. That they are the same is a view
developed by the later people.] It seems strange that these colonial-period dictionaries should
say that the “later people” considered the one-pata~njali theory, whereas indeed it is they, the
still “later people” who thought otherwise!
But what does an examination of all these texts directly reveals internally from the texts of
the four works? Are there some grounds from within the works to support the traditional view
that they have come from the same author?
First, let us look at the structure and arrangement of the respective works.
1. Each of the four books is concerned with systematizing and perfecting a particular pre-
existing body of knowledge. YS that of sAMkhya-yoga, CS that of Ayurveda, MB that of
pANini grammar, and NS that of sAmaveda ritual specifications. Each is concerned in not
bringing forth some striking new techniques, but indeed presenting that which existed from
the old with robust structures and system of instruction.
2. The foundational concepts of all the works are fascinatingly octal! Yoga-sUtra lays down
the famous Eight-fold process of yoga, the aShTA~Nga-yoga, comprising the Eight essential
limbs of yama, niyama, Asana, prANAyAma, pratyAhAra, dhAraNA, dhyAna and samAdhi,
and presented under four pAda-s.
The mahAbhAShya is anyways based on pANini’s legendary “Eight-Chapters”, the

aShTAdhyAyI, and follows exactly the same structure and sequence of those Eight chapters,
dividing each into four pAda-s (like the four-pAda-s of yoga-sUtra).
Ayurveda deals with the same number of parts, it’s own aShTA~Nga including the kAyA
(general medicine), shalya (surgery), shAlakya (supraclavical, ENT and Ophthalmology),
Agad-tantra (toxicology), kaumAra (pediatrics and obstetrics), bhUta (psychiatry and
demonology), rasAyana (rejuvenation and healing), and bAjIkaraNa (infertility treatment and
virilification). While the charaka saMhitA deals with only some of these aspects, even then
CS is also divided exactly into Eight books or sthAna-s: sUtra (fundamental concepts),
nidAna (diagnosis, pathogenesis and general patho-physiology), vimAna (chemical &
physiological processes, clinical procedures, infections and epidemics), sharIra (anatomy and
embryology), indriya (symptomatology and prognosis), chikitsA (prescriptions and some
drug formulations), kalpa (pharmacy proper), and finally the siddhi (evacuation and cleansing
procedures). Very interestingly, three of these eight sthAna-s, the books of nidAna, vimAna
and sharIra, are further sub-divided into exactly eight adhyAya-s or chapters.
Now, on this point, nidAna-sUtra may appear to be an outlier at the outset, as it does not have
eight but ten pra-pAThaka-s. Interestingly however, an annotated, reorganized and
supplemented work heavily drawing from and following nidAna-sUtra, called upanidAna-
sUtra or the Little nidAna-sUtra, of an unknown date but being quite ancient and
authoritative, brings the body of knowledge back to an Eight-chaptered organization!
3. sUtra-s: each of the books is tightly connected with the genre of the sUtra-s in one way or
the other. In the MB, which is the only of the four works that is written not in an impersonal
tenor, pata~njali shows his extreme mastery over as well as the liking for the sUtra genre,
when he mentions and quotes the sUtra-s from various subjects besides the sUtra-s of pANini
such as the vArttika sUtra-s, saMgraha-sUtra-s, kalApaka sUtra-s, as well as the various
kalpa-sUtra-s and gRîhya-sUtra-s for vaidika performances. In MB he expresses his liking
for the concise short sentances of sUtra-s when he says that, “an author as much rejoices in
the economizing of half a short vowel, as much as he does in the birth of a son!”
Pata~njali’s profound mastery over sUtra-s or his extreme liking for them actually shows up
in all the four works we are looking at!
The yoga-sUtra is of course one of the most pristine samples of the sUtra genre, NS is also
written in the sUtra-s. mahAbhAShya, though written in prose and verse, is tightly linked
with the sUtra-s anyways, being a discussion on the sUtra-s of pANini and kAtyAyana
besides quoting other sUtra-s as we have mentioned above. charaka saMhitA while in verse,
names its opening section as the “sUtra-sthAna”, which is the largest of all the sections,
spanning almost one-fourth of the whole book in laying out the fundamentals of Ayurveda.
[Note: Here, it would be interesting to cross-read the Max Muller’s amazement at the sUtra
genre, which holds absolutely valid for all these four pata~njalian works: “It is difficult to
explain the peculiarities of the style of sUtra literature to anyone who has not worked his way
through the sUtra-s themselves… impossible to give anything like a literal translation… the
most artificial, elaborate, and enigmatical form… one uninterrupted string of short sentences
twisted together into the most concise form …; not only express their fundamental doctrines
in this concise form of language, if language it can be called, by which they succeed in
reducing the whole system of their tenets to mere algebraic formulas… to understand these is
quite impossible without having key to the whole system… generally given in separate sUtra-
s called paribhAShA-s…” ]
4. As is true of the sUtra-s of any subject-matter, each of these four works attributed to
pata~njali is intended to be a practical companion and aid to the practitioner of the respective
field, while presented in a way that need for learning the respective subject from a Master is
only more emphasized. For instance, only by reading yoga-sUtra-s without any commentary
and previous knowledge of its technical terminology, one cannot even decipher what it says,
leave aside practically following it without a siddha yoga Master. The same can be said of
charaka saMhitA, mahAbhAShya, and nidAna sUtra – that they yield instruction only to an
already trained pupil not without a preceptor.
5. The opening: Prof. Surendranath Dasgupta of Calcutta Univ. had shown many decades
back the striking similarity in the opening statements of both YS and MB. We can take that
observation even further. All the four works begin without any elaborate ma~NgalAcharaNa
or traditional invoking, rather simply with “atha”. YS: “atha yogAnushAsanam”, MB: “atha
shabdAnushAsanam”, NS: “atha nidAna sUtram”, and CS: “athAto dIrgha-jIvitIyam-
adhyAyam vyAkhyAsyAmaH”. This wonderful inaugural word “atha” literally means, “Now
Then, Therefore…”, and signifies the ultimate authority that the author has on the respective
subject matter. Commentators add that this also means both a ma~NgalAcharaNa, the
auspicious beginning, as well as a pre-qualification for the reader or student: that only
someone who has done the needed preparatory groundwork can be initiated with a “Now
Then, Therefore…”
6. Proximity to the veda-s: Each of the work is closely connected with the ArSha subjects and
have affinity to the veda-s. MB fits in the vyAkaraNa a vedA~Nga, even consdiered an
Agama; CS, the first pillar of the Ayurveda represents another vedA~Nga; NS is anyways
one of the shrauta-sUtra of sAmaveda; and although YS does not speak of or refers directly to
the veda-s at all but that the yoga is the very “vidyA” spoken of in the veda-s, is the claim of
the yogi-s (see for instance the preface of haThayoga-pradIpikA or the taittarIya brAhmaNa)
and sAMkya yoga teachers like pata~njali are tightly connected with sAmaveda (such as
vArShagaNya who is pre-pata~njala, pre-mahAbhArata teacher of yoga, and a sAmavedika
teacher).
7. What about the language of the texts? Could a comparison of the language used in the texts
yield some conclusions? Some people have indeed tried to analyze the language of MB and
of YS from difference standpoints, such as done briefly by Jacobi long time back, and more
systematically by Adolph Janacek in 1958. In his “Two Texts of Patanjali and a statistical
correspondence of their Vocabularies”, Janacek built a comparative statistical model by using
words used in MB and YS to see if they could have come from the same author. He remained
inconclusive, either to support or to reject the tradition. And it is not surprising, since the very
difference in size of the two (YS is just 195 short statements and MB is like an epic) as well
as the stark differences in the subject matter, makes the statistical comparison less sound.
And still, if we briefly look up the shabdAnukramaNI (word index) of MB prepared by
paNDita-s shrIdhara shAstrI and siddheshvara shAstrI, to search for the terms used in the YS,
almost all of these are used here. “yoga” appears over a hundred times, not counting the
variants like yogya, yogatva etc., nor the sandhi-samAsau derived from “yoga” like
“yogavibhAga”, “yogArambha” etc. “yogA~Nga”, the limbs of yoga, although the term is
used here in a different sense, occurs 7 times in MB. Names of almost all the yogA~Nga-s
appear in MB at different places. “dhya” with its various forms like “dhyAyati”,
“dhyAnavat” etc. occurs so does “dhAraNa” and “dhAraNakriyA” more than once and so
also “Asana” and “Asana-kriyA”. “pratyAhAra” occurs over a dozen times besides its
derived words like “pratyAhArArtha” and “pratyAhAragrahaNa”. Drilldowns likewise of the
types of yama-niyamau are most present here besides many pAribhAShika terms of YS. MB
is also full of the terminology that is encountered both in the nidAna-sUtra and charaka-
saMhitA, to which we shall return in the next point. We must mention though that the
available MSS of the nidAna sUtra make many grammatical mistakes of various kinds, which
makes it hard to believe to have been so written if its author was a great grammarian of
pata~njali’s fame. What seems likely, since the mistakes vary from one MSS to the other, is
that these mistakes were introduced by the scribes and remained in texts in absence of critical
editing.
Now, we don’t have the wherewithal and resources to carry out the full scope lexical analysis
of the four texts; we can only recommend and appeal to the professionals to take up such a
study; at present, we can only say that there is nothing in the at a glance lexical comparison to
contradict the traditional view of one-pata~njali.
8. It is not impossible for the author of mahAbhAShya to have also written the nidAna sUtra,
as from the internal evidence of the MB he does certainly appear to have been not only a
practitioner of vaidika sacrifices but also a remarkable vaidika scholar of all the four veda-s.
Like any smArta he expresses his belief that the veda-s existed from eternity and are un-
created (nahi cHandAnsi kRîyante nityAni cHandAnsi). He not only refers to each veda and
quotes from them, but actually goes on to enumerates and mention the number of each
shAkhA of each veda. His mastery over all the four veda-s is also evident from his profuse
quotations from them: right in the first AhnikA he quotes five Rîgvedic passages. There are
several instances where he quotes the fragments of vedic verses; in the beginning of
shabdAnushAsana he reproduces the opening lines of the first verses of each veda.
Not only is pata~njali an erudite scholar of the veda-s, he was also a learned performer of
rites. In fact one of the important arguments of Dr. R G Bhandarkar in how he dated him
precisely and conclusively to the middle of the 2nd century BCE is because at one place he
explains the peculiarity of a tense when the activity has begun but not yet finished and will
continue personally by the kartA, exemplifying by a sentence that “we perform a certain rite
on behalf of rAjan puShyamitra”, this puShyamitra being the famous shu~Nga emperor. He
mentions the five great classes of sacrifices, the deva, pitRî, bhUta, nRÎ, and bramha,
besides naming the specific rituals. He names rAjasUya, vAjapeya and ashvamedha ya~jna-s,
the last of which he mentions having been performed by the king puShyamitra, besides
talking of the lesser ones like the nava, pAka, agniShToma, chAturmAsya, and the pa~ncha-
mahA-ya~jna-s remarking that the last one is done by every householder. Several objects and
tools which only a vaidika ritualist would be concerned with are mentioned by him such as
yUpa, chaShAla and sruk etc. as well as the concepts like the svastivAchana,
puNyAhavAchana, and shAntivAchanas. mahAbhAShya quotes from many brAhmaNa-
grantha-s as well as from their auxiliary texts to mention the specific mantra-s to be
employed in the specific rites. He even goes to the limit of giving the instructions about how
the case endings of vaidika mantra-s should be suitably modified by the yA~gyanika-s for the
performances of rituals. He also shows close familiarity, indeed mastery, over the concepts of
sAmaveda rituals. He mentions clearly the “uktha” of sAmaveda (4.2.60) and clearly refers to
the musical recitations (kaliyaM sAma gIyate), besides mentioning by name the meters of
jagatI, triShTubha and anuShTubha.
Could this eminent vaidika scholar not be the same person who also wrote the nidAna-sUtra-s
for compiling the specifications of the sAmaveda rituals? Indeed it seems quite extremely
possible.
There is yet another little known tradition that makes a single pata~njali’s association with
both sAmkya-yoga and sAmaveda at the same time, more likely. That is that sAmavedins are
considered closely connected with the sAMkhya and yoga. This includes the less known pre-
pata~njali Teacher of yoga vArShagaNya, who is named by mahAbhArata as a sAMkhya-
yoga master on one hand, and on the other recalled as a great sAmaveda ritualist by the
gRîhya sUtra of jaiminI. The similarity in the case of pata~njali about dealing with both
sAmaveda and sAMkhya-yoga, like his predecessor, makes the traditional view point even
more credible.
9. As becoming of a great vaidika scholar, pata~njali is also quite familiar with the atharvan
veda. In MB, he explains the term “AtharvaNika” as someone who is a thorough scholar of
the fourth veda. He also explicitly mentions that certain concepts must exclusively belong to
the atharvan veda and not the first three. Reading this, one should recall the statement in the
charaka saMhitA which says that a physician, when asked as to which saMhitA he belongs,
should only declare that he is affiliated with the atharvan-saMhitA.
10. That brings us to look at the works from the angle of medicine. Although tradition only
attributes pata~njali as an organizer of charaka-saMhita and not an original author, it
presupposes his mastery over medical knowledge. Does the author of mahAbhAShya show
enough familiarity with medicine and therapeutics?
The Missionaries of Position
Author:
Publication: The Economic Times
The yoga trade marking craze is on, and aspiring gurus are flowing in
DISTURBED by mood lighting and New Age music, yoga never appealed to Robert Sidoti.
“It’s awkward for most guys just to cross their legs,” says the Martha’s Vineyard personal
trainer. “There’s this stigma that yoga is this real groovy, open your heart, ‘I love you, man’
kinda thing.” When his wife finally persuaded him to try it, however, Sidoti discovered his
golf swing improved. Inspired, he started teaching dude-friendly yoga classes set to Radio
head and Cold play in 2008. “My style taps into men’s upper body strength,” says Sidoti.
“It’s a primal, powerful way for guys to let go.” He calls his method BROga®—a term he
trademarked in 2009.
BROga is in good company at the patent office. During the past decade, a yoga trademarking
craze has produced everything from Hillbilly Yoga® to Cougar Yoga™ (think Demi Moore,
not mountain lion). Of the 2,213 trademark applications containing the word “yoga,” more
than 2,000 have been filed since 2001 relating to yoga styles and products, according to the
government’s Trademark Electronic Search System. As the Eastern mystic practice has
spread from hippies to soccer moms to Metallica fans (yes, there’s Metal Yoga™), aspiring
gurus are seeing an opportunity in the $6 billion US yoga market. “Yoga today is where the
Food Network was 15 years ago,” says Ava Taylor, whose Brooklyn-based Yama Talent
manages the careers of 41 ambitious yogis. “Many of these teachers will cross over into the
mass market.”
Plenty are already trying. Tara Stiles opened Strala Yoga studio in New York in October. She
also recently released an iPhone app with soul guru Deepak Chopra (she’s his personal
instructor) and a DVD with Jane Fonda, and has been tapped to endorse Nissan’s new electric
car, the Leaf. “I want yoga to be the thing you do for 45 minutes while your boyfriend is in
Best Buy (BBY),” says Stiles, who hopes to bring a line of yoga studios to strip malls. While
some of her routines—Couch Yoga, Hotel Room Yoga, Yoga for Rachel Maddow—have
been criticized for cheapening the practice, Stiles, who’s represented by Creative Artists
Agency, is preparing to open a second studio. She’s also considering trademarking
opportunities. “It’s about time,” she says.
The blueprint for meditative success was created by man-thonged Bikram Choudhury. Like
soccer stars, pop singers, and Buddha, Bikram has attained the ultimate in groupie fame: one-
name status. He achieved it in 2002 by trademarking and copyrighting Bikram, his sequence
of 26 poses practiced in 105ºF. “When in Rome, I must do as the Romans do. When in
America, copyright and trademark,” he said at the time. Now Bikram charges fees for
instructor training ($10,900), studio setup ($10,000), and franchise royalties (up to 5 percent
of monthly revenues)—contributing to $5 million in annual revenue.
Enterprising yogis are now trying to eclipse even the Bikram model. “For all the talk of
Bikram’s moguldom, if you look at the numbers, they’re kind of a joke,” says Stefanie
Syman, author of The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. “He’s just a garden-
variety millionaire.” While working for yoga apparel behemoth Lululemon Athletica (LULU)
in 2009, Ava Taylor made the same observation. She thought the company’s climbing
revenues were at odds with yoga teachers’ low salaries, which the job search website Simply
Hired estimates to average $35,000 annually. “When I got to know the teachers off the mat, I
realised that many of them were struggling,” she says. Begun in January 2010, her Yama
Talent helps them book jobs and develop their own brands.
Yet the yoga entrepreneur movement is not without its adversaries. Since 2001 the Indian
government has been cataloging more than 1,000 postures in a compendium created to
protect against intellectual property infringement—what it calls “yoga theft.” Yet many
yogamongers seem undeterred.
Time will tell whether or not this generation of aspiring stars can avoid the fate of its
forebears. Joseph Pilates, the godfather of the namesake mind-andmuscle control fitness
routine, suffered for failing to trademark. When Pilates Inc. tried to protect the use of his
name in 2000, the courts ruled that “pilates” was free for unrestricted use. “Yoga and money
have a long-standing history of butting heads,” says Taylor. “While I don’t think we’ll ever
become a kind of Le-Bron James, 13-cars-in-the-driveway industry, there’s no reason
teaching yoga shouldn’t be sustainable. We don’t live in the Himalayas anymore.”
Date: March 2, 2011
||नमो योगाय योगेश्वराय योगसिद्धाय योगशास्त्राय योगासिराजाय नमो नमः||
आलोक्य िर्व शास्त्रासि सर्चायव च पुनः पुनः, इदमेकम िुसनष्पन्नम योगशास्त्रम परम्मतम
Let us examine.

“Aana” to be the karmadhAraya samAsa, making the sUtra mean, “That Asana is here called
them.
repeating there.
‘smaranti cha’)
etcetera”]
antiquity.
comfortable seat.




yogAsana, the very effect of it is that Asana makes his body transcend and withstand the
effects of extreme climate, both warm and cold.
legacy.
The real roots of yoga
Wendy Doniger, Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2011
Yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing interdisciplinary

construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim for it
Some American Hindus have recently argued that Hindus should “Take Back
Yoga”. The Hindu American Foundation insists “that the philosophy of yoga
was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of
Hindu teaching”, that yoga is the legacy of a timeless, spiritual “Indian
wisdom”. Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga – from
the many Christians who embrace it: R. Albert Mohler Jr, president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if
they value their (Christian) souls. This fight evokes for me the Monty
Python skit in which Greek and German philosophers compete in a football
game (which ends with Marx claiming that the Greek goalscorer was off-side).
Declaring the Southern Baptists (or at least the Revd R. Albert Mohler)
off-side, we may still ask, why do so many American Hindus care so much
whether yoga is Hindu? And is it?
One reason for the Hindu concern is suggested by the capitalist overtones of
phrases used by Dr Aseem Shukla, a urologist who is co-founder of the Hindu
American Foundation: Hinduism has “lost control of the brand” of yoga and
has been the victim of “overt intellectual property theft” by people who
have “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass
commercialism”. In other words, yoga is a sacred cash cow: about 15 million
people in America practise (and generally pay for) something that they call
yoga, making it a multi-billion-dollar industry.
But a deeper casus belli lies in the two-fold historical claim made by
activists of Hindu American identity politics: that yoga (a) was first
described in the ancient Vedic texts of Hinduism and (b) has always been the
core of Hinduism. Hindu Americans’ deep investment (to continue the
financial metaphor) in these claims about history has its own history. For,
given the human obsession with roots, those claims generally take the form
of arguments about the origins of yoga, a quest for purity of lineage, for
undefiled racial descent, here as always a mad quest, since the history of
yoga is, like most histories, a palimpsest.
Mark Singleton’s excellent Yoga Body: The origins of modern posture practice
sets out to demolish the assertion that the roots of modern yoga lie in
ancient India. The Hindu arguments that he challenges, and the evidence for
or against them, can be sorted into a chronology of four claims:
Claim 1: Yoga began before 2500 BC, in the Indus Valley Civilization, in
what is now Pakistan and northwest India (a civilization that left
substantial archaeological remains but no deciphered script). Evidence:
There are a few tiny soapstone seals bearing the image of a man seated in
what might be either just the way many people sit – knees apart, feet
together or legs crossed – or a basic yogic posture, like the “lotus”
(padma) or “perfect” (siddha) postures attested in much later yoga texts.
Aside from its unverifiability, this claim assumes the position that yoga
assumes the position, that the essence of yoga is in its “positions” or
“poses” (asanas, literally “sittings”) rather than, for instance, in its
philosophical or religious concepts. This assumption is contradicted by the
next claim:
Claim 2: Yoga began in around 1500 BC, in the oldest Sanskrit text, the Rig
Veda. Evidence: The word “yoga” occurs in this text, but only in the primary
sense of “yoking” horses to chariots or draft animals to ploughs or wagons
(the Sanskrit and English words are cognate, as is the English “junction”);
and then, secondarily, designating the effort of “yoking” oneself to do
physical labour. Here we have neither philosophical nor postural yoga. Let’s
try again:
Claim 3: Yoga began sometime in the middle of the first millennium BC in the
Sanskrit philosophical texts known as the Upanishads. Evidence: The word
“yoga” occurs in just a few passages in the early Upanishads, designating a
spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath control, “yoking” the
senses in order to control the spirit, and then “yoking” the mind, “yoking”
the body to the spirit, and the soul to the mind of god, in order to obtain
an immortal body “made by the fire of yoga”. This is the yoga that Mircea
Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and freedom (1958) illuminated for a generation
of Americans. (Eliade’s personal experiments with yoga, and much else, are
recorded in a roman à clef first published in Romanian in 1933 and, in 1988,
made into a film, The Bengali Night, in which the Eliade role is played,
believe it or not, by Hugh Grant.) Buddhist sources in this same period also
speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word
“yoga”, owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any
mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in
ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot
and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say.) This is the general sense in
which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later,
to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the
yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing
about the physical “positions” or “poses” that distinguish contemporary
yoga.
Claim 4: Yoga began in India in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, probably in the

