Comments on: Yoga in the news

By: “On the grounds of religion or belief” | Love of All Wisdom

“On the grounds of religion or belief” | Love of All Wisdom — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:02:26 +0000

[...] from the obvious difficulties in classification (does the term “religion” apply to yoga exercises? To meditation? To brushing our teeth?), the term leads us to ask the less important questions, [...]

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:23:48 +0000

Life really has a way of imitating the Onion, doesn’t it? When razor blade companies started introducing cartridges with two blades and then three, they ran an article about a company saying “F*** it, we’re going straight to five blades!” Sure enough, the five-blade razor came out within a year or two after the article.

By: Ayse

Ayse — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:12:09 +0000

Two recent American news articles highlight the issue. First, the founders of Bikram yoga have recently been trying to make yoga into a competitive sport, even an Olympic sport – an approach which seems to stress an entirely physical approach to yoga, so that it is not different in kind from decathlon or beach volleyball. Late as usual, but I thought I'd inform you (or remind you, if you knew about this already) that there was a hilarious Onion article several years back, parodizing this very topic.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:36:35 +0000

Sure – I think there are plenty of ashrams where some amount of traditional philosophy is imparted along with ha?ha yoga practice. But I’m intrigued here by the way some kinds of yoga practice have lost that entirely, making it a purely physical exercise. (I took a few yoga classes some years back, which were in that latter category as far as I could tell.) I sometimes hear people say “you can’t treat religion as a shopping cart,” picking and choosing the practices you like – but some people not only can and do, the practices seem to work very well for them.

By: Hot Yoga Challenge | Yoga Beauty Wisdom

Hot Yoga Challenge | Yoga Beauty Wisdom — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:02:37 +0000

[...] Yoga in the news | Love of All Wisdom [...]

By: Yoga in the news | Love of All Wisdom | dailyexercises

Yoga in the news | Love of All Wisdom | dailyexercises — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:50:39 +0000

[...] Originally posted here: Yoga in the news | Love of All Wisdom [...]

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:23:44 +0000

Amod:
In that competition nice guys would come first. The little hatha yoga I know I learned at the Sivananda Ashram in Rishikesh. The tuition was entirely free as it should be if one believes it to be a spiritual practice. Certainly not the cult of the body as one of the signs with sadhana advice had on it – Sleep separately (for married couples).

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:18:08 +0000

I guess that takes us to the question of what yoga (in a non-Western context) actually is: to what extent is it specifically practice in the Yoga Sūtra tradition, and to what extent is it spiritual practices more generally? That other practices borrowed from the YS doesn’t necessarily tell us too much, in that the YS themselves seem to have borrowed a lot from Jainism and elsewhere.

By: elisa freschi

elisa freschi — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:26:59 +0000

The status of yoga is ambivalent even within India, in the sense that, apart from yogadarsana, yoga practices (a????ga yoga or other forms of it) have been adopted in many other schools. I am not using ‘yoga’ here as a synonym of ?sana alone. That seems to be, indeed, a Western innovation.