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Who Owns Yoga?
Yoga “belongs to” Hinduism the way prayer “belongs to” Christianity. It’s a practice. It’s a vehicle for growth. It’s a tool for peace. As it was originally a Hindu practice, we may give it a polite nod of gratitude, but its physical and psychological benefits have outgrown one group of people.
As a yoga teacher, I like to make my classes about inclusiveness and acceptance. To me, trying to fit yoga into a religious pocket misses the point and the beautiful thing about yoga: there’s room in it for all faiths and belief systems.
In a country that so strongly believes in personal rights and freedom — not the least of which is freedom of religion — but also often struggles to find common religious ground, it seems as if yoga is a perfect opportunity to bring together many religions in an environment of mutual values of good health, celebration, gratitude, acceptance, and personal and spiritual growth.
As a yoga teacher, I like to make my classes about inclusiveness and acceptance. To me, trying to fit yoga into a religious pocket misses the point and the beautiful thing about yoga: there’s room in it for all faiths and belief systems.
In a country that so strongly believes in personal rights and freedom — not the least of which is freedom of religion — but also often struggles to find common religious ground, it seems as if yoga is a perfect opportunity to bring together many religions in an environment of mutual values of good health, celebration, gratitude, acceptance, and personal and spiritual growth.
Finding the sweet spot in group fitness
(Reuters) - Whether it is Zumba, bootcamp, yoga or kickboxing, whatever your workout pleasure is, there's nothing like a great fitness class to get you to the gym and keep you coming back for more.
That's why major fitness chains keep eyes peeled and ears pricked for the next big thing.
"The single biggest benefit is community," said Tim Keightley, who oversees group fitness at Gold's Gym, which has more than 600 locations around the world. "You meet a community of people so it's a lot harder not to come back next week."
Not only do group exercisers visit the gym more often, they are more likely to renew their memberships, according to Keightley, who said industry figures show that group exercisers use the gym about three times a week to the average gym member who goes 1.7 times.
"You throw on the music, you let someone decide the exercise for you," he said. "It really allows people to escape, which you can't do when you're on a treadmill."
Keightley said his teams put out a new schedule every month. "And two weeks into it they're already evaluating to see what stays and what goes," he said.
Thirty-minute workouts, military-style bootcamps, circuit training, and Zumba, the Latin-inspired dance fitness class, are currently what stays, according to Keightley, because they appeal to the 28-to-44-year-old professionals who are Gold's core clientele.Keightley said short, hardcore workouts are in.
"People want results. They spend less time in the gym and want more for their money. They get in, they get the workout, they move on." Ingrid Owen, who oversees the group fitness program at 24 Hour Fitness, a national chain, looks for classes with broad appeal.
"There was a time when it was about how creative you can be," she said. "But members really like some repetition too, because the more they come, the more improvement they see."
Owen said the old divisions of beginner, intermediate and advanced have dissolved at 24 Hour Fitness. Now any client can take any class and work at their own level.
"If you're advanced, I'll give you clues how to push yourself," she said, "but I'm gearing to the beginning/intermediate practitioner, versus the advanced one."
Carol Espel, the national director of group fitness at Equinox, said some new classes at the luxury chain reflect an industry shift toward wellness and longevity.
"Our members are interested in getting results, whether it's fitness or mindfulness," she said. "They want the same feeling, even if their bodies are not 18 anymore."
So along with vigorous bootcamps and circuit training, Equinox is rolling out LEELA yoga, a mind-body workout inspired by a video game developed by spiritual and alternative medicine superstar Dr. Deepak Chopra.
"Participants can be 23 or 60 and still get something out of it," she said. "It's the instructor's job to provide a leveling opportunity."
Whether a new class will mature into a classic workout or fall by the wayside is impossible to predict, but simplicity may be one key to success.
Keightley said aerobics, with its basic moves and motivating music, is one concept that, with variations, seems to have stood the test of time.
"Another really strong one is (indoor) cycling," he said. "You don't need coordination to take that class. You just need a smile and a willing mind."
That's why major fitness chains keep eyes peeled and ears pricked for the next big thing.
"The single biggest benefit is community," said Tim Keightley, who oversees group fitness at Gold's Gym, which has more than 600 locations around the world. "You meet a community of people so it's a lot harder not to come back next week."
Not only do group exercisers visit the gym more often, they are more likely to renew their memberships, according to Keightley, who said industry figures show that group exercisers use the gym about three times a week to the average gym member who goes 1.7 times.
"You throw on the music, you let someone decide the exercise for you," he said. "It really allows people to escape, which you can't do when you're on a treadmill."
Keightley said his teams put out a new schedule every month. "And two weeks into it they're already evaluating to see what stays and what goes," he said.
Thirty-minute workouts, military-style bootcamps, circuit training, and Zumba, the Latin-inspired dance fitness class, are currently what stays, according to Keightley, because they appeal to the 28-to-44-year-old professionals who are Gold's core clientele.Keightley said short, hardcore workouts are in.
"People want results. They spend less time in the gym and want more for their money. They get in, they get the workout, they move on." Ingrid Owen, who oversees the group fitness program at 24 Hour Fitness, a national chain, looks for classes with broad appeal.
"There was a time when it was about how creative you can be," she said. "But members really like some repetition too, because the more they come, the more improvement they see."
Owen said the old divisions of beginner, intermediate and advanced have dissolved at 24 Hour Fitness. Now any client can take any class and work at their own level.
"If you're advanced, I'll give you clues how to push yourself," she said, "but I'm gearing to the beginning/intermediate practitioner, versus the advanced one."
Carol Espel, the national director of group fitness at Equinox, said some new classes at the luxury chain reflect an industry shift toward wellness and longevity.
"Our members are interested in getting results, whether it's fitness or mindfulness," she said. "They want the same feeling, even if their bodies are not 18 anymore."
So along with vigorous bootcamps and circuit training, Equinox is rolling out LEELA yoga, a mind-body workout inspired by a video game developed by spiritual and alternative medicine superstar Dr. Deepak Chopra.
"Participants can be 23 or 60 and still get something out of it," she said. "It's the instructor's job to provide a leveling opportunity."
Whether a new class will mature into a classic workout or fall by the wayside is impossible to predict, but simplicity may be one key to success.
Keightley said aerobics, with its basic moves and motivating music, is one concept that, with variations, seems to have stood the test of time.
"Another really strong one is (indoor) cycling," he said. "You don't need coordination to take that class. You just need a smile and a willing mind."
Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul
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.
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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.
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