third century AD. (Some would put it earlier, and it draws on earlier
sources.) Many contemporary yoga practitioners cite this text as the basis
of their praxis. But Patanjali says nothing about the “postures” other than
remarking that the adept should sit in a manner that is relaxed and
conducive to meditation and breath control. On the contrary, he speaks of
cultivating “aversion to one’s own body”. But he describes magical powers
(siddhis, literally “perfections”) that result from the mastery of the mind,
which include flying, becoming invisible, walking on water, foreknowledge of
death, knowledge of past and future, entering the minds of others, and
understanding the languages of animals, claims that were later made by Hindu
ascetics who called themselves “yogis” (or “yogins”).
A degree of confusion arises from the fact that Patanjali’s text is

foundational for one of the six classical philosophies of ancient India, the
meditational school known as Yoga. This philosophy is often called “Raja
Yoga” (“royal yoga”) or the Eight-fold (ashtanga) Yoga, to distinguish it
from common or jungle varieties of yoga in the sense of any spiritual
discipline, as well as from the later “Hatha Yoga” (“the yoga of force”).
The word “yoga/yoga/Yoga” thus became a triple homonym, referring sometimes
to a physical praxis, sometimes to a mental praxis, and sometimes to a
particular philosophical school.
The confusion is compounded by the existence of various ascetics often

called “yogis” and connected to yoga in many different degrees. Scattered
evidence for these traditions begins in the Rig Veda’s reference to naked
ascetics who use (consciousness-altering) drugs and “mount the wind” (i.e.
both fly and control their breath); they are associated with Rudra, the
antecedent of the god Shiva who is closely associated with yogis, himself a
great yogi and Lord of Yogis (Yogeshvara). Some later yogic traditions
cultivated “the aversion to one’s own body” in more extreme ways. Texts from
the early centuries of the Common Era deconstruct the body (particularly but
not only the female body) into its disgusting components of shit, piss, pus,
and so forth, while others tell of men and women who, going after a kind of
god one could find only by breaking away into madness and horror, subject
themselves to extremes of heat and cold, fasting, and other forms of
physical mortification, going naked, sometimes eating out of human skulls,
or eating carrion or faeces, generally demonstrating their indifference to
both physical pain and social conventions, thumbing their nose at the body.
These disciplines often included difficult postures, such as standing on one

leg for days at a time. By the seventh century AD, such postures became so
notorious as to be subject to satire; the great frieze at Mamallipuram
(Mahabalipuram) depicts a cat (a symbol of ascetic hypocrisy in Hinduism)
standing on one leg in mimicry of a human ascetic in this posture. Many
texts reflect the uneasiness and suspicion with which conventional
householder Hindus regarded fringe groups of yogis, depicting them as
lunatics or magicians with paranormal powers. Hindus were well aware that
power corrupts, and divine power corrupts divinely. There was always a
conflict between yogis as idealized superheroes and yogis as reviled
super-villains. Yogis were often regarded as ritually polluting or downright
dangerous, sinister in both senses of the word, as David White has
documented (in Sinister Yogis, 2009).
Yogis also posed sexual threats, through an ancient Hindu belief in their
erotic powers, along a spectrum from genuine ascetics, who were said to be
able to use their unspent sexual powers to bless infertile women and thus
make them fertile, to false ascetics, who were said to use their status as
yogis as a mask through which to gain illicit access to women. In the
medieval period, the bad sexual reputation of yogis was exacerbated by the
overlap between yoga and Tantra, an antinomian and often sexual ritual
praxis. One yogic text composed some time between the thirteenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika (“Illumination of the Yoga of
Force”), describes fifteen yogic postures. It also describes the Tantric
technique of raising the coiled serpent power (the Kundalini) up the spine,
through the series of chakras (centres of force), to the brain, and a
related technique whereby the adept draws fluids (such as the secretions of
his female partner in the Tantric sexual ritual) up through his penis (the
vajroli process).
By this time, most educated Hindus had nothing but scorn for postural yoga,
though there was still respect for yoga as a spiritual discipline. The
followers of the great Vedantic philosopher Shankara (c.788–820 AD) rejected
the physical discipline and engaged only the philosophy and the meditational
praxis. The Hatha-yoga-pradipika became an embarrassment for Hindus, who
invented an apocryphal story about Dayanand Sarasvati (1824–83), the founder
of the Bengal reform movement called the Arya Samaj, who allegedly pulled a
corpse from a river, dissected it to see if the chakras were there, didn’t
find them, and threw his copy of the Hatha-yoga-pradipika into the water.
Well-born Bengalis considered exercise in general lower-class (a Mandarin
attitude that Noël Coward captured well in the line, “In Bengal, to move at
all is seldom, if ever, done”).
When the British arrived in India in the eighteenth century, they came to
share many of the Hindu anti-yogic biases, compounded by the European horror
of the nakedness and self-torture of the extreme yogis. The yogi on a bed of
nails became the stock European symbol of India’s moral and spiritual
backwardness. In addition to the individual yogis, bands of yogis often
posed military threats, using yoga to strengthen their bodies for martial
purposes. Warrior ascetics are a very old Indian tradition, going back to
the menacing troops of Vratyas mentioned in the Veda. Under the Raj,
militant yogis engaged in exercise regimes to make them tough, in order to
oppose the British; they were generally indistinguishable from violent
militants whose training centres for resistance masqueraded as centres of
yogic instruction. In this period, to be a yogi often meant to train as a
guerrilla. The British rounded up many of the ascetic mercenaries and broke
up their organizations; some yogis became beggars or itinerant carnival
performers who displayed as circus tricks the more extreme postures, such as
a handstand from the lotus position.
But at this point, something transformative happened, which is the basis of

a new claim, not made by Hindus, about the origins of yoga:
Claim 5: Contemporary postural yoga was invented in India in the nineteenth

century. This is Singleton’s most provocative assertion. He argues that a
transnational, anglophone yoga arose at this time, compounded of the
unlikely mix of British bodybuilding and physical culture, American
transcendentalism and Christian Science, naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics,
and the YMCA, grafted on to a rehabilitated form of postural yoga adapted
specifically for a Western audience. The Swedish gymnastics came from Pehr
Henrik Ling, the physical culture from a number of people including Eugen
Sandow, Bernard MacFadden, Harry Crowe Buck and Charles Atlas. Most
influential was the YMCA, in the hands of which physical culture was
eventually elevated to a position of social and moral respectability.
The British had always considered Indians weaklings, and Indians

shamefacedly agreed; Indian children in Gandhi’s day used to chant a popular
poem: “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small, / Because
being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall”. The playing fields of Eton had
made the English frightfully brave, as Noël Coward pointed out, but so had a
regimen of exercise that they now imported into India. Bodybuilding became a
religion that resacralized the body, and the British proselytized for this
muscular Christianity in India just as the missionaries did for their
evangelical Christianity. In Indian schools, the gymnastics instructor was
usually a brutal and ignorant retired non-commissioned British officer, most
often a sepoy, an Indian who served in the British Army. In an ironic twist,
Indian nationalists were able to use this colonial technique, designed to
build soldiers to master the inferior races in the Empire, to train their
own people to combat and resist the Europeans. Even when they took poses
from Hatha Yoga, they renamed them and interpreted them in the language of
modern gymnastics. In 1915, the scholar S. C. Vasu, who wanted to make yoga
medical and scientific, prepared an English translation of the
Hatha-yoga-pradipika for the Sacred Books of the Hindus, but omitted the
passage about the vajroli technique.
The British then tried to suppress the Indian physical culture clubs in
India because they wanted to do it their way and to control it, to inscribe
English physical culture on the Indian body. YMCA leaders in India had made
the postures part of the physical programme in service of Christian goals
(leading some people to regard yoga as a variant of Christian Science), but
the European poses were then reabsorbed into Hindu culture. The British
passion for physical culture, spilling over into the Hindu world, rescued
physical yoga from the opprobrium into which it had fallen and made it once
again respectable. Hindu leaders such as Swami Kuvalayananda developed more
rigorous posture work to refute the YMCA types who had insisted that the
postures were not an adequate physical regimen. Now the new yoga took the
European techniques and couched them in the discourse of the Bengal Hindu
renaissance, which is to say the Vedantic language of the Upanishads. Many
practitioners combined the more extreme postures, generally associated with
the marginalized itinerant yogis, with the more central ancient meditative
praxis, and regarded this yoga (now no longer limited to breath control but
incorporating the postures) as a path to immortality.
The extreme postures then travelled back to England. Yogis in England, where
contortionists had performed in London for hundreds of years, demonstrated
exercises such as the Hatha Yoga technique of abdominal isolation (nauli),
in which the muscles of the stomach are made to undulate in a separate
column. K. Ramamurthy had a three-ton elephant and a motor car driven over
his body; he also included in the Indian physical culture system a number of
sports that he insisted originated in India, including hockey, cricket,
tennis, billiards and boxing.
The emphasis on the physical postures of yoga may have been bolstered by the
sensational publication, in 1883, of Sir Richard Burton’s English
translation of the Kamasutra, a text that became notorious for its
“positions”. The tendency to confuse the teachings of yoga and the Kamasutra
may have led to the overemphasis on the “positions” in both, since yoga was
always associated with sex in India and came to be eroticized in England,
and the general English and Indian ignorance of the cultural content of the
Kamasutra was matched by their ignorance of the philosophical content of
(classical) yoga. Both yoga and the Kamasutra served the schizophrenic
Victorian combination of public condemnation of sex and private obsession
with it. Undeniably erotic photographs of naked women and naked men
performing yogic postures were published in journals like Health and
Science, anthropologizing and orientalizing sex, distancing it, making it
safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them,
that the images were not about real bodies, their bodies, but merely about
the bodies of strange, dark people far away. (The same logic allowed
National Geographic to depict the bare breasts of black African women long
before it became respectable to show white women’s breasts in Playboy.)
The advent of mass photography at the end of the nineteenth century greatly
enhanced the erotic appeal of yoga. In 1902, Thomas Edison made a
documentary about a “Hindu Fakir” that was circulated along with other early
forms of the peepshow. (The erotic view of yoga continues. In March 2003, a
hilarious spoof, entitled “Yoga: A religion for sex addicts”, imagined a
Christian pastor defining the ultimate goal of yoga practitioners as
contorting their bodies into demonic positions so as to be able to place
their sexual organs in their mouths.) The pendulum of mutual influence
continued to swing, as Hindus reacted against these new European versions of
yoga and brought yet another form of yoga to America. In 1896, repulsed by
the physical contortions and twisted bodies of the yogic postures, Swami
Vivekananda said that he rejected Hatha Yoga because it was very difficult,
could not be quickly learned, and did not lead to much spiritual growth, and
because the goal of making men live long and in perfect health was not as
important as the spiritual goal represented by Raja Yoga, which Vivekananda
claimed to be reviving. Yet he believed that physical culture, of the
European variety, was essential for Indian youth, and he is said to have
held the view that one can get closer to god through football than through
the Bhagavad Gita.
But the Vedantic yoga of Vivekananda was not the antecedent of the yoga
practised in America today. That came from many sources, but particularly
from the invention, by T. Krishnamacharya, between 1930 and 1950, of a novel
sequence of movements, partially derived from a royal gymnastics tradition
in Mysore; and from B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, published in 1966.
Other techniques that we now recognize as yoga were, by the 1930s, already a
well-established part of Western physical culture, particularly that
intended for women, but were not yet associated in any way with yoga. At the
same time, some women promoted “spiritual stretching and deep breathing”
which they called “yoga for women”. For now yoga became gendered: postural
yoga developed out of a male, muscular, Christian, nationalist and martial
context (still practised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other Hindu
nationalist organizations); while “harmonial” yoga, of the “stretch and
relax” variety, was a synthesis of women’s gymnastics and para-Christian
mysticism. To this day, women greatly outnumber men as yoga practitioners.
After Vivekananda had expelled Hatha Yoga, the modern Hindu yogis brought it
back by rewriting the Hatha Yoga tradition, leaving out the positions that
they found repellent or simply impossible, and fleshing out the tradition
with diet, relaxation, cleanliness and breathing, all attested in some of
the many other forms of ancient Indian yoga. They replaced the unpalatable
ancient Indian material with more attractive ancient material, as well as
much new material, and claimed that that was what yogis had always used.
Ultimately new combinations of Western and Eastern physical culture methods
were naturalized as ancient Hindu knowledge.
Yoga came into its own as a national pastime during the 1950s and 60s. But
it had attracted celebrities in Europe and America, from Henry Thoreau, the
first American yogi, to Aleister Crowley, who published, in 1939, eight
lectures about yoga under the megalomaniac pseudonym “Mahatma Guru Sri
Paramahansa Shivaji”, using a bit of Patanjali but mostly pseudo-Tantric
materials that further damaged yoga’s reputation. In 1921, Fritz Lang made a
film about crazy yogis. “Yogi” (Lawrence Peter) Berra picked up his famous
nickname from a friend who said that whenever Berra sat around with his arms
and legs crossed, waiting to bat, or looking sad after a losing game of
baseball, he resembled a Hindu holy man they had seen in a movie.
Contemporary yoga practices are a far cry both from the Upanishads and from
Hatha Yoga. Most of the new American yogis want to relax after a hard day at
the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their
blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve
regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet
with a lot of yogurt (which is not etymologically related to “yoga”) – and a
route to God. Siddha Yoga has become “City Yoga”. Never the twain shall
meet.
But they can, in fact, meet. For some people, yoga is a religious
meditation, for some an exercise routine, and for some, both. A few years
ago I met Gwyneth Paltrow, a yoga practitioner who delighted me by reciting
a long passage from Patanjali in flawless and melodious Sanskrit. The union
of physical and spiritual praxis was possible for ancient Indians and
remains a real goal for many contemporary yogis. This sort of combination is
affirmed by an old joke about a Jesuit priest who, when his bishop forbade
priests to smoke while meditating, dutifully agreed but argued that surely
there would be no objection if he occasionally meditated while he was
smoking. That one can, however, choose merely to smoke or merely to meditate
is denied both by Christians of the Reverend R. Albert Mohler ilk and by
Hindus of the Hindu American Foundation ilk, both of whom insist that yoga
is only and always a religious system.
Such Hindu Americans, concerned about their image, fear (not without cause)
that their religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith
of “castes, cows and curry”. They counteract these charges by swinging to
the other extreme and arguing that everything in India is, and always has
been, spiritual, a blinkered view that makes some people mispronounce Kama
Sutra as “Karma-Sutra”. They want to cash in on the popularity of yoga in
order to use it as the symbol of a more spiritual “Indian wisdom”. They
argue that yoga – more than temple rituals, the worship of images of the
gods, or other, more passionate, communal, and widespread forms of Hinduism
– is the essence of Hinduism, that yoga has always been entirely spiritual
and entirely Hindu.
But this claim ignores the complex history of yoga. There is an ancient
Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in yoga
classes today. That same history, however, also demonstrates that there are
more historical bases for contemporary postural yoga within classical
Hinduism than Singleton allows. The Europeans did not invent it wholesale.
But they changed it enormously. They changed it from an embarrassment to an
occasion for cultural pride, and from a tradition that encouraged the
cultivation of “aversion to one’s own body” to another, also rooted in
ancient India, that aimed at the perfection of the body. The modern Indian
and American yogis didn’t take their methods from European physical culture;
they took them back from physical culture. What Mark Singleton does prove,
with massive, irrefutable, fascinating and often hilarious evidence, is that
yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing interdisciplinary
construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim for it.
Mark Singleton
YOGA BODY
The origins of modern posture practice
262pp. Oxford University Press.
£60 (paperback, £11.99).
978 0 19 539535 8
Wendy Doniger teaches at the University of Chicago. Her books include Siva:
The erotic ascetic, 1973, The Bedtrick: Tales of sex and masquerade, 2000,
The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was, 2005, and, most recently, The
Hindus: An alternative history, 2009.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7172361.ece
See the blurbs about the book of Mark Singleton at

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Hinduism/?view=usa&ci=
9780195395341
*Mark Singleton* teaches at St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is
the editor, with Jean Byrne, of *Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary
Perspectives* . He lives in Santa Fe. The blurb also claims that he is “the
first non-Indian to learn the complete Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga syllabus.”
What India Hands to the World
by Sheela Bhongir 03/07/2011
http://www.newgeography.com/content/002098-what-india-hands-world
Yoga. Mantras. Bollywood. Henna tattoos. Once unique to India, each of

these has now become commonplace in households across the globe. As a
first generation East Indian American, I've had an opportunity to
contrast the world my parents experienced with the one I inhabit. When
my parents first settled here in the 1980s Indian cultural influences
were not this prominent, but the increases in America and around the
globe have been dramatic.
Any gym is bound to teach a yoga class. Popular exercise regimens such
as Pilates have been influenced by ancient Indian spiritual exercises.
During a recent study abroad trip to Goiania, a medium sized city in the
Brazilian countryside, I was surprised to encounter yoga classes, and
many of my Brazilian classmates wanted to learn Yoga from me.
Bhangra, a North Indian folk dance, has been incorporated into gym
workouts. Sarina Jain, the Indian American creator of The Masala Bhangra
Workout, says she's "the first to bring Indian dance to the U.S. fitness
industry at a global level." The DVD has been named one of the five
hottest workouts by America Online.
Meditation, similarly, has become widely popular. This ancient Vedantic

technique to reach inner peace has been popularized by Indian gurus who
have spread the practice throughout the West; one transcendental
meditation organization claims to have taught more than 50,000 students
across the United States, Latin America and Africa during the past two
years alone. The bestselling book (and then film) "Eat, Pray, Love" has
further popularized the use of meditation to tame the mind. Julia
Roberts, who plays the protagonist in the film, even identifies herself
as a Hindu who regularly meditates.
Other Vedantic influences on daily life include reciting mantras, and

the popularization of words such as "guru" and "pundit" to describe
people with expertise. The idea that all of your actions, whether good
or bad, produce consequences that shape your future is a common theme in
many cultural value systems, but the term "karma" captures that concept
in one word and has become used throughout the English-speaking world,
as well as elsewhere.
Billions of people around the world also value the concept of ahimsa -
non-violence - as popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. His ideas strongly
influenced Martin Luther King Jr. Ahmisa also explains why many Hindus
and Jains are vegetarians The belief that what you eat affects your
behavior, and that a vegetarian diet can help tame the mind, has been
popularized worldwide by Indians, who are known for their exquisite
vegetarian cuisine.
Worldwide, flavorful Indian spices and seasonings have increased the
appeal of vegetarian food. India produces over four million tons of
spice, and exports around 180 spice products to over 150 nations. The
Indian Spice Board is currently planning to set up three promotional
centers in, respectively, Dubai, Chicago and Europe.
Spices are also of special interest in the alternative health community,

where they are viewed as anti-inflammatory agents, that can help the
aging brain and play a role in cancer prevention. Turmeric and several
other spices are part of the Indian Ayurvedic system. Ancient Indian
epics like The Ramayana reference Ayurveda, a holistic approach to
health that fuses the forces of mind, body, senses and spirit. Today,
about thirty companies are leading the way, with a million dollars or
more per year in business to meet the growing demand for Ayurvedic
medicine. The larger Ayurvedic medicine suppliers have also moved into
the businesses of toiletries -soap, toothpaste, shampoo - which use
traditional herbal ingredients.. For example, L'Oreal has been reported
to be looking into purchasing an Indian Ayurvedic skin care brand, and
companies like Estée Lauder have created their own Ayurvedic spa
treatments.
But even more wide-spread is India's music and dance scene. The sitar,
first popularized in the US by Ravi Shankar, has been used by artists
from the Beatles to Janet Jackson. The most powerful Indian cultural
export, though, has long been its film industry, nicknamed Bollywood,
which is generally believed to produce the largest number of feature
films in the world. Bollywood makes more ticket sales than Hollywood
does, though revenue figures are much higher for the latter Sometimes
dubbed in local languages, these films, filled with colorful costumes,
dances, music, and love stories are watched in Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia,
Scandinavia, the Caribbean and even Fiji.
Through television, Brazil has been particularly touched by India.

Brazil's 2009 Emmy Award-winning telenovela (soap opera), Passage to
India, introduced Indian culture there on a broad scale. As an Indian
traveling through Brazil, almost every person I met asked whether I
watched the show. Even in Cavalcante, a remote area, a truck driver knew
that the cow is considered sacred in India, and was newly aware of the
Indian custom of arranged-marriage.
Another result of the show's popularity has been that Brazilians are now
fascinated by Indian clothing. I noticed malls consistently had at least
one Indian themed store selling kurti tops - Indian style blouses which
are popularly worn over skinny jeans or tights. I also saw men wearing
t-shirts with pictures of Indian Gods and Goddesses, and saw them
printed on swim suit cover ups. Of course, you rarely see Indians
wearing this kind of garment, since, many consider these displays on
clothing to be somewhat offensive.
There are many other aspects of Indian culture that have spread on a
global scale. From curries to computer programs, self-realization to the
arts, and well beyond, we are seeing its influence. The popular Indian
art of using henna to create beautiful body designs and patterns only
temporarily affects the surface of the skin. But the influence of India
is likely to leave a permanent - and positive -impact on the world.
Sheela Bhongir is an undergraduate student at California State

University, Northridge studying Urban Studies and GIS. She is working as
an intern on Legatum's new map of the world project.
Namaste. Now Nap Time.
Author: Emily Glazer
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: March 28, 2011
URL:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703386704576186463216602684.html#prin
tMode
Yoga classes for kids are taking off, as advocates say it's especially helpful for those with
focusing problems
A three-year-old doing a downward dog? A four-year-old doing a cobra—and then helping a

stuffed animal stretch into the same pose?
Yoga isn't just good exercise for adults. A growing number of schools, hospitals and studios
say it can also be a boon to kids, helping them relax and focus, and improve their flexibility.
A 2003 study by California State University, Los Angeles found that yoga improved students'
behavior, physical health and academic performance, as well as attitudes toward themselves.
That same year, Leipzig University reported that yoga reduces feelings of helplessness and
aggression, and in the long term helps emotional balance. The benefits of yoga are
particularly strong among children with special needs, research shows.
'A Different Language'
Now thousands of schools across the country—as well as yoga studios and hospitals—are
adding programs that teach children to do the exercises.
Sandy Huffaker for The Wall Street Journal
Breathe Deeply: Yoga class at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif.
In January, Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Southern California added yoga to its
curriculum for 650 students at $20,000 a year. Principal Adriana Chavarin says she has seen
how calm and centered students are after practicing the techniques. At a recent assembly,
students were getting restless as they sat on the floor. Then a few sixth graders spontaneously
led the rest in yoga poses and breathing exercises.
"Every kid in the audience quieted down," says David Miyashiro, the district superintendent.
"It's a different language they all speak now."
Before statewide testing in May, Paul Ecke's teachers plan to lead students in yoga to help
them concentrate and stay calm. Mr. Miyashiro, meanwhile, is working to expand the
program to the entire Encinitas Union School District.
Nearby, the San Diego Center for Children received more than $1.3 million from California's
Mental Health Services Act Innovation grant in February to start a wellness program, which
includes yoga. And the psychiatric unit at the Children's Hospital of Colorado uses yoga with
children ages four to 20 who suffer from issues such as mood disorders, eating disorders or
autism, says Michelle Fury, the hospital's yoga therapist.
Getting kids to stretch and bend often takes a bit of creativity. Donna Freeman, a yoga
instructor in St. Albert, Canada, builds classes around themes. With a beach theme, for
instance, she'll tell a simple story by going through a variety of poses that suggest seaside
scenery or activities, such as a tree pose to suggest looking at palms, then boat and fish poses
to represent being out on the water. During the Chinese New Year, she taught a class around
animals in the zodiac, such as the rabbit or snake.
Yoga "helps to improve self management," Ms. Freeman says. "Children learn where their
body ends and where it begins."
No Miracles?
Still, not all parents are on board with the practice. In some cases, parents have raised
religious objections to yoga, saying that it's a form of worship that conflicts with their beliefs.
So, some instructors avoid certain phrases and exercise positions that have spiritual
connotations. Or they substitute others: At Chabad schools in New York, for instance,
children say "shalom" instead of the traditional "om."
Some doctors, meanwhile, agree that yoga for kids can be beneficial—but they say it's not as
revolutionary as its boosters argue. Kathi Kemper, a professor at the Center for Integrative
Medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, says children's yoga helps with
cardiovascular fitness and cognitive development. But she says you can get the same benefits
from other common exercises, such as ballet or weight lifting, by focusing on your breathing
while you're working out and setting aside time to breathe deeply and relax afterward.
Yoga "might be helpful for people to manage emotions and thoughts," Dr. Kemper says. But
"people can exaggerate the benefits of just about anything."
- Ms. Glazer is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau. She can be
reached at [email protected].
Yoga in America: A checkered history
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-a-chequered-history-of-yoga-in-
america/20110414.htm
If you thought Swami Vivekananda was the first one to suggest yoga to Americans, think
again, says Arthur J Pais
Stefanie Syman, a journalist and yoga aficionado for over 15 years, asserted in her book The
Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America that yoga 'has been the aspect of Asian culture
most widely and readily assimilated' in the United States, outside of food.
Syman named Henry David Thoreau as one of the earliest American yogis. Vivekananda
came to America in 1893 to address the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Thoreau
was a big influence on Mahatma Gandhi's Civil Disobedience campaign against the British.
Thoreau would often meditate from sunrise to noon, and once wrote in a letter, Syman
pointed out in her book published a few months ago, 'To some extent, and at rare intervals, I
even am a Yogin.'
Thoreau, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists in 19th century
Concord, Massachusetts, had enormous interest in Hinduism. Emerson in his long poem
Brahma glanced at Vedantic Hinduism through translations of Hindu epics.
Yoga and Indian meditation caught the imagination of millions of Americans starting four
decades ago, thanks to the efforts of yoga masters and writers B K S Iyengar and Pattabhi
Jois and yoga's popularity with Hollywood and British glitterati including Madonna, Sting,
George Harrison, Christy Turlington and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Christopher
Isherwood.
Yoga continues to win over more and more Americans year after year. Though many
Hollywood celebrities in the 1930s and 1940s were curious about yoga and Vedanta thanks to
Swami Yogananda Paramahamsa, yoga and meditation did not really start catching fire till
the 1960s.
Syman reveals that one of the first prolific American yogis was Pierre Bernard, who brought
tantric yoga into the secret-society culture in America at the turn of the 20th century. He
founded the ultra-exclusive Tantrik Order in 1905 with the forbidding cost in those days, of
$100 for a membership.
Bringing yoga to America
Bernard 'would don a dark velvet cape, pinned just below his neck, with the TO insignia -- a
winged globe framed by a gold star of David -- itself encircled by a snake eating its own tail.
In a photograph from this era, Bernard has a handlebar moustache and long sideburns,'
Syman wrote.
In Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Mark Singleton wrote that Bernard
first gained attention in 1898 when, witnessed by nearly 40 doctors and surgeons, he
demonstrated Kali-Mudra, the simulation of death.
Syman describes a later photo of a similar event: 'Bernard's body is lax and blood dribbles out
of his nose, as a physician, in black cutaway coat fingers his wrist, looking for but not finding
his pulse. Bernard had used pranayam to slow his heartbeat to imperceptibility.'
Bernard was the subject of The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America,
published last year to acclaim. It is written by journalist Robert Love, who reveals that mid-
west born Bernard original name Perry Baker began his teenage yoga studies under a Syrian-
Indian teacher, Sylvais Hamati. Rumor has it Bernard traveled to India in the 1890s.
He went on to launch yoga schools on both coasts. The police often raided his classes, thanks
to rumors that he had sex with underage girls. Researchers and yoga historians believe he was
notorious for his sex rites and philandering, and that his legacy is primarily that of a conman.
'In New York City in 1910, his private clients included Broadway star Lillian Russell,' writes
Love. 'But it was at his country ashram in Nyack, New York, that yoga became a cause c l
bre for the boldfaced names of the Roaring Twenties.'
Russian-born Indra Devi brought glamour and yoga to America. 'Devi's near-immediate
success in Los Angeles reads like some strange fairy tale: A virtually unknown middle-aged
foreigner alights in the City of Angels to teach a relatively obscure type of yoga and is almost
immediately patronized by the city's biggest stars,' Syman wrote.
'But there wasn't anything particularly unusual about the course of events. Devi had lived
most of her life in the company of royalty of some sort and had the assuredness of wealth,
though she had long since dispensed with its outward manifestations.'
Married to a Czech diplomat, Devi learned yoga in Mysore from Sri Krishnamacharya, who
also taught B K S Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. Krishnamacharya had refused to teach Devi
because she was a woman, but he changed his mind at the request of the Mysore raja.
Hollywood sits up and takes notice
The stories of Americans adopting yoga and showing interest in Hinduism were big news in
the 1920s. 'Daughter of Wilson Turns Hindu' The Washington Post headline said in response
to news that Margaret Woodrow Wilson left America for an ashram in India, Syman
revealed.
Her death in 1944 was greeted with The New York Times headline: 'Margaret Woodrow
Wilson Dies a Recluse at 57 in a Religious Colony in India.'
Early celebrity adopters of yoga included Gloria Swanson, Linda Christian and Ruth St
Denis, all Devi's devotees in Los Angeles. Years later, Shirley MacLaine would openly
declare her belief in reincarnation. Goldie Hawn shared her fascination with Buddhism and
Hinduism.
The age of the guru reached its height in the 1960s, yoga historians say, thanks to the counter
culture movement in America, and many gurus including Swami Satchidananda settling
down in America or spending months here and in Europe.
Other gurus like Swami Muktananda, who counted many Hollywood celebrities among his
disciples, also made yoga highly visible in the 1970s and 1980s.
'Tens of thousands of Americans dove headlong into a spiritualised yoga'
Though several yoga teachers were involved in scandals, many Americans were meanwhile
learning about yoga directly from books and demonstration classes.
The author of many books on yoga and a popular figure at the 1969 Woodstock festival,
Satchidananda 'led the high, young multitude in chanting Sanskrit syllables,' Syman wrote.
'Tens of thousands of Americans dove headlong into a spiritualised yoga the kind that took
over your whole life, the kind that made you drop everything to follow your guru around, the
kind that got you to India, no money in your pocket and you don't even care.'
Yoga was also catching up as physical therapy in a big way starting in the 1980s. One reason
for its wide appeal, Syman -- who also reveal the shortcomings of many yoga teachers --
mused, is because 'yoga is so massive and complicated It is so contradictory and baroque that
American society has been able to assimilate any number of versions of it, more or less
simultaneously.
Yoga has also become 'one of the first and most successful products of globalisation,' she
asserted.Robert Love said he knows why so many Hollywood artists are drawn to yoga. 'The
real reason artists do it and then talk about it is that yoga works,' he wrote in an essay.
'Look at the long careers of Madge and Sting; it seems obvious that they're doing something
right. So when Jennifer Aniston wants you to believe that yoga changed her life, there's no
reason to doubt her.'
Meditation might ward off effects of aging
Author: Jo Marchant
Publication: Taipei Times
URL: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2011/04/26/2003501700
A study at a Buddhist retreat suggests relaxation techniques can protect our chromosomes
from degenerating
High in the mountains of northern Colorado, a 30m-tall tower reaches up through the
treetops. Brightly colored and strung with garlands, its ornate gold leaf glints in the sun. With
a shape that symbolizes a giant seated Buddha, this lofty stupa is intended to inspire those on
the path to enlightenment.
Visitors here to the Shambhala Mountain Center meditate in silence for up to 10 hours every
day, emulating the lifestyle that monks have chosen for centuries in mountain refuges from
India to Japan. But is it doing them any good? For two three-month retreats held in 2007, this
haven for the eastern spiritual tradition opened its doors to Western science. As attendees
pondered the “four immeasurables” of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, a laboratory
squeezed into the basement bristled with scientific equipment from brain and heart monitors
to video cameras and centrifuges. The aim: to find out exactly what happens to people who
meditate.
After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally
starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising
psychological and cognitive changes — improvements in perception and wellbeing, for
example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting
caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the
process of aging.
It’s the kind of claim more often associated with pseudoscience. Indeed, since researchers
first started studying meditation, with its close links to religion and spirituality, they have had
a tough time gaining scientific credibility. “A great danger in the field is that many
researchers are also meditators, with a feeling about how powerful and useful these practices
are,” says Charles Raison, who studies mind-body interactions at Emory University in
Atlanta. “There has been a tendency for people to be attempting to prove what they already
know.”
But a new generation of brain-imaging studies and robust clinical trials is helping to change
that. Scientists from a range of fields are starting to compile evidence that rather than simply
being a transient mental or spiritual experience, meditation may have long-term implications
for physical health.
There are many kinds of meditation, including transcendental meditation, in which you focus
on a repetitive mantra, and compassion meditation, which involves extending feelings of love
and kindness to fellow living beings. One of the most studied practices is based on the
Buddhist concept of mindfulness, or being aware of your own thoughts and surroundings.
Buddhists believe it alleviates suffering by making you less caught up in everyday stresses —
helping you to appreciate the present instead of continually worrying about the past or
planning for the future.
“You pay attention to your own breath,” explains Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist who studies the
effects of meditation at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston. “If your mind wanders, you
don’t get discouraged, you notice the thought and think, ‘OK.’”
Small trials have suggested that such meditation creates more than spiritual calm. Reported
physical effects include lowering blood pressure, helping psoriasis to heal, and boosting the
immune response in vaccine recipients and cancer patients. In a pilot study in 2008, Willem
Kuyken, head of the Mood Disorders Centre at Exeter University, showed that mindfulness
meditation was more effective than drug treatment in preventing relapse in patients with
recurrent depression. And in 2009, David Creswell of Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh found that it slowed disease progression in patients with HIV.
Most of these trials have involved short courses of meditation aimed at treating specific
conditions. The Shamatha project, by contrast, is an attempt to see what a longer, more
intensive course of meditation might do for healthy people. The project was coordinated by
neuroscientist Clifford Saron of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of
California. His team advertised in Buddhist publications for people willing to spend three
months in an intensive meditation retreat, and chose 60 participants. Half of them attended in
the spring of 2007, while the other half acted as a control group before heading off for their
own retreat in the autumn.
It sounds simple enough, but the project has taken eight years to organize and is likely to end
up costing around US$4 million (partly funded by private organizations with an interest in
meditation, including the Fetzer Institute and the Hershey Family Foundation). As well as
shipping laptops all over the world to carry out cognitive tests on the volunteers before the
study started, Saron’s team built a hi-tech lab in a dorm room beneath the Shambhala center’s
main hall, enabling them to subject participants and controls to tests at the beginning, middle
and end of each retreat, and worked with “a village” of consulting scientists who each wanted
to study different aspects of the meditators’ performance. “It’s a heroic effort,” says
neuroscientist Giuseppe Pagnoni, who studies meditation at the University of Modena and
Reggio Emilia in Italy.
Many of the tests focused on changes in cognitive ability or regulation of emotions. Soft
white caps trailing wires and electrodes measured the meditators’ brain waves as they
completed grueling computerized tasks to test their powers of attention, and video recordings
captured split-second changes in facial expressions as they watched images of suffering and
war.
PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES
But psychologist Elissa Epel, from the University of California, San Francisco, wanted to
know what the retreat was doing to the participants’ chromosomes, in particular their
telomeres. Telomeres play a key role in the aging of cells, acting like a clock that limits their
lifespan. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, unless an enzyme called
telomerase builds them back up. When telomeres get too short, a cell can no longer replicate,
and ultimately dies.
It’s not just an abstract concept. People with shorter telomeres are at greater risk of heart
disease, diabetes, obesity, depression and degenerative diseases such as osteoarthritis and
osteoporosis. And they die younger.
Epel has been collaborating with Elizabeth Blackburn, also from the University of California,
San Francisco, who shared the 2009 Nobel physiology or medicine prize for her work on
telomeres, to investigate whether telomeres are affected by psychological factors. They found
that at the end of the retreat, meditators had significantly higher telomerase activity than the
control group, suggesting that their telomeres were better protected. The researchers are
cautious, but say that in theory this might slow or even reverse cellular aging. “If the increase
in telomerase is sustained long enough,” says Epel, “it’s logical to infer that this group would
develop more stable and possibly longer telomeres over time.”
Pagnoni has previously used brain imaging to show that meditation may protect against the
cognitive decline that occurs as we age. But the Shamatha project is the first to suggest that
meditation plays a role in cellular aging. If that link is confirmed, he says, “that would be
groundbreaking.”
So how could focusing on your thoughts have such impressive physical effects? The
assumption that meditation simply induces a state of relaxation is “dead wrong,” says Raison.
Brain-imaging studies suggest that it triggers active processes within the brain, and can cause
physical changes to the structure of regions involved in learning, memory, emotion regulation
and cognitive processing.
The question of how the immaterial mind affects the material body remains a thorny
philosophical problem, but on a practical level, “our understanding of the brain-body
dialogue has made jaw-dropping advances in the last decade or two,” says Raison. One of the
most dramatic links between the mind and health is the physiological pathways that have
evolved to respond to stress, and these can explain much about how meditation works.
PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS
When the brain detects a threat in our environment, it sends signals to spur the body into
action. One example is the “fight or flight” response of the nervous system. When you sense
danger, your heart beats faster, you breathe more rapidly, and your pupils dilate. Digestion
slows, and fat and glucose are released into the bloodstream to fuel your next move. Another
stress response pathway triggers a branch of the immune system known as the inflammatory
response.
These responses might help us to run from a mammoth or fight off infection, but they also
damage body tissues. In the past, the trade-off for short bursts of stress would have been
worthwhile. But in the modern world, these ancient pathways are continually triggered by
long-term threats for which they aren’t any use, such as debt, work pressures or low social
status. “Psychological stress activates these pathways in exactly the same way that infection
does,” says Raison.
Such chronic stress has devastating effects, putting us at greater risk of a host of diseases
including diabetes, cancer, heart disease, depression — and death. It also affects our
telomeres. Epel, Blackburn and their colleagues found in 2004 that stressed mothers caring
for a chronically ill child had shorter telomeres than mothers with healthy children. Their
stress had accelerated the aging process.
Meditation seems to be effective in changing the way that we respond to external events.
After short courses of mindfulness meditation, people produce less of the stress hormone
cortisol, and mount a smaller inflammatory response to stress. One study linked meditators’
lower stress to changes in the amygdala — a brain area involved in fear and the response to
threat.
Some researchers think this is the whole story, because the diseases countered most by
meditation are those in which stress plays a major role. But Epel believes that meditation
might also trigger “pathways of restoration and enhancement,” perhaps boosting the
parasympathetic nervous system, which works in opposition to the fight or flight response, or
triggering the production of growth hormone.
In terms of the psychological mechanisms involved, Raison thinks that meditation allows
people to experience the world as less threatening. “You reinterpret the world as less
dangerous, so you don’t get as much of a stress reaction,” he says. Compassion meditation,
for example, may help us to view the world in a more socially connected way. Mindfulness
might help people to distance themselves from negative or stressful thoughts.
The Shamatha project used a mix of mindfulness and compassion meditation. The researchers
concluded that the meditation affected telomerase by changing the participants’ psychological
state, which they assessed using questionnaires. Three factors in particular predicted higher
telomerase activity at the end of the retreat: increased sense of control (over circumstances or
daily life); increased sense of purpose in life; and lower neuroticism (being tense, moody and
anxious). The more these improved, the greater the effect on the meditators’ telomerase.
For those of us who don’t have time for retreats, Epel suggests “mini-meditations” —
focusing on breathing or being aware of our surroundings — at regular points throughout the
day. And though meditation seems to be a particularly effective route to reducing stress and
protecting telomeres, it’s not the only one. “Lots of people have no interest in meditation, and
that’s fine,” says Creswell. Exercise has been shown to buffer the effects of stress on
telomeres, for example, while stress management programs and writing emotional diaries can
help to delay the progression of HIV.
Indeed, Clifford Saron argues that the psychological changes caused by the Shamatha retreat
— increased sense of control and purpose in life — are more important than the meditation
itself. Simply doing something we love, whether meditating or gardening, may protect us
from stress and maybe even help us to live longer. “The news from this paper is the profound
impact of having the opportunity to live your life in a way that you find meaningful.”
For a scientific conclusion it sounds scarily spiritual. But researchers warn that in our
modern, work-obsessed society we are increasingly living on autopilot, reacting blindly to
tweets and e-mails instead of taking the time to think about what really matters. If we don’t
give our minds a break from that treadmill, the physical effects can be scarily real.
A history of meditation
Author:
Publication: Taipei Times
URL: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2011/04/26/2003501700/1
Buddhists in India began to develop meditation as a practice around 500 BC, under the
tutelage of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, but written records of meditation date back as
far as 1500 BC.
Forms of meditation were used in ancient Greece, among early Christians and in Judaism, but
the practice did not become widespread in the West until the 1960s, driven by social change
and a surge of interest in eastern culture.
A government survey in 2007 found that more than 20 million US adults, or 9.4 percent of
the population, had practiced meditation within the past 12 months.
Famous meditators include David Lynch, and the British cabinet ministers Nick Clegg and
William Hague, who have practiced transcendental meditation; Madonna, who goes on silent
retreats; and Meg Ryan, who practices mindfulness.
More than 1,000 scientific studies of meditation in the English language have been
documented.
Katy Perry turns to Hindu meditation
Author: IANS
Publication: IBNLive.com
Date: May 11, 2011
URL: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/katy-perry-turns-to-hindu-meditation/151945-45-75.html
Singer Katy Perry meditates to stay relaxed and says her comedian husband Russell Brand,
who is into Hindu practices, introduced her to it.
"I come from a very non-accepting family, but I'm very accepting. Russell is into Hinduism,
and I'm not (really) involved in it. He meditates in the morning and the evening; I'm starting
to do it more because it really centres me," she told Vanity Fair magazine.
Perry isn't the only one in her family open to other religions and lifestyles, her parents, strict
Christian followers, have also learned to be accepting, reports a website.
"I think sometimes when children grow up, their parents grow up. Mine grew up with me. We
co-exist. I don't try to change them anymore, and I don't think they try to change me. We
agree to disagree... They're happy that things are going well for their three children and that
they're not on drugs. Or in prison," she said.
Katy: Russell is into Hinduism
Author: PTI
Publication: Deccan Chronicle
Date: May 07, 2011
Singer Katy Perry says she is gravitating towards meditation because of husband Russell
Brand, who is into Hinduism.
Brand, who married Perry in India last year, even sought the blessing of a Hindu guru before
the wedding. Perry, who had a strict Christian upbringing, says she is very accepting and
that’s one of the things that keeps their marriage going.
“I come from a very non-accepting family, but I’m very accepting. Russell is into Hinduism,
and I’m not really involved in it. He meditates in the morning and the evening and I’m
starting to do it more because it really centres me,” Perry said in an interview with Vogue
magazine.
“But I just let him be him, and he lets me be me,” added the 26-year-old. Perry, however, still
regrets not having a normal childhood because of her strict parents. “I did not have a
childhood. I was always scared I was going to get bombed when I was there. I have always
been the kid who’s asked ‘Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith,” she said.
Ancient Moves for Orthopedic Problems
Author: Jane E. Brody
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/health/02brody.html?_r=2&emc=eta1
With the costs of medical care spiraling out of control and an ever-growing shortage of
doctors to treat an aging population, it pays to know about methods of prevention and
treatment for orthopedic problems that are low-cost and rely almost entirely on self-care. As
certain methods of alternative medicine are shown to have real value, some mainstream
doctors who “think outside the box” have begun to incorporate them into their practices.
One of them is Loren Fishman, a physiatrist — a specialist in physical and rehabilitative

medicine affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital. Some in the medical
profession would consider Dr. Fishman a renegade, but to many of his patients he’s a miracle
worker who treats their various orthopedic disorders without the drugs, surgery or endless
months of physical therapy most doctors recommend.
Many years ago, I wrote about Dr. Fishman’s nonsurgical treatment of piriformis syndrome,
crippling pain in the lower back or leg caused by a muscle spasm in the buttocks that entraps
the sciatic nerve. The condition is often misdiagnosed as a back problem, and patients
frequently undergo surgery or lengthy physical therapy without relief.
Dr. Fishman developed a simple diagnostic technique for piriformis syndrome and showed
that an injection into the muscle to break up the spasm, sometimes followed by yoga
exercises or brief physical therapy, relieves the pain in an overwhelming majority of cases.
Nowadays yoga exercises form a centerpiece of his practice. Dr. Fishman, a lifelong devotee
of yoga who studied it for three years in India before going to medical school, uses various
yoga positions to help prevent, treat, and he says, halt and often reverse conditions like
shoulder injuries, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and scoliosis. I rarely devote this column to one
doctor’s approach to treatment, and I’m not presenting his approach as a cure-all. But I do
think it has value. And he has written several well-illustrated books that can be helpful if used
in combination with proper medical diagnosis and guidance.
For many years, yoga teachers and enthusiasts have touted the benefits to the body of this
ancient practice, but it is the rare physician who both endorses it and documents its value in
clinical tests. Dr. Fishman has done both. Rotator Cuff Relief
This year, Dr. Fishman received a prize at the International Conference on Yoga for Health
and Social Transformation for a paper he presented on a surprising yoga remedy for rotator
cuff syndrome, a common shoulder injury that causes extreme pain when trying to raise one’s
arm to shoulder height and higher. He described a modified form of a yoga headstand that
does not require standing on the head and takes only 30 seconds to perform, and presented
evidence that it could relieve shoulder pain in most patients, and that adding brief physical
therapy could keep the problem from recurring.
Rotator cuff injuries are extremely common, especially among athletes, gym and sports
enthusiasts, older people, accident victims and people whose jobs involve repeated overhead
motions.
For patients facing surgery to repair a tear in the rotator cuff and many months of
rehabilitation, the yoga maneuver can seem almost a miracle. It is especially useful for the
elderly, who are often poor candidates for surgery.
Dr. Fishman said he successfully treated a former basketball player, who responded
immediately, and a 40-year-old magazine photographer who had torn his rotator cuff while
on assignment. The photographer, he said, had been unable to lift his arm high enough to
shake someone’s hand.
Instead of an operation that can cost as much as $12,000, followed by four months of
physical therapy, with no guarantee of success, Dr. Fishman’s treatment, is an adaptation of a
yoga headstand called the triangular forearm support. His version can be done against a wall
or using a chair as well as on one’s head. The maneuver, in effect, trains a muscle below the
shoulder blade, the subscapularis, to take over the job of the injured muscle, the
supraspinatus, that normally raises the arm from below chest height to above the shoulder.
The doctor discovered the benefit of this technique quite accidentally. He had suffered a bad
tear in his left shoulder when he swerved to avoid a taxi that had pulled in front of his car.
Frustrated by an inability to practice yoga during the month he waited to see a surgeon, one
day he attempted a yoga headstand. After righting himself, he discovered he could raise his
left arm over his head without pain, even though an M.R.I. showed that the supraspinatus
muscle was still torn.
Dr. Fishman, who has since treated more than 700 patients with this technique, said it has
helped about 90 percent of them. “It doesn’t work on everyone — not on string musicians, for
example, whose shoulder muscles are overtrained,” he said in an interview.
In a report published this spring in Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation (an issue of the journal
devoted to therapeutic yoga), he described results in 50 patients with partial or complete tears
of the supraspinatus muscle. The initial yoga maneuver was repeated in physical therapy for
an average of five sessions and the patients were followed for an average of two and a half
years.
The doctor and his co-authors reported that the benefits matched, and in some cases
exceeded, those following physical therapy alone or surgery and rehabilitation. All the yoga-
treated patients maintained their initial relief for as long as they were studied, up to eight
years, and none experienced new tears.
Yoga for Bone Disease
Perhaps more important from a public health standpoint is the research Dr. Fishman is doing
on yoga’s benefits to bones. Bone loss is epidemic in our society, and the methods to prevent
and treat it are far from ideal. Weight-bearing exercise helps, but not everyone can jog, dance
or walk briskly, and repeated pounding on knees and hips can eventually cause joint
deterioration.
Strength training, in which muscles pull on bones, is perhaps even more beneficial, and Dr.
Fishman has observed that osteoporosis and resulting fractures are rare among regular yoga
practitioners.
In a pilot study that began with 187 people with osteoporosis and 30 with its precursor,
osteopenia, he found that compliance with the yoga exercises was poor. But the 11 patients
who did 10 minutes of yoga daily for two years increased bone density in their hips and
spines while seven patients who served as controls continued to lose bone. He noted that
yoga’s benefits also decrease the risk of falls, which can result in osteoporotic fractures.
Medical guidance here is important, especially for older people who may have orthopedic
issues that require adaptations of the yoga moves.
Yoga May Help Low Back Pain. Mental Effects? Not So Much
Author: Jennifer Corbett Dooren
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
URL:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204777904576651230399881192.html?mod
=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_Top
A study believed to be the largest of its kind suggests that the physical aspects of yoga are
effective at relieving low back pain, but it didn't find any evidence that yoga provided
broader mental benefits.
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary
and Alternative Medicine, was published online Monday in the Archives of Internal
Medicine. It was lead by researchers at Seattle's Group Health Research Institute.
Smaller studies in the past have suggested that yoga, which involves stretching exercises
along with a mental component of deep breathing and other relaxation techniques, was
moderately effective at easing symptoms of chronic lower back pain.
It was thought the combination of stretching and relaxation relieved back pain, according to
previous studies.
But the current study found both yoga and stretching were equally as effective, suggesting the
benefits of yoga are attributable to the physical benefits of stretching and not to its mental
components, said the study's lead author, Karen J. Sherman, senior investigator at Group
Health Research Institute.
It involved 228 adults with chronic, low back pain that didn't have a specific cause such as a
spinal disc problem. They were divided into three groups to compare two types of classes
with patients using a self-care book that provided instruction on exercises and stretches to
help treat lower pain.
The people who took classes may have been more likely to complete the exercises. More than
80% of the participants in the self-care group reported reading some of the book and doing
some exercises, but time spent on the exercises was typically less than the class groups.
"They need that class format to get started," Ms. Sherman said.
About 50% of patients in the yoga or stretching classes reported feeling much better or
completely better in relation to their back pain and function compared to about 20% of
patients in the self-care group, said Ms. Sherman.
Twice as many patients in the yoga and stretching groups reported decreased
medication use during the study compared to the self-care group.
About 90 patients each were randomly assigned to attend 75-minute weekly yoga classes or
weekly stretching classes for 12 weeks. The people who attended the classes were also
instructed to practice for 20 minutes a day at home in between classes.
Another group involved 45 patients who were given a 200-page book with advice on
exercising, lifestyle modifications and managing flare-ups.
The type of yoga used in the study was viniyoga, a style of hatha yoga, that adapts exercises
for each person's physical condition. The stretching classes involved 15 stretches targeting
the lower back and legs were which held for a full minute repeated for a total of 52 minutes
of stretching.
The study measured changes in back pain and functional status at the beginning of the study
and at six weeks, 12 weeks and six months.
Write to Jennifer Corbett-Dooren at [email protected]

Yoga shanghaied
Author: Bachi Karkaria
URL: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/erratica/entry/yoga-shanghaied
An Iyengar guru, an Iranian Zoroastrian yoga teacher, students from Kashmir to Kerala,
classes held in a hall above a Hindu temple, and the aroma of roasting sambhar spices
distracting our 7 am shirshasana. The mix was confusing enough without Confucius jumping
into the pot.
But soft power is harder than you think. For the past 10 days, Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh's
already-packed morning class on the second floor of Matunga's Kanyaka Parameshwari
temple has resembled the seven-billion scenario. And again, China and India are responsible.
Ten Chinese yoga students from eight provinces are here to refine their asanas and seek the
correct path to Patanjali. The diversity of their features is an eye-opener to China's ethnic
range. As the class begins, alien accents infiltrate our invocation to the sage, "Yogena
chittasya padena vacham/ malam sarirasya cha vaidyakena..."
The fine-boned Chen Jie is the only one who speaks English and she has now been joined by
Yan, a stylish interpreter with a cascade of salon curls. They softly translate Zubin's attempt
to perfect our asanas and attitudes, his analogies and his factoids. The group huddles together,
trying to remain unobtrusive. They observe the teacher with the unblinking intensity of a
border patrol at Nathu La. But there is only worship in their eyes.
Several of them lean forward to capture Zubin's every action on their ubiquitous touch
phones, including his agarbatti arati before the small Patanjali idol at the session's start. At
first we smirked at this iPhone path to Iyengar yoga, but then we realised that it was akin to
the deaf compensating with sight. They could hear, yes, but they couldn't understand, so for
this group it added up to the same sensory shortfall.
There's only one guy among this group of girls, and he doesn't seem communicative even
with them. He's the exact opposite of the convivial, English-fluent Chang who had come last
year, and enthusiastically partaken of our after-class chatter. And of the esoteric delights of
Madras Café. He may well have ended up speaking Tamil after a couple of more trips. But he
had gone back, and died of the cancer he had hoped to conquer with yoga.
This morning on my way to class, i almost flipped into an involuntary backbend when i saw
the inscrutable Man-churian of the current group furiously skipping rope on the pavement
opposite the Kanyaka Parameshwari temple.
He was totally oblivious of the cows who are a permanent fixture on this Matunga street with
its parikrama of mandirs. If the bovine cluster was bemused by this unusual apparition, it
wasn't apparent to the human eye. Even the devotees, newsboys and schoolchildren kept their
eyes on their sacred or secular destinations.
Considering that there's now a yoga centre on almost every second street in every major
Chinese city, and the reverent crowds that Guruji B K S Iyengar drew on his recent trip, an
oriental guy jumping rope in veshti-bound Matunga isn't really a cultural revolution. It's more
coalescence than collision. And for a country hurtling manically into modernism, ancient
philosophies of whatever provenance are a stabilising Great Leap Backward.
The Chinese are not the only foreigners who periodically spend time in our class.
Yogaficionados from Spain are regulars, as are those from all over the world. But of late it's
been a predominantly Chinese invasion. In branded shorts and trikonasana-embossed tees,
they flock here, to the many other Iyengar yoga centres across India, and to other schools of
this spiritual, and now science endorsed, pursuit. Good sign.
Tai Chi and Tao Te Ching may be winning over the West as well, but we aren't doing too
badly at subverting China softly with our song.
In Pakistan, Yoga Rises Above Its Indian Origins
Author: Bina Shah
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/yoga-pakistan-
india.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=6601395448017A9C560A6132F751AC0D&gwt=pay&a
ssetType=opinion
I first heard of yoga while I was growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, with the arrival on the
Karachi scene of a colorful personality called Professor Moiz Hussain. He had trained at the
Yoga Institute in Mumbai, then branched out into alternative stress-reduction and healing
techniques like reiki from Japan, NLP (neurolinguistic programming) from California and
qigong, with roots in China. His Institute of Mind Sciences and Classical Yoga attracted a
certain type of Karachi woman — affluent and well traveled — who was interested in
developing her mind and body. Slowly at first, one teacher after another emerged to offer
classes. Still, they had to be careful: The 1980s was a time of rigorous Islamization in
Pakistan and cold hostility to India, and anything remotely associated with India or Hinduism
was discouraged if not outlawed.
This particularly affected the arts, namely classical Indian dance; government officials
banned public performances as both “vulgar” and “Indian”; Pakistani students of the
art could not obtain visas to study under gurus in India, and local teachers had to
immigrate to other countries because classical dance became so unpopular they could
not attract students. (Only Kathak, with its Mughal origins in northwestern India before
partition, was looked upon with a less jaundiced eye than the unabashedly Hindu-flavored
Odissi or Bharatanatyam schools of dance.)
The way around this was to introduce yoga as a practice less spiritual than physical, but
yoga classes in Karachi remained small, private and for a select few. Then, in the 1990s,
when state-run television gave way to a profusion of private television channels, yoga found
another outlet: breakfast and morning shows in which a physical activity segment aimed at
housewives often included a 20-minute or half-hour yoga session. Sandwiched in between
advice on the best foods for a baby and how to cook enticing meals for the household, a
nonthreatening form of yoga — no extreme physical poses, just one that could be performed
in modest clothing — was available to women in Pakistan with access to cable channels.
Viewers were encouraged to stretch and breathe to cultivate healthy bodies and minds,
a goal not incompatible with the moderately conservative form of Islam practiced by 90
percent of Pakistanis. Yoga even began to come out into the open, with sessions held in
public parks, where some teachers made mild comparisons between yogic meditation and
Islamic reflection, or the poses in a simple sun salutation and the positions taken in salat, a
ritual Islamic prayer. This opened up yoga to middle-class, conservative Pakistanis who
might have remained hostile to the practice had it been presented as a purely Hindu or Indian
ascetic discipline.
Today, yoga is immensely popular in all cities of Pakistan; a yoga teacher named
Shamshad Haider claims to run 50 yoga clubs in Punjab, and International Yoga Day
has been celebrated in Pakistan for three years in a row. Yoga is practiced all the way
from Chitral in the north to Karachi in the south. There’s a whole crop of younger teachers
now equipped with training from India, Thailand and Bali, as well as from yoga schools in
North America and Britain. Teachers at swank studios in Karachi attract students through
Facebook pages and affiliations with the International Yoga Alliance.
Their classes incorporate styles from hatha, vinyasa flow, ashtanga, even power yoga and
Bikram yoga. They use the Sanskrit names for the poses interchangeably with the English
ones, and both women-only and mixed classes are popular. Meanwhile, yoga still appears on
television, in schools and in park sessions, with women meditating while wearing shalwar
kameezes, or full abayas and hijabs, and men with long beards and shalwar kameezes
performing sun salutations next to men in track pants and T-shirts.
Yoga purists would probably bristle at the attempt to dissociate yoga from Hinduism or
India, but it’s not that different from what’s happening to yoga in the West, with its hot
yoga studios and aerial yoga and Yoga Asana championships. It also reminds me of what
has been happening to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. In the West, Sufism has been
disconnected from its Muslim roots and presented as a universal movement of peace and
tolerance, the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi portrayed as a lovelorn poet singing of love
rather than a conservative Islamic cleric bent on forging a fierce connection with his creator.
A necessary sacrifice, perhaps, to spread the universal message of peace, tolerance and love.
Pakistan, which was amputated from India in 1947, then lured by the promise of power
and richness coming from the Middle East, has never been able to decide whether its
identity is Arab or South Asian. After decades of trying to identify with a purely Islamic
heritage and history, some Pakistanis are finally recognizing that their heritage is unique,
informed by strains of tradition and heritage from many geographical areas: Central Asia and
Persia, as well as India and the Middle East.
Our current challenge is to reconnect with the many sources of our roots and heritage, while
forging a new identity that will serve us well into the future. Pakistan recently unveiled a
1,700-year-old sleeping Buddha statue from an ancient Buddhist site in Bhamala, one of
many that dot Pakistan’s north and northwest — a strong testament to its pre-Islamic
heritage. Progressive historians — admittedly in the minority still — are trying to educate
Pakistani students about their country’s ancient history and religions, after years of being told
that Pakistan’s history begins only with the invasion of Sindh by the Arab conqueror
Muhammed bin Qasim in A.D. 711.
As I practice yoga in the crisp air of a mild Karachi winter, gazing out to the Arabian
Sea, I can’t help wondering whether some of this reconnection might come from yoga.
We move in unison as our teacher calls out the Sanskrit names of the poses called asanas.
Then the call to prayer begins to ring out from a nearby mosque and we fall silent, listening
to the sound of our own breaths and the time-old Arabic words of the azaan. As soon as the
practice is over, I’ll roll up my yoga mat and go find my prayer mat. I’ve never felt so
integrated, so connected to my Islamic heritage and my South Asian roots.
Why is there a fear of Yoga?
Author: Sridharan DV
Publication: Indiafacts.org
URL: http://indiafacts.org/why-fear-yoga/
Monotheism needs a god ‘apart’ from you. For a Hindu the goal is an absolute merger, where
all is one. It’s an existential threat for monotheism to deny a god apart from you.
--------------------------------
Maha @ NamasteNIHao
Hot yoga, beer yoga, abuse & shout yoga, even Christian yoga! This is crass & cultural
perversion that USA has resorted to. What is our govt doing? why aren't we fixing rules and
regulations, why aren't we deciding hw yoga should be taught? Hw much more of perversion
shud we take?
--------------------------------
This Tweet set me wondering.
I did some research. Sure, there are many varieties of Yoga out there. Hot Yoga students do
Yoga in hot humid conditions. If you don’t care for that, there’s Beer Yoga which is done
while drinking cold beer. There are other kinds, too tiresome to list here or to bother with. It
is clear these have mushroomed, triggered by the vogue word that Yoga has become. This
happened to Dosa too, when it became a global darling. There are tens of varieties being
invented to excite and attract the bored classes. We best leave this Yoga marketplace to the
idle class to study the more curious struggles that Yoga has triggered.
There are now Muslim Yoga and Christian Yoga. The latter is of a lesser interest because
Christians, at least in the West, have mostly broken free of any fear of disobedience to a
judgmental god. In fact, some of the finest teachers of classical Yoga are to be found among
them, having been students under traditional Indian Masters. The question of how the clergy
deals with Indian Christians is another matter and I shall return to it later.
The predicament of Islam however is rather dire. Unlike Christians, a majority of Muslims
adhere to core requirements, such as eating only halal food or not eating pork. In fact of late,
the core-list appears to have enlarged resulting in more beards and burkhas to be seen
everywhere.
Their threat perception is well narrated by Rajiv Malhotra, that doughty warrior for Dharma,
in this post which has a video as well on the same subject. There’s also a list of the attempts
made by Islam to cope with the pull of Yoga.
After studying Malhotra’s 10-point list, I classified and reordered it in the following manner.
There are 5 efforts, progressing from banning to ownership of Yoga:
Proscribe: Do not practice Yoga; it is ‘shirk’, i.e., an Islamic offence
Amend: Do not chant Om or mantras nor do Surya Namaskar

Politicize: Yoga propagation is a Hindu Right conspiracy
Adapt: Chant Qu’ranic verses, invoke Allah
Appropriate: Yoga is pre-Hindu, the Qu’ran had referred to it, concept of ‘prana’ is of Arabic
origin.
My question is this: Must Hindus really worry about what’s happening to Yoga here? Or,
must the Muslim leadership do?
To me it is the latter.
Monotheism runs on a single preceptor to obey and a book to abide by. Everything you need
to live by is required to be found within the world these two define.
Hindus on the other hand, are a freewheeling lot, even rowdy I’d say, in their exuberance and
creative individualism. Their culture, ways and places of worship teems with variety. Song,
dance, pageants, colors, fragrances, stories, travels – and oh yes, revered classics of wisdom,
too – are part of their inheritance. Nearly nothing shakes their equanimity, save when they
sense the grossest unfairness to their ways of life.
Quite a contrast with what monotheism dictates.
This line from Malhotra’s post at the above link, holds a tell-tale clue. It is an advisory to a
Muslim who’d practice Yoga:
“Replace silence with chanting Allah’s name”
There you have it: the fear is the silence. Can’t afford it, fill it up.
Yoga seeks to align your body with your mind. Meditation, an adjunct of Yoga trains you to
be still and quiet so that you may give yourself a chance of glimpsing what reality truly is.
Once you have experienced that, all man invented systems become finite sub-sets.
With Yoga and meditation go music, dances and festivals all of which are meant to transport
you, through ecstasy to where Truth reigns. And these would be a threat to a demanding god
too.
Malhotra in that video, narrates a debate he had with a Muslim cleric who claimed ecstatic
Sufis have known oneness too.
Malhotra: So do you agree that in that state there’s no Allah apart from you? All is one?
The cleric quickly modified himself: what Sufis experience is not a total oneness but a
seeming one.
That’s the rub. Monotheism needs a god ‘apart’ from you. For a Hindu the goal is an absolute
merger, where all is one.
It’s an existential threat for monotheism to deny a god apart from you.
Christianity’s experience in India has cautionary lessons for those that’d conquer Hindus with
ideology. Indian converts to Christianity are beginning to assimilate many practices of their
Hindu ancestors. These include wearing jewellery, sporting bindis and other similar overt
symbols that’d mark a Hindu, having ecstatic festivals, circumambulations of holy hills,
prefixing pastors’ names with Shastri or Sadhu, night long vigils to compete with
MahaSivaratri and crafty tweaking of narratives to suggest Christianity was of this very soil
as much as Hinduism itself. Of late churches are being built to look like temples.
I am not here including Christians’ very common practice today of retaining Hindu gods’
names even after converting; that could be a ruse to avail privileges a non-Hindu is not
entitled to, or to avoid unnecessary attention that a Christian name would attract.
None of the above is a grouse. I am merely pointing to a softening of the rigor with which
Christians wore their identity to stand apart when I was a little boy 70 years ago.
You must wonder why.
The reason is this: The inexorable pull towards the Secret of Dharma that the human soul
experiences is of a fatal threat to finite faith systems. Indian Christianity has sensed that pull
on its flock and has begun to concede the ‘deviations’ I listed above, as toffees to humor a
whimpering child.
Indian Muslims are behind that curve, but have sensed what lies ahead. Lately, there’s been a
greater assertions to stand out and apart. But I doubt the prospect of their staying this course.
There are many odds that are stacked against monotheism but I’ll restrict myself to just one
that I feel in my Hindu bones.
Every life form, including the human, is inseparably tethered to a vast barely discernible
Cosmic pool.
People may collectively delude themselves in congregations but when they are alone to
reflect and ask themselves a series of questions, there is no escape from the only conclusion
there can be.
Yoga and meditation are the means by which you are afforded the alone-ness so that you may
experience the merger of yourself with your origins. With nothing intruding, when the stories
you had been fed fall away, you glimpse the Truth, the Eternity, the only permanence.
And thereby hangs the reason for fear of Yoga and meditation for those that wish to drive
their flock away from the Truth.
How Poor Analysis Can Wreck Your Yoga
Author: Sheetal
Publication: Blog.beliefnet.com
URL: http://blog.beliefnet.com/omsweetom/2012/01/how-poor-analysis-can-wreck-your-
yoga.html
I’d like to thank the The New York Times for continuing to fuel the relevancy of the Hindu
American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign. The latest piece in the Times Magazine,
“How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by William Broad, just adds more fodder to the
campaign. Broad’s latest has naturally upset many in the yoga community – it’s a rather
silly, one-sided piece that highlights a handful of people who have suffered injuries due to
their yoga practice. The male college student sitting on his heels in vajrasana “for hours a
day, chanting for world peace” is hardly the typical profile of an everyday yoga practitioner.
It’s also rather curious that Broad had to go back as far as 1973 to find a healthy, 28-year-old
woman who suffered a stroke due to backbending. Admittedly, Broad agrees these are
seemingly rare, but goes on to note that yoga-related injuries have been increasingly since
2000. Pardon my immediate reaction, but isn’t that obvious? As with any activity that
requires physical exertion, it is only logical that as it becomes more popular, the number
practitioners will increase, as will the number of injuries. ”How Zumba Can Wreck Your
Body,” anyone?
Moreover, Broad draws his conclusions from studies that were individual case reports
which, according to the physicans at HAF, carry the stamp of least academic legitimacy
and are effectively, tantamount to anecdotes. And while several systematic, randomized
studies have demonstrated the health benefits of yoga, no large, matched cohort or
epidemiological study has ever revealed the dangers, making me yet again wonder why his
piece received so much space in the magazine.
But, putting aside the absurdity of Broad’s very narrow base of examples, there are two larger
issues which his piece touches upon. The first is essentially the premise of the Take Back
Yoga campaign: Yoga is not a purely physical exercise, and to view it as such is the crux of
the problem. Asana is an important component of yoga, one with countless benefits, and in
today’s body-image obsessed world, it is THE limb that has opened up the world of yoga to
millions. But asana alone is not yoga, and as Glenn Black comments in the piece, “Asana is
not a cure-all.” He is absolutely correct, and I commend his usage of the word “asana”
instead of “yoga.” Asana is posture. Yoga, on the other hand, is a holistic practice rooted
in Hindu philosophy that reaches far beyond the 90 minutes spent on a mat. As we at
HAF have continuously said, “Yoga is a combination of both physical and spiritual exercises,
entails mastery over the body, mind and emotional self, and transcendence of desire.” The
goal of yoga is not physical – it is inner peace and ultimately, the attainment of
liberation from worldly suffering, or moksha.
The purpose of asana is to train and discipline the body to be able to sit in meditation for
extended periods of time. The mental state in which a person approaches their yoga mat is as
important as their physical state. What and how much a person eats and drinks, what she sees
and thinks, how one acts in her life outside of the studio – all of these are variables that
cannot be ignored in a holistic practice. Even a quick perusal of the famous Yoga Sutras by
Sage Patanjali will demonstrate the importance of actions, behavior, and thoughts outside of
the yoga studio. Yoga encompasses concepts such as non-violence, truthfulness, cleanliness
(both physical and mental), contentment with oneself, and moderation of diet. Attempts,
such as Broad’s, to analyze asana and its effects in isolation of a practitioner’s lifestyle
cannot be taken as a serious study on yoga. A dishonest and hurtful person may be able to
twist, contort, and bend into countless asanas, but that doesn’t make him a yogi – it just
makes him flexible.
The second problem, which Broad explicitly covers in his interview with Black, is the surge
of yoga teachers who are not qualified to teach and are thus, prone to pushing their students
too far, leading to injuries. When I began learning yoga, it was one-on-one with an amazing
teacher, Holbrook Newman, who had years of experience and was adamant that I learn the
basics before trying anything complicated. She was particular about my alignment in even
the most basics of asanas and careful about how she taught me more advanced asanas, like
headstand.
While everyone does not have the luxury of having one-on-one sessions to introduce them to
yoga, there wonderful alternatives, like the studio I currently frequent, Ashtanga Yoga New
York (AYNY) run by Eddie Stern. There, yoga is taught in traditional manner and new
students, who receive personalized attention, are taught the basics before they are allowed to
learn more. Despite having practiced for a few years, I was out of class (which was like an
one-on-one session with Eddie) in less than 30 minutes the first three or four times I went to
AYNY. There was no headstand, shoulder stand, nor backbending…and there was no injury.
Contrast that to some of the “Level 1” and “Beginner” classes I have attended over the years
at various studios. Students who could barely manage downward dog were attempting
headstands and wheel pose in class. In a class of 20 or 30, with only one teacher, that is a
recipe for disaster. To compound the issue, in an effort to not exclude anyone (or perhaps
make as much money as possible, depending upon the studio), its appears that the majority of
yoga classes are “open to all levels” leaving the decision of which asanas to attempt and how
far to push the body up to the students. As one of the newer students at AYNY, I know the
feeling of practicing next to someone who has been attending class for six, seven, or eight
years. It’s incredibly awe-inspiring and intimidating at the same time. It can be hard not to
gawk and think to myself, “Yes, I can do that too.” I generally come back to my senses and
to my own practice thanks to all the Take Back Yoga efforts I’ve been involved with at HAF.
And then there is also Eddie hovering over me saying, “No more. You’re done for the day.”
And there’s no arguing with that.
Already send KD
Yoga and Injuries

Author: David
Publication: Youryogamn.com
URL: http://www.youryogamn.com/blog/2012/1/8/yoga-and-injuries.html
The New York Times printed a controversial article last week about yoga and injuries.
Various yoga teachers have penned responses, but I’ve yet to see one that I find fully
satisfying (the one that came closest was by Michael Taylor of Strala Yoga, and I also
enjoyed Eddie Stern's witty riposte). In my opinion, that is because the Times does
something a little sneaky: it lays out what purports to be a scientific debate, but puts a
provocative and even sensationalist spin on it. Presumably they did that so the article
would create more of a stir. They succeeded in that regard. Unfortunately, their decision to
court controversy also means that any yoga teacher trying to respond is forced into a
defensive posture from which it is very difficult to emerge in a good light.
The Times article is predicated on several anecdotes of people getting seriously hurt while
doing yoga postures. It cites a new book by a fellow New York Times columnist as evidence
of the dangers of yoga (it also features a prominent direct hyperlink to buy the book, a fact
which some have argued casts the whole article in a dubious light). It also cites Glenn Black,
a yoga teacher, as saying that yoga as it is taught today is too dangerous for most people.
The dilemma for any yoga teacher trying to answer these claims is this. If you argue that yoga
in general is very safe, you look like you’re ignoring the “evidence” contained in the article.
If, on the other hand, you accept that much yoga is dangerous, but claim that your way of
teaching it is somehow safer, you’re both undermining the yoga community as a whole and
setting yourself up for a hubristic fall.
When the choice you’re offered is “would you like to be punched in the face or in the balls,”
the most appropriate step is usually to figure out how you got tricked into such a lousy
dilemma. Often, when you uncover the hidden assumptions or equivocations, you can
dissolve the problem rather than attempting the impossible task of solving it.
Where the Times went wrong
In this case, I think the overlooked element in the Times article is a logical sleight of hand.
The main complaint in the piece appears to be that there is a large incidence of injuries
among yoga practitioners, ranging from relatively minor muscular-skeletal strains and pulls,
all the way to debilitating strokes. There is also a thinly veiled insinuation that poorly trained
and over-zealous teachers are largely to blame. These teachers are accused of lacking
anatomical knowledge, fostering a competitive environment, and pushing their students to
over-exert themselves (sometimes literally pushing them).
This argument conflates several legitimate points with a far more questionable one. The
legitimate points:
1) There are a lot of undertrained teachers, particularly with respect to physiology.

2) There is a dangerously competitive environment at a lot of yoga studios.
3) If people over-exert themselves, they are very likely to get hurt.
No one who understands the state of yoga in America today would dispute any of those
points. But all these pretty obvious truths mask a huge leap in logic that is buried in the
article. The author jumps from the above premises to the conclusion that you’re more likely
to get hurt doing yoga than if you do other forms of exercise. And that, in my opinion, is
completely unsubstantiated and probably wrong.
Let’s get this straight. Yes, you can hurt yourself doing yoga poses. To paraphrase Bryan
Kest, any physical movement you do without paying attention is liable to hurt you. If you do
it mindlessly, you can herniate a disk bending over to tie your shoe, or poke your eye out
trying to brush your teeth. The question though, is whether you’re more likely to get hurt
doing yoga poses than doing the alternatives. And there’s at least one excellent reason to
believe that you’re actually far less likely to get hurt in yoga.
A revolutionary approach to fitness
In competitive sports, you’re encouraged to endure extreme physical strain. In many gym and
personal-training environments, the emphasis is placed on aesthetics and short-term
performance at the expense of long-term, sustainable wellness. And if you eschew physical
exercise completely, you’re likely to suffer from far worse ill-health effects than any of the
above.
In a yoga class on the other hand, you are actively encouraged to cultivate sensitivity,
and to balance your ambition for change with an acceptance and appreciation for how
and who you already are. That is a revolutionary approach to physical fitness, in which we
cultivate wisdom while we work out. It also makes us far less likely to hurt ourselves.
Polluted practice
Certainly, where yoga has been polluted by prevailing attitudes about fitness (it’s about
looking good or performing extreme feats), it is probably about as dangerous as other forms
of physical exercise. Maybe there are even some circumstances where it is more dangerous,
because it combines stretching with movement, which can make joints vulnerable if the
teacher or student is careless. It’s also true that some of the contortions and inversions that
have become popular in many mainstream classes put risky strains on the body if rushed into
without adequate preparation, or if over-practiced even with the right preparation. However,
the Times article presents a false dichotomy between the two extremes of recklessness and
paranoia. Missing from that caricature is the yogic happy medium that combines caution with
curiosity.
Ultimately, the Times article provides no evidence that yoga classes on the whole are
any more dangerous than other exercise classes. I haven’t been able to find any statistics
on the prevalence of injuries from yoga classes versus from running, lifting weights, P90X,
CrossFit, step aerobics, Zumba, deep knee bends, silly walks, etc. But if those statistics have
indeed been collected somewhere, my bet would be that yoga comes out among the
safest exercise options, because of the point made above: only in yoga are you actively
encouraged to practice mindfully and sensitively.
Of course, there are studios where that’s not the case. And there are students who will ignore
the teacher no matter how many times they emphasize listening to one’s body and not
pushing on vulnerable joints and junctures. But a few scattered anecdotes prove nothing.
It’s extremely sad that some people have suffered strokes that were triggered by a yoga pose.
But I have also known young, healthy people who have suffered a heart attack and died while
jogging. Nevertheless, physical exercise is clearly one of the most urgently needed remedies
for our society’s current epidemic of obesity and general poor health. When done mindfully,
exercise is not only more effective on a physical level, but can also begin to heal emotional
and psychological problems, and be a gateway to incredible personal healing and growth. It
can promote love and creativity, and a sense of community and responsibility.
My story
My own personal story is very different from those that are portrayed in the Times article.
Years of competitive sports, followed by several more years of abusive weight training,
completely destroyed my body. I had next to no range of motion in my ankles and hips,
severely degenerated knee cartilege, and the beginnings of vertebral problems in both my
lumbar and cervical spine. Since I traded a weight bench for a rubber mat, my yoga
practice has healed me of all but a trace of these ailments. And the worst injury I’ve ever
sustained from my years of yoga practice is a pulled muscle in my shoulder that hurt for a
week. I know there are many others like me who have had physical health and the love of life
that is our birthright restored to them through yoga.
I would like to close this post with some advice based on my own experience. This advice is
for yoga practitioners, yoga teachers, and the New York Times, in order.
Yoga Practitioners
To paraphrase Bryan Kest again, the harder you are on anything, the quicker it will wear out.
Exercise the principle of caution when you practice. And when the teacher says “listen to
your body,” “back off,” etc., take their words seriously.
Remember that a one-speed practice is not going to enable you to adapt to your changing
needs. That's one reason why we incorporate gyrokinesis-based movements in our warm ups
at Your Yoga, and it’s also why we’re about to add a yin-style “Slow Flow” class on
weekday evenings. Your body (and spirit) needs different things at different times, and you
need to cultivate sensitivity in order to make the right choices in your practice.
The best way I know of cultivating that sensitivity is to start a home practice that incorporates
a gentler approach than your typical sweaty vinyasa class. That practice might only last a few
minutes, but that is plenty if you do it regularly. My biggest tip: make it easy to do. Commit
to literally just one minute. You don’t need to unfurl your mat, or to change into your yoga
gear. Do it on the floor in your jeans. Just one minute a day of one yoga pose. Probably what
will happen is that once you get going you won’t want to stop, and will at least do a few
minutes. This is the single biggest injury-proofing step you can take.
Yoga Teachers
(i) Accept your responsibilities.
You are guiding people through a challenging physical practice. It is up to you to make sure
you are well educated about the body and what it can take. The Times is right to point out one
issue that the yoga community has been sweeping under the rug for far too long, which is the
widespread lack of anatomical knowledge among teachers. Most yoga training programs
skimp on the anatomy and physiology, and it’s easy to see why. The fact is, there’s just way
too much to cram into 200 hours or even 500 hours, which are the typical lengths of teacher
training programs. Anatomy and physiology are technical and challenging subjects, so
they’re the easiest ones to jettison. That means as a teacher you have to go the extra mile and
learn on your own. Sign up for some seminars or workshops. Among the workshops Megan
and I have found the most useful are those offered by Gil Hedley, Tom Myers and Amy
Matthews.
(ii) Don’t try to claim responsibility for that which you cannot control.
In addition to making sure you know what’s up, you also need to communicate clearly to
your students that they have an equal share of responsibility for their experience. Often,
students will automatically trust you, since you’re an authority figure of sorts. The problem
is, your students’ respect can tickle your ego until you feel like encouraging it to grow to an
unhealthy degree. It can also be in your financial interests to encourage students to believe
you have all the answers – a problem that is actively worsened by the reprehensible practice
of compensating teachers based on the number of students who show up for their class; a
practice which I urge all studio owners to abandon. You need to let your students know that
what matters most of all is their practice. That’s why we don’t post individual teacher
schedules: we want people to come for their practice, not for your class. Sure, you won’t get
as much credit when a student has an amazing practice - but that credit didn’t belong to you
in the first place. Empowering the student leads to a much healthier relationship all around.
The New York Times
Many of us in the yoga community appreciate your ongoing efforts to stimulate intelligent
debate about the practice of yoga, which is becoming a major lynchpin of modern American
culture. You are one of the most widely read and influential newspapers in the country.
Perhaps you can bear those facts in mind as you make editorial decisions relating to yoga.
Putting a sensationalist slant on articles may get you more quick hits in the short run, but in
the long run it may undermine your reputation as a reliable source of information, and may
even discourage people from making healthy choices — like taking up yoga.
- David
Already send KD
Yoga Won't Wreck Your Body But May Make You More Hindu
Author: Suhag A. Shukla, Esq.
Publication: Huffington Post
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suhag-a-shukla-esq/yoga-wont-wreck-your-
body_b_1195754.html
Yoga can wreck your body and make you fat -- at least according to New York Times science
writer William Broad. Between Maureen Dowd's column back in October, "How Garbo
Learned to Stand on Her Head," on Broad's upcoming book, "The Science of Yoga: The
Myths and the Rewards," and Broad's own piece last week, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your
Body," Broad has taken up prime journalistic real estate to grind his axe with yoga. His
conclusions about yoga, however, are premised on anecdotes about asana, not yoga, and the
only thing really getting fat is the gap between the popular understanding of yoga and what
yoga really is.
Yoga is a combination of both physical and spiritual exercises, the key word being
"combination" with an emphasis on the spiritual. Yoga is the practice of preparing oneself to
yoke, unite or experience the Divine within (i.e. the individual self with the Cosmic Self).
Yoga is about attaining moksha, or liberation, from worldly suffering and the cycle of birth
and rebirth. Yoga is a holistic and spiritual system of living that is essential to the
understanding and practice of Hinduism. What yoga is not is asana alone.
There are eight limbs of yoga:
1. Yama (restraints)
2. Niyama (observances)
3. Asana (posture)
4. Pranayama (mastery of breath)
5. Pratyahara (withdrawal)
6. Dharana (concentration)
7. Dhyana (meditation)
8. Samadhi (higher levels of meditation)
Thousands of years of sage experience have revealed that there is a rhyme and reason
to the limbs and the order in which aspiring yogis are to incorporate them into their
lives. But before even stepping onto the mat, it is abundantly clear that the contortion circus
many yoga magazines and classes appear to be, as well as the instances from which Broad
draws his conclusions, are in direct opposition to key principles of the first two limbs of yoga
-- the yama of ahimsa, meaning the practice of non-hurting, including oneself, and the
niyama of brahmacharya, or the exercise of moderation and self-control (not just sexual).
Analyzing yoga as only exercise and then labeling it as hazardous to one's health is a false
equation because yoga doesn't equal asana. And therein lies the crux of the problem of not
only Broad's theses, but the secular and physical fixation in which the West -- and sometimes
the East in mimicking the West -- has cloaked this ancient spiritual tradition. As a result, we
are now bombarded with Naked Yoga, Hip Hop Yoga, Hot Yoga, Antigravity Yoga,
Christian Yoga ... the list is long and just as ludicrous. The truth is that none of these are yoga
simply because they incorporate some form of asana and say they are. What's the saying?
"You can put lipstick on a pig..."
Almost three years ago, the Hindu American Foundation launched its Take Back Yoga
Project (TBY). The initial aim was simple: to bring about acknowledgement of yoga's Hindu
roots by highlighting not only the delinking of yoga from its spiritual framework by the yoga
industry, but also the erroneous idea that yoga is primarily a physical practice based on asana.
But as more than 20 million Americans dabble in "yoga" and the $6 billion yoga industry
continues to bloat, the importance and scope of TBY has evolved from one of identity to that
of filling in the public knowledge gap.
Just as equating yoga with only asana is a half-truth (more like a 1/8th-truth), so too is
ignoring the spiritual, metaphysical Truths upon which yoga rests. Ever been to a studio
which displays an Aum (Om) on its walls or a class which begins with the chanting of it?
Aum, according to the Vedas (Hinduism's most sacred texts), is the primordial sound that
resonated at the creation of our Universe and continues to resonate in each of us and all of
existence. Ever close a session with hands at your heart and the utterance of "Namaste -- the
Divine/Light in me bows to the Divine/Light in you"? Namaste encompasses the essential
teachings of Hinduism that God is both immanent and transcendent and we all are inherently
Divine. How about a class focused on sun salutations or Surya namaskar? Prostration to the
sun was central to ancient Hindu worship and continues to be relevant. Chakras out of sync?
Chakras are first mentioned in the Vedas and detailed throughout the Upanishads.
It is also problematic to approach the path of raja yoga, of which hatha and kriya yoga are a
part, as a stand-alone practice. The full benefits of yoga cannot be experienced without also
treading the sister paths of jnana yoga (path of knowledge), bhakti yoga (path of devotion to
God) and karma yoga (path of selfess action) or the sister tradition of Ayurveda.
TBY's quest to educate the public requires being truthful about all of the aspects of yoga,
even if it means that many people might steer clear of yoga or miss out on its universal
physical, mental and spiritual benefits because it is rooted in "religion." But as HAF states in
the position paper that formed the basis of TBY, "Hinduism, as a non-proselytizing religion,
never compels practitioners of yoga to profess allegiance to the faith or convert. Yoga is a
means of spiritual attainment for any and all seekers."
Ironically, while much of the yoga industry and mainstream media perpetuate the yoga is
asana formula with an occasional nod to pranayama, the leadership of a number of the
world's religions, such as the Vatican, warn their flock that yoga may lead one into exploring
and experiencing Hindu belief and practice. I have to say, I concur. True yoga will not wreck
your body or make you fat, but it may just open your heart, increase your capacity to see and
be divine, and lead you towards a more pluralistic, Hindu view of life.
How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
Author: William J. Broad
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-
body.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&hp
On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose
devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master
class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in
Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in
solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby
Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens.
He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out:
Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the
virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to
him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found
myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I
could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then,
in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many
diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a
source only of healing and never harm.
At Sankalpah Yoga, the room was packed; roughly half the students were said to be teachers
themselves. Black walked around the room, joking and talking. “Is this yoga?” he asked as
we sweated through a pose that seemed to demand superhuman endurance. “It is if you’re
paying attention.” His approach was almost free-form: he made us hold poses for a long time
but taught no inversions and few classical postures. Throughout the class, he urged us to pay
attention to the thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up
to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India,
he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist.
Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way — pop, pop, pop.
After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding
only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder
stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is
more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But
then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of
people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.
Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because
most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but
inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for
articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for
people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say,
but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”
Black seemingly reconciles the dangers of yoga with his own teaching of it by working hard
at knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something — the shoulder stand, the headstand or
putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.” Though he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a
legendary Manhattan-based physical therapist who devised a method of massage and
alignment for actors and dancers, he acknowledges that he has no formal training for
determining which poses are good for a student and which may be problematic. What he does
have, he says, is “a ton of experience.”
“To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘O.K.,
we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’ — it just doesn’t work.”
According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing
yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga
typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an
outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a
couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures
despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle
alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding
popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to
what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an
abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize
when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing
people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people,
pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with
their egos.”
When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black
tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”
“They look at me like I’m crazy,” he goes on to say. “And I know if they continue, they
won’t be able to take it.” I asked him about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-
known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body
forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The
whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.” He said he had seen some “pretty gruesome hips.”
“One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints,” Black told me.
“The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements.” I asked if
she still taught. “Oh, yeah,” Black replied. “There are other yoga teachers that have such bad
backs they have to lie down to teach. I’d be so embarrassed.”
Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is
described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to
calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower
your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life.
But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain.
Jagannath G. Gune, who helped revive yoga for the modern era, made no allusion to injuries
in his journal Yoga Mimansa or his 1931 book “Asanas.” Indra Devi avoided the issue in her
1953 best seller “Forever Young, Forever Healthy,” as did B. K. S. Iyengar in his seminal
“Light on Yoga,” published in 1965. Reassurances about yoga’s safety also make regular
appearances in the how-to books of such yogis as Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois and
Bikram Choudhury. “Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda, a
guru who made 10 world tours and founded ashrams on several continents.
But a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people,
a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga
injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals —
among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American
Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent
disabilities. In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided
to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as
vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty
walking, running and climbing stairs.
Doctors traced the problem to an unresponsive nerve, a peripheral branch of the sciatic,
which runs from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the legs. Sitting in vajrasana
deprived the branch that runs below the knee of oxygen, deadening the nerve. Once the
student gave up the pose, he improved rapidly. Clinicians recorded a number of similar cases
and the condition even got its own name: “yoga foot drop.”
More troubling reports followed. In 1972 a prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W.

Ritchie Russell, published an article in The British Medical Journal arguing that, while
rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in relatively young, healthy
people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but
also from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in whiplash —
or certain yoga poses. Normally, the neck can stretch backward 75 degrees, forward 40
degrees and sideways 45 degrees, and it can rotate on its axis about 50 degrees. Yoga
practitioners typically move the vertebrae much farther. An intermediate student can easily
turn his or her neck 90 degrees — nearly twice the normal rotation.
Hyperflexion of the neck was encouraged by experienced practitioners. Iyengar emphasized

that in cobra pose, the head should arch “as far back as possible” and insisted that in the
shoulder stand, in which the chin is tucked deep in the chest, the trunk and head forming a
right angle, “the body should be in one straight line, perpendicular to the floor.” He called the
pose, said to stimulate the thyroid, “one of the greatest boons conferred on humanity by our
ancient sages.”
Extreme motions of the head and neck, Russell warned, could wound the vertebral arteries,
producing clots, swelling and constriction, and eventually wreak havoc in the brain. The
basilar artery, which arises from the union of the two vertebral arteries and forms a wide
conduit at the base of the brain, was of particular concern. It feeds such structures as the pons
(which plays a role in respiration), the cerebellum (which coordinates the muscles), the
occipital lobe of the outer brain (which turns eye impulses into images) and the thalamus
(which relays sensory messages to the outer brain). Reductions in blood flow to the basilar
artery are known to produce a variety of strokes. These rarely affect language and conscious
thinking (often said to be located in the frontal cortex) but can severely damage the body’s
core machinery and sometimes be fatal. The majority of patients suffering such a stroke do
recover most functions. But in some cases headaches, imbalance, dizziness and difficulty in
making fine movements persist for years.
Russell also worried that when strokes hit yoga practitioners, doctors might fail to trace their
cause. The cerebral damage, he wrote, “may be delayed, perhaps to appear during the night
following, and this delay of some hours distracts attention from the earlier precipitating
factor.”
In 1973, a year after Russell’s paper was published, Willibald Nagler, a renowned authority
on spinal rehabilitation at Cornell University Medical College, published a paper on a strange
case. A healthy woman of 28 suffered a stroke while doing a yoga position known as the
wheel or upward bow, in which the practitioner lies on her back, then lifts her body into a
semicircular arc, balancing on hands and feet. An intermediate stage often involves raising
the trunk and resting the crown of the head on the floor. While balanced on her head, her
neck bent far backward, the woman “suddenly felt a severe throbbing headache.” She had
difficulty getting up, and when helped into a standing position, was unable to walk without
assistance. The woman was rushed to the hospital. She had no sensation on the right side of
her body; her left arm and leg responded poorly to her commands. Her eyes kept glancing
involuntarily to the left. And the left side of her face showed a contracted pupil, a drooping
upper eyelid and a rising lower lid — a cluster of symptoms known as Horner’s syndrome.
Nagler reported that the woman also had a tendency to fall to the left.
Her doctors found that the woman’s left vertebral artery, which runs between the first two
cervical vertebrae, had narrowed considerably and that the arteries feeding her cerebellum
had undergone severe displacement. Given the lack of advanced imaging technologies at the
time, an exploratory operation was conducted to get a clearer sense of her injuries. The
surgeons who opened her skull found that the left hemisphere of her cerebellum suffered a
major failure of blood supply that resulted in much dead tissue and that the site was seeped in
secondary hemorrhages.
The patient began an intensive program of rehabilitation. Two years later, she was able to
walk, Nagler reported, “with [a] broad-based gait.” But her left arm continued to wander and
her left eye continued to show Horner’s syndrome. Nagler concluded that such injuries
appeared to be rare but served as a warning about the hazards of “forceful
hyperextension of the neck.” He urged caution in recommending such postures, particularly
to individuals of middle age.
The experience of Nagler’s patient was not an isolated incident. A few years later, a 25-year-
old man was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, complaining of blurred
vision, difficulty swallowing and controlling the left side of his body. Steven H. Hanus, a
medical student at the time, became interested in the case and worked with the chairman of
the neurology department to determine the cause (he later published the results with several
colleagues). The patient had been in excellent health, practicing yoga every morning for a
year and a half. His routine included spinal twists in which he rotated his head far to the left
and far to the right. Then he would do a shoulder stand with his neck “maximally flexed
against the bare floor,” just as Iyengar had instructed, remaining in the inversion for about
five minutes. A series of bruises ran down the man’s lower neck, which, the team wrote in
The Archives of Neurology, “resulted from repeated contact with the hard floor surface on
which he did yoga exercises.” These were a sign of neck trauma. Diagnostic tests revealed
blockages of the left vertebral artery between the c2 and c3 vertebrae; the blood vessel there
had suffered “total or nearly complete occlusion” — in other words, no blood could get
through to the brain.
Two months after his attack, and after much physical therapy, the man was able to walk with
a cane. But, the team reported, he “continued to have pronounced difficulty performing fine
movements with his left hand.” Hanus and his colleagues concluded that the young man’s
condition represented a new kind of danger. Healthy individuals could seriously damage their
vertebral arteries, they warned, “by neck movements that exceed physiological tolerance.”
Yoga, they stressed, “should be considered as a possible precipitating event.” In its report, the
Northwestern team cited not only Nagler’s account of his female patient but also Russell’s
early warning. Concern about yoga’s safety began to ripple through the medical
establishment.
These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety
Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after
years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then
they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive
reporting — they reveal trends rather than totals — but the spike was nonetheless statistically
significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those
suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds
of therapists.
Around this time, stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times
reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for
example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One
specialist noted that ligaments — the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a
joint — failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and
dislocations.
In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and
Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors.
The answers to the survey’s central question — What were the most serious yoga-related
injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen? — revealed that the largest number
of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of
prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The
respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in
some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of
risk — nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warning — pointed to a decided
shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.
In recent years, reformers in the yoga community have begun to address the issue of yoga-
induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff — a yoga instructor and
therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina
— revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and
after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into
the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her
hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year
of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again. The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin
Quistgaard, described reinjuring a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class. “I’ve experienced how
yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt — and I’ve heard
the same from plenty of other yogis.”
One of the most vocal reformers is Roger Cole, an Iyengar teacher with degrees in
psychology from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. Cole has written
extensively for Yoga Journal and speaks on yoga safety to the American College of Sports
Medicine. In one column, Cole discussed the practice of reducing neck bending in a shoulder
stand by lifting the shoulders on a stack of folded blankets and letting the head fall below it.
The modification eases the angle between the head and the torso, from 90 degrees to perhaps
110 degrees. Cole ticked off the dangers of doing an unmodified shoulder stand: muscle
strains, overstretched ligaments and cervical-disk injuries.
But modifications are not always the solution. Timothy McCall, a physician who is the
medical editor of Yoga Journal, called the headstand too dangerous for general yoga
classes. His warning was based partly on his own experience. He found that doing the
headstand led to thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition that arises from the compression of
nerves passing from the neck into the arms, causing tingling in his right hand as well as
sporadic numbness. McCall stopped doing the pose, and his symptoms went away. Later, he
noted that the inversion could produce other injuries, including degenerative arthritis of the
cervical spine and retinal tears (a result of the increased eye pressure caused by the pose).
“Unfortunately,” McCall concluded, “the negative effects of headstand can be insidious.”
Almost a year after I first met Glenn Black at his master class in Manhattan, I received an e-
mail from him telling me that he had undergone spinal surgery. “It was a success,” he wrote.
“Recovery is slow and painful. Call if you like.”
The injury, Black said, had its origins in four decades of extreme backbends and twists.
He had developed spinal stenosis — a serious condition in which the openings between
vertebrae begin to narrow, compressing spinal nerves and causing excruciating pain. Black
said that he felt the tenderness start 20 years ago when he was coming out of such poses as
the plow and the shoulder stand. Two years ago, the pain became extreme. One surgeon said
that without treatment, he would eventually be unable to walk. The surgery took five hours,
fusing together several lumbar vertebrae. He would eventually be fine but was under
surgeon’s orders to reduce strain on his lower back. His range of motion would never be the
same.
Black is one of the most careful yoga practitioners I know. When I first spoke to him, he said
he had never injured himself doing yoga or, as far as he knew, been responsible for harming
any of his students. I asked him if his recent injury could have been congenital or related to
aging. No, he said. It was yoga. “You have to get a different perspective to see if what you’re
doing is going to eventually be bad for you.”
Black recently took that message to a conference at the Omega Institute, his feelings on the
subject deepened by his recent operation. But his warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I was
a little more emphatic than usual,” he recalled. “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea
or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’
A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”
This article is adapted from “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards,” by William J.
Broad, to be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Broad is a senior science writer at
The Times.
Editor: Sheila Glaser

Om my God, who wrecked our yoga? The Dirty Picture of a 5 bn
dollar industry
Author: Sandip Roy
Publication: Firstpost.com
URL: http://www.firstpost.com/living/om-my-god-who-wrecked-our-yoga-the-dirty-picture-
of-a-5-bn-dollar-industry-183391.html
Should yoga come with a statutory warning? Practising yoga can be injurious to health.
The New York Times seems to think so. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it
can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a
general class,” says yoga guru Glenn Black in a five-page magazine story How Yoga Can
Wreck Your Body by its science writer William Broad. It has unleashed such a storm of
protests, the site had to stop accepting comments on the story.
The main critique is that the story states the obvious. Headstands are not for everyone.
Duh, says a blog on Spaweekly.
Why not publish “How Running Can Wreck Your Knees?” or “How Moving A Refrigerator
Can Crush Your Toes, Break Your Back, and Rip Your Rotator Cuff?”… The truth is, there’s
no fail-safe sport, activity or product on the planet. However, in this 5 page article, William J.
Broad decided to collect every example of negative yoga experiences (fishing back to random
incidents from nearly half a century) and jolt the 20 million Americans who have turned to
yoga for fitness, mind/body renewal, and inner peace.
Perhaps Broad’s book (from which the NY Times article is excerpted) is more balanced.
According to an earlier column by Maureen Dowd, the book also says yoga can result in
surges of sex hormones or what one yogini calls the “best sex she never had”. Phew. Thank
god for that.
But the excerpt, as it stands, is a bunch of anecdotes dressed up to sound like a contorted
expose — The Dirty Picture of yoga. But it has also made one thing crystal clear. Yoga
might be India’s biggest export to the West but this is now an American story about
something that has become a Western form of exercise. There’s nothing very Indian about it.
No Indians were harmed in the course of researching this story. No desis were interviewed
for the New York Times article. No Indians show up in The Guardian’s follow up storyabout
the “ferocious backlash” either. The few desi names in there are of the yoga brand masters —
BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois or Bikram Choudhury. They only show up as brands.
Anyone can sell yoga and it seems everyone does. About 20 million Americans are doing
yoga according to the Times. It’s a 5 plus billion dollar industry. Once you might have
needed the Indian seal of authenticity to sell yoga to the West. Now you don’t even need that.
I admit I am one of those Indians who don’t do yoga. Not because I was scared of strokes,
yoga foot drop, hurting cerebral arteries, retinal tears or degenerative arthritis of the cervical
spine or any of the yoga horrors The Times throws at the reader. I just would not know a
downward dog if it bit me. So it is hard for me to read the New York Times “attack” on yoga
as any kind of attack on India or the Hindu way of life.
Obviously the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which had started the Take Back Yoga
campaign, thinks otherwise. It has launched its own broadside against the Times accusing its
writer William Broad of using “prime journalistic real estate to grind his axe with yoga”. It is
a “silly, one-sided piece that highlights a handful of people who have suffered injuries due to
their yoga practice,” writes Sheetal Shah, the foundation’s senior director on Belief.net.
In fact, argues the HAF, Broad inadvertently proves HAF’s main point. The West has
reduced yoga to asanas. Asanas are really just one of the eight limbs of yoga. Delinking yoga
from its spiritual framework, its Hindu roots, is the crux of the problem.
“Analyzing yoga as only exercise and then labeling it as hazardous to one’s health is a false
equation because yoga doesn’t equal asana,” writes the HAF.
Perhaps the New York Times should have titled its story How Asanas Can Wreck Your
Body. I am not sure the HAF would have been particularly happy with that either.
The fact is no one is ready to give yoga “back” to the Hindu American Foundation. This is
now big business. That is why this article has pissed off so many people. Could it hurt brand
Yoga? In the free market of yoga – Bikram, Iyengar, Ashtanga, Power, Kundalini – everyone
wants to sell their brand as the Number One brand. There’s even a hot and sexy yoga video –
the Equinox fitness chain’s yoga video, where a woman in a black bra and panties contorts
herself while a man sleeps on a mussed up bed next to her. That’s got yogis‘ leotards in a
twist.
The video is “just emblematic of the Western commercialization of yoga,” says Suhag Shukla
of the Hindu American Foundation to the Washington Post. “You know, the whole purpose
of the physical asanas [poses] is to prepare your body to sit still and focus. It’s not about
having a cute ass.”
But when something becomes as big business as yoga has become, it’s all about the cute ass
aka the bottomline.
As the Ashtanga New York group writes in its own pushback story (How the New York
Times Can Wreck Yoga):
When there is a great potential for making money, quality is usually the first thing to be
sacrificed. Fast food, anyone? It is unfortunate that this is exactly what we are facing now –
yoga has been McDona-fied. It has been reduced from a practice that traditionally demanded
dedication, discipline, sacrifice, humility, surrender, love, devotion, and self-investigation –
and yes, suffering through rigorous practice – to something that one can now learn to teach in
a weekend.
That is the crux of the problem. Yoga has been McDona-fied but it comes with none of the
stringent health standards and food safety rules that govern McDonalds burgers and fries.
“In a mere 200 hours, you can become a bonafide, registered yoga instructor. 200 hours is
spit,” scoffs Ashtanga New York.
The HAF might want to take yoga back. But the bird has long flown its nest. Even in India, a
friend who has been doing yoga for 20 years, says she has met yoga instructors who come to
her parents’ apartment building to teach yoga at home. They are in great demand because
they claim they learned the “real” stuff from American DVDs. It’s time to accept that there is
the eight-limbed yoga the HAF talks about and then there are the asanas on a mat that
millions practice. The latter might need to have a more rigorous form of certification. Doing a
suryanamaskar at the beginning won’t fix anything. This is no longer about putting the Aum
back in yoga.
The Hindu American Foundation’s campaign has not made any of the classes run by blonde
rockstar yogis less crowded.
The New York Times exposé will not dissuade any of the 20 million Americans who do yoga
from rushing to the next yoga class with a rolled-up mat under their arms.
But it’s certainly created a buzz about Broad’s upcoming book. It’s really much ado about
nothing. If you ask me, the whole controversy is a bunch of Kundalooney.
'Yoga can damage your body' article throws exponents off-balance
Author: Joanna Walters in New York
Publication: Guardian.co.uk
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/14/yoga-can-damage-body-
row?INTCMP=SRCH
A $5bn industry is outraged over a New York Times article saying that the keep fit regime is
bad for your body
One of the most common sights in New York is slim, young professional women scurrying
across the city with rolled-up yoga mats under their arms and determined looks, cramming in
a dawn or lunchtime session between power moves in the office. So perhaps it should come
as no surprise that an incendiary magazine piece in the New York Times, under the headline,
"How yoga can wreck your body", has turned the usually chilled community of yoga-lovers
upside down. In the US, and perhaps even in Britain, where an estimated million people
practise regularly, yoga may never be the same again.
The offending article, which appeared across several pages of the paper's prestigious Sunday
magazine, was written by senior science writer William Broad. In it, he alleged that students
and even "celebrated teachers" were injuring themselves "in droves" by over-ambitious and
under-taught yoga moves.
He also quoted at length the views of local yoga veteran Glenn Black, who seriously hurt his
back after years of practice. According to Black, "the vast majority of people should give up
yoga altogether" because it's too likely to cause them serious damage.
The result has been acrimony, recrimination and a ferocious backlash from representatives of
a $5bn-plus industry in America with an estimated 20 million followers – five times more
than 10 years ago. Drivel, sensationalism, disgraceful hype, bizarre and misleading were just
some of the criticisms posted online and expressed to the Observer. After more than 700
comments had been posted on the New York Times website, there was no room for more.
The well-known Ashtanga New York group retaliated with an article on its own website
entitled "How the New York Times can wreck yoga".
Meanwhile, the controversy quickly became the talk of the hundreds of studios all over the
city and the hundreds of thousands beyond.
"I'm shocked. Yoga transformed my life and I love going to practise – it's made me healthier
and much calmer and my body feels more alive," said Susan Davies, 28, a software designer,
as she walked near Central Park on the way to her twice-weekly class. "I'm more balanced
and yet more assertive and efficient at work – my friends who do yoga say the same."
Paula Tulsi, who runs the Manhattan practice Reflections Yoga, said: "The controversy is
massive. People in the circles I run in are going crazy, because lots of people who were going
to try yoga – the people you can bring in and heal – are going to be afraid now and they'll
think yoga's bad. That's so tragic and angering."
"I thought it was insulting to the yoga community," said massage therapist Eddie Rodriguez,
who runs the Maio Physical Therapy practice in New York. But Rodriguez did point out that
many yoga classes are too crowded and most people aren't aware that many instructors are
barely trained – even though they may look the part. "I encourage my clients to try yoga. But
get a recommendation by word of mouth, don't just go to a studio because it's got a free offer,
it's on the gym schedule or it's nearby and has classes at convenient times. It's definitely a
case of buyer beware," he said.
And in New York, at least, tales of yoga disasters are not difficult to find. Arts administrator
Elizabeth Bennett, 45, slipped a disc in her neck after being "bullied" into a headstand at a
New York yoga studio. "When I hesitated, he called me a wimp. There are too many teachers
who push unwitting students too far to serve their own egos," she said.
Despite having health insurance, she ended up spending about $8,000 of her own money on
acupuncture and months of physiotherapy until she was pain-free again. Bennett added that
people trust yoga and rely on it as a source of healing, not injury, but are now learning to be a
lot more sceptical and discerning in their choice of studio.
Anatomy experts also warn – as did Broad's article – about the risks of inverted poses, which
can strain cervical vertebrae or restrict blood flow into the head, either acutely or
progressively.
David Patane sees up to 10 clients a year with a current or past yoga injury at his Physique
corrective exercise, movement and lifestyle coaching business in Manhattan. He said the
computer age has given so many people slouched postures and expanded waistlines that they
are inviting injury if they jump up from their chairs and unthinkingly start twisting
themselves, on demand, into poses that hyper-extend the often already weakened neck and
lumbar spine.
"A neck pushed forward one inch in front of the plumb line of correct alignment – common
with slumped posture – is already putting seven pounds of stress on the cervical spinal
column," he said. When these people flipped into a shoulder stand, or bent their legs back
over their heads in "plough pose", there was a greater risk of injury, he said.
Megan Branch, 22, an executive assistant at a web company, strained her back last year
simply by doing the "superman'", where you lie on your front and raise your legs and arms
simultaneously, because she was in a class that was so crowded with up to 70 people that she
had to lie at an odd angle so the next student did not have his feet in her face.
"I felt something snap in my back and then I went limp," she said. She recovered by resting
and stretching carefully, but her back now feels less stable.
The $5 community class, like many, simply had a leader to mimic, with no expert correction
of students' postures or warnings about injuries or not pushing one's limits. In an industry
where there is cursory certification and no official licensing, yoga teachers can become
"qualified" with a 200-hour online course.
"Many teachers are coming out of training and don't even know the three different hamstring
muscles," said Emilia Conradson, who branched out from teaching the Forrest school of yoga
into her own therapy business Body In Balance in New York, which also treats yoga injuries.
"Their understanding of anatomy is laughable, and yet yoga is about the physical as well as
the spiritual and needs to be safe." Other experts blame the "westernisation" of yoga as more
of a workout than a holistic practice.
Even Tulsi, while furious at the inflammatory nature of Broad's attack, does admit that the
debate is timely. "It's not yoga, it's the bad translation or teaching of yoga that's the problem,"
she said.
After a row that threatened to throw one of America's favourite middle-class leisure pursuits
off balance the lesson for devotees is clear: take care and take your time when choosing your
next yoga class.
'They blamed my bad karma'
Professional photographer Naomi Harris, 38, was delighted with her special offer of an
unlimited yoga pass to attend a popular studio near her home in Manhattan in the summer of
2008.
"I decided I was going to get really into it, and for about six months I went four or five times
a week and was feeling and looking really good." But one day, descending the stairs from her
fifth storey apartment, her knee buckled. "It was like a little 'pop' and didn't feel good."
She continued going to yoga for a few days, but the knee got worse until it would collapse
without warning. A scan revealed a bad tear in the meniscal cartilage, the knee joint's shock
absorbers, requiring surgery.
"The surgeon asked me what I'd been doing and I said I was really healthy and active, doing
yoga up to five times a week and he said, 'That's it!'."
He said he saw lots of yoga injuries and hers probably stemmed from "pigeon pose", where
the knee is folded inwards at an angle under the body. After keyhole surgery, Harris was on
crutches and bumped into her favourite yoga instructor and one of the studio administrators.
"The instructor was, like, 'Oh my God, what happened?' I told her my surgeon said I was
doing too much yoga and she just walked away."
The administrator then told her the studio owner said if you got injured doing yoga it was
because you had "bad karma".
"I'm anti-yoga now," she says.

How the NYT Can Wreck Yoga
Author:
Publication: Ayny.org
URL: http://ayny.org/how-the-nyt-can-wreck-yoga.html
This article has been modified since it was first posted; I have added two responses below
mine – the first is from my friend and colleague Marshall Hagins, PT, with whom I have
worked with on a funded yoga study, and the second from Rick Bartz, a chiropractor in the
Catskills.
The New York Times Magazine published an article this week entitled “How Yoga Can
Wreck Your Body“, adapted from William Broad’s new book.
Broad is a ‘senior science writer at The Times’, and though his article is heavy on anecdote
and slim on science, I agree that the increasing occurrences of injuries in yoga should not be
discounted or taken lightly. Still, the temptation to argue Broad’s article paragraph by
paragraph is hard to resist: for example, yoga teacher Glenn Black’s repeated, incorrect use of
the word ‘ego‘, or the need to go back to the 1970′s to find examples of strokes caused by
yoga. The case of the college student who kneeled on his toes for hours ‘praying for world
peace’, causing nerve damage, begs the questions: what was he more influenced by; yoga, or
Christian penitence? And does one need to inflict suffering on oneself in order to bring about
peace? The teachings of Yoga would claim just the opposite.
There are a couple of obvious reasons why there are so many injuries in yoga (which we must
acknowledge do on occasion occur, as they do in every physical activity). The nature of the
injuries and the way that one responds to an injury also varies greatly. However, Broad did
not address this issue, he addressed the most sensationalistic aspects of injury, and this is
what I wish to respond to.
One reason that injury can occur in yoga is due to overzealousness, or even just plain
enthusiasm, on the part of the student – I have of course experienced this myself – it is a
natural response for a particular type of person when it comes to any activity that has
physicality associated with it – no matter what a teacher may caution. Of course, injuries can
happen anytime we do physical activity, whether or not we are taking risks.
A more troublesome underlying cause that leads to injuries while doing yoga, I believe, is the
value system that forms the basis of the yoga ‘industry’ in America, which is built largely on
economic incentive. Sound cynical of me? As a five-billion-dollar a year industry, it would
be hard to argue that the values traditionally associated with yoga, such as simplicity,
humility, and one-pointed focus could somehow coexist un-problematically in the midst of a
product-oriented industry. America is good at jumping at opportunities – and when it comes
to making the holy dollar, no cow is too sacred to be sacrificed in the West.
When there is a great potential for making money, quality is usually the first thing to be
sacrificed. Fast food, anyone? It is unfortunate that this is exactly what we are facing now –
yoga has been McDona-fied. It has been reduced from a practice that traditionally demanded
dedication, discipline, sacrifice, humility, surrender, love, devotion, and self-investigation –
and yes, suffering through rigorous practice – to something that one can now learn to teach in
a weekend. Or, more popularly, in a mere 200 hours you can become a bonafide, registered
yoga instructor. 200 hours is spit. It is a joke. And it is a joke that is leading a tradition – one
which, granted, has even in India been subject to ridicule – to an even greater harm. We have
an opportunity, in the West, to bring these transformative teachings to places where they will
result in the greatest good. It is true that this is already happening – in schools, prisons,
hospitals, with veterans, and as well with people who simply walk into a class off of the street
– but it is also true that a rotten apple can spoil the barrel, and the yoga industry apple is a
mighty big apple.
I miss the early days when I was first doing yoga in NYC, in the mid to late 1980′s. The
feeling of freshness, of being clean and free, of feeling that a whole, new world was opening
in me. There were no products for sale, no fifty types of yoga mats, just a towel and some
cut-off sweatpants to practice in, or a pair of white, cotton ‘yoga’ pants that I could buy on
Bleecker St. for $5. I still feel that freshness when I practice, and I love that – but when I look
around at what is happening with yoga in America, I can’t help but feel sad.
It is not that the ‘olden days’ were better – every age has its challenges. But spirituality in
America has become ‘easy’, and we are becoming dumbed down. It is not wrong to work
hard and strive to understand something difficult and subtle, and then achieve an inner
satisfaction that is the result of hard work, persistence and dedication – let’s not sweep that
under the table. To live a life of self-examination is not always an easy thing. But that does
not mean that it is not joyous, or have its own rewards, for it can be both of those things.
When I saw the title of Broad’s article, the first thing that came to mind was Ice Cube’s old
hip-hop song ‘Check Yo’ Self’ (‘You better check yo’self before you wreck yo’self’) – pretty
good advice for the over-enthusiastic in yoga or any physical endeavor. I was going to post it,
but it is so inappropriate, and the issue of injuries is too serious of an issue; I will not make
light of anyone’s pain. But, searching out Ice Cube did lead me down the dark path of
youtube, where I trolled through videos that filled me with a happy nostalgia for the rawness
of youth – of early punk rock, and the passion and energy that was being expressed through
so many amazing songs.
Sanskrit means refined, and many of the yogis of India were extremely elegant, in a
simplicity-filled way. The rishis, who became the world’s first yogis, purposely left society to
meditate in the forests, turning their backs on the mundanity and suffering of the world. They
discovered something that ultimately can be of great benefit to us all, if we use it wisely.
This is quite the opposite of the rawness of music that I grew up with, like the Clash or Sex
Pistols – but, still, hearing White Man (in Hammersmith Palais) now still fills me with the
same feeling of freedom I felt when I first heard it when I was probably 14. And who can
argue with this lyric: “The new groups/ are not concerned/ with what there is to be learned/
they put on suits/ they think it’s funny/ turning rebellion into money”. I always loved that
line, and now it just makes me think of Lululemon.
Then I came across this below – I have no idea if anyone will think it is as awesome as I do –
but this girl is killing it. I love how every once in a while she cracks just a little smile – punk
rock, a little bit humorous, as it was meant to be – you know, if we didn’t take ourselves all
too seriously, maybe we would cause a lot less harm. To ourselves, and to each other.
From Marshall Hagins, PT, Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, Long Island
University:
Apparently the Times believes that it needs to make yoga look “funny” to sell what is
ostensibly a serious work of scientific reporting [“How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by
William Broad in the NY Times Magazine on Jan 8th ]. But it is not the attempt by the
Times to sell more papers that really concerns me, it is the lack of balance in a report of
genuine importance—risk of injury while practicing yoga.
First, anecdotal reports, no matter how impressive the journal they appear in, does not a
convincing argument make. Second, the issue is not whether some people get hurt doing yoga
(no serious yogi thinks that yoga has zero risk) but injury rate. In other words, how many
people are getting hurt doing yoga (numerator) compared to how many people are actually
practicing yoga (denominator). Many common activities are inherently risky. Have you seen
the statistics for playing basketball?—over 600,000 injuries per year in America (15% of
basketball players get injured in the sport). Yet we continue to play basketball and other even
more risky sports (football anyone?). Why? Because there are perceived benefits and we
make the choice of risk versus reward.
Well…you may ask, then why can’t this piece be viewed as helping increase awareness of the
risk of yoga so people can make informed choices? Because this piece fails to accurately
describe the risk of yoga—it merely cherry picks a few extreme events and implicates the
entire practice. (Is it really surprising that if you sit on your heels for “hours a day” that
nerves will go to sleep in your legs?) A balanced, serious, and accurate scientific report on
the risks of yoga would have, at a minimum, explicitly stated that no one actually knows the
injury rates for yoga, as is actually the case. What is provided beyond anecdote to
demonstrate the “growing body of medical evidence” is two numbers: 1) Emergency room
injuries related to yoga increased from 13 to 46 in a two year period; 2) Yoga practitioners
grew in number by 15 million in the last 10 years. While acknowledging that comparing risk
between activities is ultimately much more complex than what I suggest here, it is still
roughly reasonable to note that if you multiply the number of reported yoga injuries by 100(!)
to account for under-reporting, the injury rate using the authors numbers is still exceedingly
small and far less than what is known about most common sports activities.
And by the way, it is not true that the cervical spine can only rotate 50 degrees as suggested
by the author. If you doubt this, turn your head as far as you can to the right or left. Is your
nose almost pointing over your shoulder? Voila…80 degrees of rotation. Now you have the
mobility of an “intermediate” yogi!
While reading the article “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” in last week’s NYT Magazine,
I found several medical errors in William J. Broad’s writing and took issue with his
contention that yoga could cause vertebral basilar artery injury (VBAI) in the course of an
average practice. I am a chiropractor with 16 years in practice and a student of Ashtanga
Yoga and Iyengar Yoga for the past 25 years.
From Rick Bartz, D.C.
Mr. Broad makes a glaring error in reporting the extent of side to side rotation in a normal
cervical spine. In stating range of motion for the neck, or cervical spine, the author gives 75˚
extension, 40˚ flexion, 45˚ left lateral flexion (LLF), 45˚ right lateral flexion (RLF), and 50˚
in both right rotation and left rotation. The normal range of motion for the cervical spine,
according to most major references, including the AMA Guide to Impairment, is 70˚ ext, 50˚
flex, 45˚ LLF and RLF, and 80˚ L rotation and R rotation. So the author is a bit generous in
neck extension, a little short on normal flexion, correct in lateral flexion, but seriously
erroneous in rotation. Since most of his arguments linking yoga to cerebrovascular incidents
are based on an assumption of hyper rotation, he is seriously at odds with the medical
literature. For an “Intermediate student” to have 90˚ active rotation is only a small increase
above normal, and no more than the passive rotation normally expected in a routine physical
exam.
He then goes on to misidentify hyperflexion of the neck as encouraged by Iyengar in the

cobra pose. In fact, in cobra pose the neck is in extension! This is a sloppy error that one
hopes the author would have caught before going to print. As far as shoulder stand, where
the neck is truly hyperflexed, some sources indicate that motion of the chin to the sternum is,
in fact, the maximum accepted ROM of 80-90 degrees.
The primary focus of the article is, of course, stroke. As a chiropractor, my profession has
been under relentless attack for years with the false accusation that chiropractic manipulation
is a causative factor for VBAI. In fact, the most definitive paper on the subject published in
2008 by J. David Cassidy, was a meta-analysis of vertebrobasilar artery (VBA) stroke cases
admitted to hospitals in Ontario over a 10 year period. The conclusion that Cassidy’s
prestigious team reached was that “VBA stroke is a very rare event in the population. The
increased risks of VBA stroke associated with chiropractic and primary care physician (PCP)
visits is likely due to patients with headache and neck pain from VBA dissection seeking care
before their stroke. They found no evidence of excess risk of VBA stroke associated with
chiropractic care compared to primary care.” In other words, patients with acute headache
and neck pain were already suffering symptoms of a stroke when they came into their
doctor’s office with those complaints. The astute doctor would then refer the patient to the
emergency room upon recognizing these and other related neurological symptoms during
physical exam.
The human body provides a marvel of redundancy in it’s blood supply to the brain. there are
two internal carotid arteries and two vertebral arteries providing circulation to the basilar
artery, also known as the Circle of Willis, so that in the event that either the left or right is
compromised or entirely occluded, the other side will provide the needed oxygen-rich blood
supply, via the Circle, to the side that is deficient. Mr. Broad correctly identifies the
anatomical problem area for the vertebral artery as C1-C2 in an earlier part of his article
when he references the 1973 study of a 28 y.o. woman, but then goes on to describe a 25 y.o.
man rushed to Northwestern Hospital in Chicago with “blockages of the left vertebral artery
between the C2 and C3 vertebrae.” Incidentally, the C2-C3 section of the VBA is
statistically less likely to be damaged by neck rotation. Even If he had suffered “total or
nearly complete occlusion” in that artery, it is false to say that “no blood could get through to
the brain.” There would certainly be at least three other arteries providing circulation, via the
Circle of Willis, to his brain. Not to deny that the young man did indeed have a stroke, but
that the causes are suspect. There are many cases of spontaneous dissection of the vertebral
artery. There are cases of people with only one vertebral artery who had no neurological
symptoms in their lives.
This is not to say that yoga practice is without risk of injury and that yoga teachers should be
alert to signs of potential medical issues, such as acute, intense headache and unusual neck
stiffness, that would affect a student’s ability to do practice safely.
Rick Bartz, D.C.
Why Schools Are Banning Yoga
Author: Alia Wong
Publication: The Atlantic
URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/570904/?__twitter_impression=true
Mindfulness programs have become popular on K–12 campuses, but in some parts of the
country concerns about religious intrusion keep the trend at bay.
In certain parts of the United States, it’s getting more and more likely that rather than a game
of dodgeball in gym class or a round of Heads-up, Seven-up as a break between lessons,
students will instead find themselves doing downward-facing dog. The internet is saturated
with yoga-based lesson plans, teacher-training courses, and “mindful” music playlists
designed for schools, while programs for certified yoga instructors who want to bring their
practice onto campus have also gained popularity.
While up-to-date data on the prevalence of school-based yoga is hard to come by, a 2015
survey led by the New York University psychologist Bethany Butzer identified three dozen
programs in the United States that reach 940 schools and more than 5,400 instructors. School-
based yoga programs, Butzer and her co-authors concluded, are “acceptable and feasible to
implement.” The researchers also predicted that such programs would grow in popularity.
The trend, however, seems to have been accompanied by an uptick in vocal pushback against
the idea. In 2016, an elementary school in Cobb County, Georgia, became the subject of
heated controversy after introducing a yoga program. Parents’ objections to the yoga
classes—on the grounds that they promoted a non-Christian belief system—were vociferous
enough to compel the district to significantly curtail the program, removing the “namaste”
greeting and the coloring-book exercises involving mandalas. A few years before that, a
group of parents sued a San Diego County school district on the grounds that its yoga
program promoted Eastern religions and disadvantaged children who opted out. While a
judge ruled in favor of the district, the controversy resurfaced two years ago amid concerns
that the program was a poor use of public funds in already strapped schools. Meanwhile, just
last month the Alabama Board of Education’s long-standing ban on yoga caused some
ballyhoo after a document listing it as one of the activities prohibited in “gym class” was
recirculated, grabbing the attention of a Hindu activist.
Neuroscience has a lot to learn from Buddhism.
Proponents tend to cite studies underscoring the benefits of mindfulness-based

therapies such as yoga for kids’ development. A 2009 study published in the Journal of
Child and Family Studies, for example, found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,
which teaches children how to divorce themselves from harmful thoughts or emotions, was
linked to reduced anxiety and increased attention levels. Other studies suggest that “mindful
movement” such as yoga helps to enhance kids’ executive functions—skills such as working
memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility. Some studies have gone as far as
concluding that yoga has a positive effect on students’ academic performance or engagement,
particularly among students who’ve struggled with traumatic experiences such as poverty and
struggle with self-regulation as a result. After all, decades of research have shown that it’s
hard for a child who hasn’t learned how to respond to stress to do well in school.
But some observers question the research on yoga’s benefits. Amy Wax, a University of
Pennsylvania law professor who specializes in social-welfare policy, in a 2016 Atlantic story
criticized some existing studies on yoga and mindfulness as being of “low quality and
dubious rigor.” Julia Belluz, a senior health correspondent for Vox, has noted that despite a
drastic increase in recent decades in the number of studies on yoga, the research tends to rely
on small numbers of participants and imperfect comparisons, among other limitations. And
some parents argue that yoga’s potential benefits aren’t enough to justify the spending at a
time when public schools already struggle with limited funding.
The most vocal opponents tend to cite yoga’s Hindu and Buddhist roots, arguing that
the line between those origins and secular practices is often blurry. Yoga encompasses all
kinds of approaches and techniques, some more spiritual than others, but those roots often
filter into even the most innocuous of mindful-movement routines. Religious influences are,
arguably, even baked into elements as simple as “om” chants, poses with Sanskrit
names, and, as the controversy in Georgia attests, collective “namaste” greetings.
In the Cobb County case, some parents felt that the school was using a double standard
in allowing yoga classes yet banning other forms of religious practice in schools. “No
prayer in schools. Some don’t even say the Pledge [of Allegiance], yet they’re pushing
ideology on our students,” one mother, Susan Jaramillo, told a journalist for the area’s NBC
affiliate. “Some of those things are religious practices that we don’t want our children doing
in our schools.” Yet the school’s principal, who did end up apologizing for and revising
the yoga curriculum, argued that much of the parents’ criticism rested on false
assumptions about the program—a parent cited by The Washington Post worried, for
instance, that the school was promoting a “Far East mystical religion with crystals and
chants to be practiced under the guise of stress release meditation.”
In reality, school-based yoga typically focuses on physical exercise or on relaxation and

mindfulness. Some schools integrate it via in-classroom lessons that have kids engage in a
few exercises at their desk during short breaks throughout the day. Other schools adopt yoga
as an in- or after-school elective, while some incorporate it into regular PE classes.
“Many original forms of yoga are practiced in a religious or spiritual manner,” acknowledges
Marlynn Wei, a psychiatrist, therapist, and certified yoga teacher who’s written about yoga’s
educational uses. Still, religion-infused yoga often pursues the same ends as its secular
counterpart: For example, they both emphasize being in the present. By removing yoga’s
more superficial aspects (such as Sanskrit words and symbols), yoga can still have
mindfulness and be appreciated for its benefits beyond physical exercise, Wei says.
“The minute you put Sanskrit into a curriculum … some parents are going to freak out,”
agrees Jai Sugrim, a yoga instructor who’s taught in schools.
Adoption of these programs has been uneven across the United States—yoga in schools is far
more common in some regions than in others. Programs are, according to Butzer’s 2015
survey, based primarily in big cities on the coasts, such as Los Angeles and New York City.
Areas known for their New Age–y enclaves—such as Colorado and the Northwest U.S.—
account for many of the programs, too. Where they’re all but unheard of, Butzer’s data
suggests, is in America’s heartland.
U.S. schools are teaching kids that morality isn’t important.
Big cities and liberal strongholds generally tend to be vanguards when it comes to
implementing “progressive education” policies, such as the movement to replace zero-
tolerance discipline with conflict resolution or the movement to eliminate homework. What’s
more, much of the research on school-based yoga focuses on its benefits for “urban
youth,” a high percentage of whom contend with trauma such as poverty, community
violence, and exposure to drug abuse that takes a toll on their ability to manage stress.
It’s easy to take this stuff for granted in areas such as parts of the West Coast and the mid-
Atlantic, where, according to a 2016 survey, one in five people practices yoga. But in a state
like Alabama, where school-based yoga has long been banned and where according to that
same survey just 10 percent of the population has taken a class, it’s conceivable that many
might see yoga as bizarre and inappropriate in a school setting. Notably, the same survey
found that many people who hadn’t tried yoga before perceived it to be exclusive to young
women or those who are already flexible, athletic, or spiritual.
Ironically, proponents argue that the value of yoga in schools is its inclusiveness —its
promise to help boys who don’t know how to contain their outbursts, students with
physical disabilities, children who struggle with obesity, and teens who lack direction.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle faced by school-based yoga comes down to the fact that
everyone has his or her own way of thinking about it. Religious versus secular, meditation
versus exercise, exclusive versus inclusive—it’s little wonder that two people might see the
same kid doing a warrior pose through completely different lenses.
- ALIA WONG is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers education and families. She
previously wrote for Honolulu Civil Beat.
Tweet from an anti-Modi academic
Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) tweeted at 1:34 AM on Fri, Sep 21, 2018:

Americans Schools are Banning Yoga - This is how Modi making Yoga globally popular!
https://t.co/RypcWSFDOC
(https://twitter.com/ashoswai/status/1042867001742356480?s=03)
Saudi Arabia embraces yoga in pivot towards 'moderation'
Author:
Publication: Agence France Presse
URL: https://www.afp.com/en/news/2266/saudi-arabia-embraces-yoga-pivot-towards-
moderation-doc-19d4yw7
In a sparse, wood-floored studio, Saudi women squat, lunge and do headstands. Even a year
ago, teaching these yoga postures could have rendered them outlaws in the conservative
Islamic kingdom.
Widely perceived as a Hindu spiritual practice, yoga was not officially permitted for decades
in Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam where all non-Muslim worship is banned.
But with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vowing an "open, moderate Islam", the
kingdom last November recognised yoga as a sport amid a new liberalisation drive that has
sidelined religious hardliners.
Spearheading efforts to normalise yoga in the kingdom is Nouf Marwaai, a Saudi woman
who has battled insults and threats from extremists to challenge the notion that yoga is
incompatible with Islam.
"I have been harassed, (and) sent a lot of hate messages," said the 38-year-old head of the
Arab Yoga Foundation, which has trained hundreds of yoga instructors in the kingdom.
"Five years ago, this (teaching yoga) would have been impossible," added Marwaai, as she
began training a cluster of women students at a private studio in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
Hanging up their body-shrouding abayas and headscarves, the women stretched in unison in
an arching warrior pose known as "virabhadrasana".
Arms outstretched, their bodies folded into a 180-degree backward bending posture known as
"chakrasana", or wheel pose.
In a country where women have long been denied the right to exercise publicly, the students -
- some of whom regularly attend yoga retreats in India -- said the exercise had transformed
their lives.
Ayat Samman, a 32-year-old health educator, said yoga helped alleviate her lifelong struggle
with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disorder that often left her bedridden.
Yoga also works as therapy, the women said, helping them vent bottled up emotions and
tackle a woefully common ailment -- depression.
"It just opened me up like a water balloon," said Yasmin Machri, 32.
"After my first class... I started breaking down and crying."
- Religious outreach -
In just a few months since yoga's recognition, a new industry of yoga studios and instructors
has sprouted in various Saudi cities. That includes Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest cities,
Marwaai said.
Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler, has sought to project a moderate image of the
kingdom, long associated with a fundamentalist strain of Wahhabi Islam, with a new push for
inter-religious exchange.
Saudi Arabia in recent months has hosted officials linked to the Vatican and the prince also
met a group of Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders in New York earlier this year, in a rare
inter-faith gesture.
"The prince's outreach to other religions is apparent in the interfaith gatherings and the new
enthusiasm for Saudi Arabia's pre-Islamic heritage," said Kristin Diwan, of the Arab Gulf
States Institute in Washington.
For decades, Saudi rulers derived much of their legitimacy from their alliance with a clerical
establishment that pushed a puritanical vision of Islam.
But the prince appears to have upturned the system, seeking instead to tap support from the
kingdom's swelling youth base through a surge of nationalism and a much-hyped
modernisation drive.
Saudi columnists have openly called for abolishing the once-feared religious police as the
kingdom introduces entertainment, including mixed-gender concerts, and re-opens cinemas
after a decades-long ban.
Prominent hardline Salafist clerics with millions of followers on social media have been
jailed, with some on death row, as the crown prince clamps down on dissent.
"The religious networks which once led campaigns against more liberal ideas appear cowed,
but new practices like yoga are always subject to ad-hoc attacks," Diwan said.
- 'Nothing to do with religion' -
Yoga is still regarded as a deviant practice in conservative circles, sometimes associated with
witchcraft, and Marwaai's students say they often confront accusations of betraying their
religion.
"I receive messages through social media asking: 'Are you a Hindu? Did you turn into a
Hindu?'" said Budur al-Hamoud, a recruitment specialist.
"Yoga has nothing to do with religion. It's a sport... It does not interfere with my faith."
Yoga is seen at odds with several other faiths, but the recognition of the practice in Saudi
Arabia –- the epicentre of the Islamic world –- appears to have given a new impetus to
Muslim yoga practitioners around the world.
Marwaai is taking on conservatives not just in the kingdom but also India, the birthplace of
yoga where clerics last year slapped a fatwa, or religious edict, against a female Muslim yoga
teacher just days before the kingdom recognised the sport.
In a shrill Indian television debate, Marwaai -- a lupus survivor and recently awarded the
Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours –- calmly sought to reason with Muslim
clerics who hurled insults at her.
The clerics were particularly opposed to "Surya Namaskar", a yoga sequence designed to
greet Surya, the Hindu sun god, and the chanting of Hindu mantras.
"It is not the worshipping of the sun and the moon," Marwaai responded as tempers frayed,
denying they engaged in chanting.
Unconvinced, a cleric said the set of physical movements in the Muslim prayer ritual offered
enough exercise.
The slow meditation does not increase the metabolic rate, Marwaai retorted. "Prophet
Mohammed used to race with his wife."
‘Hindus Appropriated Yoga From Buddhists And Jains’:
Western Academic Scholars
Author: Manish Maheshwari
Publication: Swarajyamag.com
URL: https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/hindus-appropriated-yoga-from-buddhists-and-jains-
why-western-scholars-are-terribly-wrong
Snapshot
- Just as how British theory of Aryan invasion and the missionary account of ‘caste system’
became fossilised facts, Western scholars’ stand that Vedic rishis appropriated yoga from
Buddhists and Jains would be frozen in time.
- But by that time, it will be too late!
The academic scholarship on yoga in the rarified environs of Western universities has been
trying to reconstruct the history of the spiritual practice, and the recent “conclusions” they
have reached—to put it mildly—will surprise many. These scholars claim that the ideas of
karma, rebirth, meditation, and yoga first appear among the Sramana traditions of Buddhists
and Jains and were later “appropriated” by Vedic rishis (monks) and incorporated into their
“Brahmanical religion”.
During the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, the Sramana ascetics present in the Magadha area
developed the practices of what is called yoga, independent of any Brahmanical influence,
because the Greater Magadha region during the time of Buddha and Mahavira was beyond
the pale of “Brahmanical religion”.
Buddhist scholar, professor Geoffrey Samuel agrees, and says: “(Yogic) practices developed
in the same ascetic circles as the early Sramana movement (Buddhist, Jains and Ajivikas)
probably in and around the 5th and 6th centuries BCE.”
However, yoga, like practices of meditation and physical austerity, appear frequently in Rig
Veda and Atharva Veda. To this, our scholars assure us that yoga, like practices mentioned in
the Vedas, “may be forerunners of later yogic techniques…..but it is entirely speculative to
claim…that the Vedic corpus provides any evidence of systematic yoga practice.” When the
advanced yogic practices in the Mahabharata refer to these Vedic practices, the scholars
caution that “it would be wrong to read this backwards as proof of a similar understanding
within the vedas themselves.”
Moreover, due to a lack of unanimity on the dates of Hindu texts, the early Upanishads on
Yoga are dated post-Buddha by these scholars, to preclude any possibility of the origins of
yoga in the “Brahmanical” traditions.
Now there is this knotty question that the word yoga does not occur in any of the earlier
literature of the Sramanas of both Buddhist and Jain sources. They occur most frequently in
what our scholars would call “Brahmanical texts”. If the Brahmins did not practise yoga, then
in what context did they use the word “yoga”?
Indology scholar, professor Johannes Bronkhorst, drawing on his research and that of other
academics, says Brahmins used the word yoga to refer to the “psychospiritual” practices of
the Buddhists and the Jains. The Brahmins used the word “tapas” to describe their ascetic
practices. This “tapas” cannot be the same as the “yoga” of Sramana as the goal of tapas is to
gain worldly boons without religious merit while the goal of yoga is to achieve liberation.
Therefore, yoga, as we understand it, was not something that the Brahmins themselves
practised but used it as a reference to others.
After this hair-splitting argument, Bronkhorst delivers the knockout punch:
“…the Brahmanical contribution to Yoga is minimal. Indeed, its most important contribution
would seem to be the word yoga itself, which Brahmanical texts assigned to what were
originally non-Brahmanical practices.”
Now that any “Brahmanical” influence on yoga is ruled out except the naming rights, the next
logical step is to question the very credibility and authenticity of the entire yoga traditions of
Hinduism. Amongst the world’s leading academic authority on yoga, James Mallinson and
Mark Singleton, in their book, Roots of Yoga (published 2017), deliver the coup de grace:
“As a text seeking to affirm Brahmanical religion, the Bhagavad Gita seeks to appropriate
yoga from the renunciate milieu in which it originated…(while) Patanjali Yoga Shastra
represents a Brahmanical attempt to appropriate yoga from the Sramana traditions (such as
those of earlier Buddhism) …”
Now, dear readers, please stop for a moment and take a deep Ujjayi breath to let this sink in.
In the last few minutes, you have learnt that that there was no “Brahmanical” presence in the
Magadha region during the time of the Buddha and Mahavira, that the origins of the entire
meditative and yogic forms of Hinduism, including the Bhagavad Gita, was appropriated
from rival traditions, and the only foundational contribution of Hinduism to yoga is the word
“yoga” itself!
While you may agree or disagree with such research, do you not cringe to read that these
Western academic experts in the world’s top universities can use as loaded a term as
“appropriate” to describe the yogic traditions of Hinduism? (I mean, how dare Krishna not
put a footnote in the Bhagavad Gita, mentioning the source of his teaching!). Do you not
cringe at the Western academia’s usage of the term “Brahmanical religion” to describe the
entire early traditions and culture of Hinduism? Do you not cringe at the Western scholars’
description of Sramana and Brahmanical traditions in such starkly separate terms, as if these
traditions were water-tight compartments?
While it is easy to ignore the yoga research that happens in Western academia as something
irrelevant to our beliefs, what is now ‘research’ on yoga history by eminent Western scholars
will eventually become academic orthodoxy and will then become fossilised ‘facts’ in our
textbooks. Just as Max Muller’s date of 1,500 BCE for Rig Veda became fossilised ‘fact’,
just as British scholars’ theory of Aryan invasion became fossilised ‘fact’, just as the
missionary account of ‘caste system’ became fossilised ‘fact’, similarly ‘Hinduism’s
appropriation of yoga from Buddhist traditions’ will become fossilised ‘fact’ in our school
textbooks. And by that time, it will be too late!
Mom battles school board, saying yoga is against her
family’s religion
Author: Isabel Teotonio
Publication: The Star
URL: https://www.thestar.com/amp/news/gta/2018/11/28/mom-battles-school-board-
saying-yoga-against-her-religion.html?__twitter_impression=true
Gina Clarke was furious when her 8-year-old daughter came home from school in tears after
doing a wellness day activity in her Grade 3 class.
“(My daughter) was very upset,” recalls the Vaughan mother. “She knew she did something
she wasn’t supposed to.”
That something was yoga.
The Clarke family is Roman Catholic and doesn’t do yoga because it’s rooted in Hinduism.
Whether or not Catholics should do yoga is debatable. Some believe physical aspects, such as
poses, are acceptable, but spiritual elements, such as mantras and meditations, are not. And
some, like the Clarkes, prefer to avoid yoga altogether.
So when her daughter came home that day in May 2017, Clarke was upset because she says
she had asked the principal for a religious accommodation that excused her from the activity.
She says the accommodation was granted, so she was stunned when her daughter said she had
done yoga.
That set Clarke on a quest for answers up the ranks of the York Region District School
Board, including speaking with the teacher, principal, superintendent, trustee and director of
education. She also contacted Ontario’s education minister.
“My paper trail is a mile long,” says Clarke, a cancer scientist who keeps detailed notes and
records. “The system has been completely unaccountable to us.”
The matter is expected to come up at the board’s Director of Education Performance Review
Committee, which will meet in private on Wednesday. Recommendations made by the
committee will be voted on by the board Dec. 11. Citing privacy reasons, board staff said
they could not discuss specifics of this case.
Clarke is hoping, in part, for a full apology, greater accountability, and more transparency
when it comes to investigations that she would like to see include more parent voice
throughout.
According to documents Clarke gave the board, and in interviews with the Star, she says she
requested a religious accommodation for her children in March 2017 at Mackenzie Glen
Public School. It was triggered when her son came home and said his senior kindergarten
class was doing Cosmic Kids Yoga. Clarke met with Principal Lorellie Munson.
“I said, ‘We don’t do this in our religion,’” recalls Clarke, who followed up with an email
suggesting yoga be replaced in her son’s class with “alternative exercises which do not have
religious origins so that (he) might not feel singled out.”
Her verbal request for an accommodation was granted by the principal, and her son never
again participated in yoga. Clarke says she never filled out an official request form, which
she later learned is board policy.
About two months later, she says her daughter came home crying, saying her class had
participated in an activity and followed along to a video. At the end of the video, which
credited The School Yoga Project, the girl realized she had unknowingly done yoga. Clarke
later saw a photo on the teacher’s Twitter account that showed her daughter doing what
appears to be the tree pose and a meditation practice, and reviewed the video. She spoke with
the teacher, and the vice-principal to explain why yoga was incompatible with her faith.
“I really felt like I was viewed as having nine heads, regarding our beliefs,” says Clarke, who
took her concerns to the superintendent. She also requested an immediate transfer of her
children to another school.
A personnel investigation by Superintendent Paul Valle found there was no record of a

request for religious accommodation on file.
“There was no intent to offend you in the matter of religious belief,” explained Valle to
Clarke in a June 2017 email she shared with the Star. “In my communication and interviews
with the school and staff, it was confirmed that the activities were focused on breathing,
stretching and physical exercises and that the content presented had no spiritual or religious
context.”
Clarke says she was upset because she felt like she was being told what is an acceptable
belief for her and says faith accommodations don’t require a spiritual or religious context.
She also felt shut out from the investigation process and couldn’t get answers on what steps
were taken and what was asked during those interviews. The whole process was not
transparent, she says.
Cecil Roach, Co-ordinating Superintendent of Education, Indigenous Education and Equity

for the board, says his recollection is that Clarke’s wishes were accommodated and that the
principal thought students had participated in a mindfulness activity and not yoga.
“Many schools in the province are doing mindfulness,” he told the Star. “This particular
parent interpreted that as yoga.”
He says it’s hard to see how yoga would qualify as a faith accommodation, but says it was
granted nonetheless to Clarke’s children.
According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, schools must consider accommodation
requests for religious beliefs or practices that are sincerely held, and must accommodate
them, unless there are reasons of undue hardship (health, safety, cost), or it significantly
interferes with education. In some cases, for example, children are accommodated and
exempt from physical education, music and dance classes.
Clarke says yoga can be a “very grey area,” which is why she wanted the accommodation for
her kids, so they wouldn’t have to make difficult judgments. Some schools in the United
States have even banned yoga because of the religious element.
At the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, it’s not uncommon to receive inquiries about
whether yoga is endorsed by the Catholic Church.
“It’s more than a simple yes or no response,” says Neil MacCarthy, spokesperson for
Archdiocese of Toronto. “Exercise and physical activity, including stretching, is healthy and
encouraged. However, the original proponents of yoga, and many who enjoy yoga today,
view the activity as a spiritual practice. While no one tends to think of swimming or jogging
as spiritual activities, yoga is different in that perspective. The stretching elements involved
in yoga are not at issue but using the practice as part of a holistic approach to one’s
spirituality would be of concern for many Catholics because of an incompatibility in what the
two spiritualities aim to achieve.”
Clarke’s concerns made it all the way up to the school board’s new director, Louise Sirisko,
who took over the role in January. She conducted her own review and in the summer shared
her draft findings with Clarke, concluding that appropriate steps had been followed. Clarke
provided extensive feedback, believing the board had failed to acknowledge mistakes, make
anyone accountable and be transparent. In late October, she received a final response from
Sirisko, who said the board responded to complaints in a “thorough and fulsome manner” and
stuck with her original finding.
Clarke now hopes the committee will make recommendations so other families don’t go
through what she did. She says if someone had apologized at the outset for a mistake or a
misunderstanding, this matter would not have escalated.
“This started in the school and could easily have ended and been resolved in the school,” she
said. “The whole system has failed us.”
Isabel Teotonio is a Toronto-based reporter covering education. Follow her on Twitter:

@Izzy74
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Yoga and Veterans: A Different Kind of Warrior
Author: Jennifer Steinhauer
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/yoga-
veterans.html?emc=edit_th_190120&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=545272450120
To casual observers of either military service or the practice of yoga, the path from Oorah to
Om may not seem obvious. But the intersection of yogi and veteran is natural if
unexpected, beginning with the five classic yoga poses known as warriors.
While veterans make up a small percentage of yoga instructors, their ranks are growing.
Many members of the military now often include yoga — sometimes taught by veterans — as
an element of their workout routine, and veterans turn to the practice for therapeutic
applications. The Department of Veterans Affairs has successfully used yoga to help treat
opioid addiction and post-traumatic stress.
“A lot of vets have post-traumatic stress,” said Thierry Chiapello, who served in the Marines
and now teaches yoga at the National Defense University in Washington. “By lengthening
the exhalation of breath, this gets people out of those fight-or-flight instincts that drain
you,” he continued, putting them in a mode of “rest and recovery that definitely is
associated with less aggressive behaviors.”
Veterans, long schooled in discipline and concentration, also make excellent yoga teachers,
both to other veterans, whose experiences they understand, and to active-duty military
members, whose trust they often gain. They are becoming a welcome addition in civilian
yoga studios, where students are usually attracted to their compassionate yet frequently no-
nonsense approach.
Here are some veterans who have become yoga teachers — from various service branches,
eras and parts of the country — reflecting on the transition.
HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIF.
Christian Allaire
Retired Coast Guard; chief operating officer, Veterans Yoga Project; and teacher at Yoga
Tribe in Huntington Beach and Purple Yoga in Long Beach, Calif.
“There are huge synergies with the military and yoga,” said Mr. Allaire, who discovered this
as he learned yoga. “There is a stereotype that yogis are a bunch of hippie types of people
who are not militaristic,” he said. “But the whole system of yoga is about moral and ethical
restraints on behavior and trying to stay calm in challenging conditions. Sometimes in a pose
you feel pain and you have to say, ‘Is that pain that is damaging or is that discomfort that I
need to lean into?’”
Mr. Allaire teaches hot yoga, a power-driven practice that is popular with veterans because of
its athletic nature, and his background shows in how he teaches. “Your commanding officer
is your breath,” he said during a recent class in Huntington Beach.
“I don't do a lot of chanting,” he said, acknowledging his special style. “I step into class and
say, ‘O.K., folks, get into child’s pose.’ I believe this to be a discipline. Coming in late is not
cool and not being serious about your practice is not cool.”
He noted that yoga could benefit people on active duty. “In order to be skilled at a firearm,
you have to be able to control your breathing,” he said. “Special Forces people train in
breathing techniques all the time. That is one little thing that no one would ever connect.”
Mr. Allaire experiences the service-driven life of yoga through his work for the Veterans
Yoga Project, which provides yoga to roughly 1,000 veterans and their families per week as
well as trains prospective teachers. “We will have four or five people in a conference room at
a V.A.,” he said. “There might be an Iraq war vet in his 20s, a Korean War vet in his 80s,
some can barely move, some may be missing limbs and the teacher’s job is to create space for
a person to do a twist. Maybe all they can do is raise their hands above their heads, but we are
creating a ritual.”
BLOOMFIELD, CONN.
Michael Riley
Air Force veteran; teacher and veteran outreach coordinator for Mindful Yoga Therapy
“I teach veteran culture to civilian yoga teachers, which is important,” Mr. Riley said. “With
the V.A. accepting yoga as one of the methods for traumatic brain injuries or PTSD, there are
more traditional yoga teachers coming in contact with veterans who may not understand the
culture, and there can be some triggering. If I was to describe the average veteran, they are so
stuck in their body that they are not really breathing. We teach them to breathe more deeply
in their body.”
Mr. Riley notes that teaching veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder requires
precautions. “For instance, I teach with my back to the door,” he said. “By allowing veterans
to see the door, it gives them a little more ease in their body.”
He added: “As I move, I try not to move too much. I don’t do a lot of hands-on adjustments.
There is a space with vets that I don’t violate. I don’t get too close sometimes, I allow them to
feel what is coming up and sometimes it doesn’t feel good and that’s O.K. It is difficult, but
you have to sit with it if you really want to heal. You want to just hold space and be able to
recognize what is coming up in the moment and see what is my next move. ”
Like many veteran yogis, he practiced what he now preaches. “What I bring when I teach
veterans is not just my yoga journey, but how I have been able to weave in other support
techniques,” he said. “I have been done great with it. I know it works. Since 2012 when I
went to the V.A. and started practicing yoga, my relationship with my children has improved
tremendously. But, he noted, “It hasn’t helped much with my relationships with my exes."
CORPUS CHRISTI, TEX.
Liz Corwin
Former Navy F-18 pilot and current Navy reservist. Teaches yoga at military bases and
studios around the country and leads global retreats with Walkabout Yoga.
“I found yoga in flight school in Meridian, Miss.” Ms. Corwin said. “There was one yoga
studio. This is when I found it was such an escape for me because flight school is so intense
and they are critiquing everything you do. Nobody knew who I was and nobody cared who I
was. I disappeared.”
So what is the difference between teaching yoga to civilians and to active-military members
and veterans?
“In the studio I am a bit more esoteric,” she said. “I use a bit more flowy words.” But being a
veteran, she added, “absolutely adds a legitimacy in a competitive, stressful, critical world.
They say, ‘If she can learn to turn her brain off from all the spinning I can, too.’”
Ms. Corwin’s work taps into the military-civilian divide in the United States.
“The hard thing about teaching in the military — there is very much either you’re in the
military or you’re a civilian,” she said. “It is really hard as a yoga teacher who hasn’t been in
the military to step into that community and immediately garner the trust. When I teach the
military, I teach a pretty power-focused class. I tend to hold poses longer and talk more
specifically. They tend to like the direction — there is a sense of safety in the authority that
they are used to. But I introduce a playfulness; I curse. I keep it real.”
Sometimes people are skeptical at first, especially about yoga’s ability to offer the intensity
that military workouts entail. “You invite some humor in and give them something to find
their edge with,” Ms. Corwin said. “Within that community, I can use that different voice.
With a bunch of PTSD vets, you wouldn’t take them to those places. My entire intention is
how do I get them to walk back into a yoga studio.”
Not everyone can get past the perception of yoga, of course. One guy simply had to call it
“combat stretch.”
CYPRESS, TEX.
Andy Johnson
Former Army combat medic; teacher at Some Like It Hot Yoga and Fitness
A veteran himself, Mr. Johnson recognizes patterns with yogis, especially men, that he tries
to address. “What veterans try to do is pull themselves through the practice. It’s the opposite
of what you should be doing. I try to really focus on the breathing what would happen if you
just let gravity take over,” he explained
“My passion is getting men into yoga and trying to get them connected to themselves, the
pain they are feeling and the things they need to let go. It is incredible to see people learn that
it is not about getting into the pose,” Mr. Johnson said. “Soldiers are very good at being in the
moment, much better than I have seen with a lot of civilian yogis. But what I am learning is
that it doesn’t matter if you are a former military vet who served four terms in Iraq or a
housewife with four kids and anxiety issues. We approach those issues the same way. You
think you have all this control in yoga, but it’s not about the control, it’s about kind of letting
go.”
The studio attracts veterans, and sometimes it holds special classes, “Warriors in Poses,”
focused on them. “It is a class for veterans taught by a veteran but opened to the entire
community,” Mr. Johnson said. “I have been told that it is interesting to see a veteran
teaching and I think they do appreciate it. I do bring a different point of view to my practice
because we had to endure so much regimentation and structure that now I like to break rules.”

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The theft of yoga

Author: Aseem Shukla

Why is yoga severed in America's collective consciousness from Hinduism? Yoga,

Deepak Chopra's rejoinder to my column on the appropriation of yoga presents a veritable

For Chopra incomprehensibly condemns Hinduism as "tribal" and "one-eyed about

I am left stunned that Chopra would consider Hinduism to be "dogmatic" or "proprietary."

*Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?*

----- Forwarded Message ----

I am an admirer of Dr.Deepak Chopra's work as a neurologist and and a medical doctor. He

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

I’m a Hindu, I’m a yoga practitioner and also I teach. I

In support of the first point I would like to quote Sri

A first reading of Dr. Chopra’s comments

Hinduism is as universal as one can imagine! Like Yoga, which is an

Dr. Chopra, like a number of modern thinkers, appears to reduce Hinduism

I agree that no particular

But we have a bigger issue than identity; the freedom of

Yoga is not an entity by itself –

So what is the relationship

In these comments of Dr. Chopra one finds admission the

"The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and

And finally, the great Maharishi Aurobindo had to say this

“As the Indian mind, emerging from its narrow mediaeval

Shall we call Rishi Aurobindo a fundamentalist? Certainly there needs to be a greater

- Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Last year, I conducted a session on religious studies, on perception of world religion to a

- The writer is Social activist, Communication & Behavioral Trainer

Asana aka Yoga

Reversing the Efforts to Decouple Yoga from Hinduism

May 16, 2010

Ms. Natalya Podgorny

In the similar fashion, your magazine talks about 'Chakras', 'Puranas',

*Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?*

Friend is not so much a conversationalist as a monologuist, an occupational hazard of

“We are,” Friend said, beaming, “the Yoga of Yes.”

We ride the tiger. . . .

- Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly.

Katie Prior, of mental health charity Mind, welcomed the study.

o India moves to 'patent' yoga

“Yoga is a journey inwards, a practice of self-exploration without specific goals. We practice

"This collection is very successful in preventing wrong patent information, but it is

- Special correspondent Ayesha Manocha contributed to this report.

Several Yogathon participants at Iskon Temple in New Orleans said participating in

"What I found is that it opened my spirit; it renewed my spirituality," she said.

"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.

He said his view is "not an eccentric Christian position."

Is the downward-facing dog somehow ... demonic?

"Here we go again with fear-based, black-and-white thinking," said Jennifer Norling, of

"I can do both"

"It made me feel like I was a hypocrite to Jesus, to God."

"We empty ourselves to be filled by God," she said.

Ironically, it's having the inverse effect on some religious leaders.

Moksha. Is that why you take yoga classes?

More importantly, if it reduces stress, why aren't we all praticing yoga?

-- Father Thomas Keating, from our book, "Be The Change."

Nevertheless, a significant number of American Christians either experiment with yoga or

Douglas R. Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and a respected specialist

-- Father Thomas Keating, from our book, "Be The Change."

Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?

Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?

Do the Hindu roots of yoga matter?