The right question is, What is wrong with our understand of Yoga?
As per most people and if you ask them, they would reply Yoga means twisting, bending and turning your body in crazy ways to heal/medicinal use. Nothing would be further from the truth. Unfortunately things have come down to a level where people only give ritualistic definition of Yoga! Yoga also has many branches.
To understand Yoga in its essence I would advice you to read Swami Vivekananda's complete works.
I practice Yoga. Yoga is not a 2 hour exercise session. Yoga is a way of life. I practice Yoga, Its a branch of Yoga called Karma Yoga! So what does Karma Yoga mean? Its exemplified from a verse in Gita:
You have power to your actions only, not its outcome. Act therefore forth right without succumbing to inaction
This is to dedicate yourself towards a goal, consciously iterating and eliminating your faults in moments of self reflection improvising and not giving up until you reach your goal.
This is easier said than done! The key here is self reflection. I felt that David Allen's Getting things done took me to a better enabler to following Karma Yoga! I started following these techniques since last February.
I started taking one day a time, trying to most productive in a day. Eliminating distraction. And working towards a larger goal. The results have been astounding to me.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
---
There are also other forms of Yoga! My mother practices Pranayama. Which is basically meditation and breathing practices.
You also need a good teacher. Who knows Yoga! Else you will end up making mistakes which can be dangerous.
Yoga is a way of life. Stop thinking it in terms of gym sessions.
Ultimate aim of Yoga is to make you bring you to a state of self actualization. Like what Buddha was! And healthy body plays a important role in that. So Yoga helps you build that too. But people tend to understand Yoga only as some form of medical exercises.
It is quite unfortunate that OP is getting upvoted. He has hijacked the discussion by completely redefining yoga. Yoga might have meant all those spiritual aspects you've outlined, but as practised here in the USA and even in India, none of those aspects are even remotely brought to bear. I have been taught yoga formally in India both as a kid ( in most CBSE middle schools, you are auto-enrolled in 1 hour of yoga per week ) and as an adult. Swami Vivekananda was mentioned not even in passing.
> To understand Yoga in its essence I would advice you to read Swami Vivekananda's complete works.
Yeah and likewise to understand Computer Scienmce in its essence I would advice you to read D.E. Knuth's complete works and not profess to know any CS until you memorize each and every algorithm in TAOCP! You see how ridiculous that sounds ? That's the whole problem. Yoga a few centuries ago might have meant what you said, but as practised today, in the here and now, simply means acrobatic gym sessions with contortions paid for by your montly paycheck. Its unfortunate, but that's what it is.
Bringing in Kipling into this discussion is hugely ironic considering how much of a royal prick he was in his attitude towards Indians ( Kipling's transparently racist portrayals of Indian characters in Kim and Gunga Din, among others )
The Times article is about genuine medical risks posed by spinal twists and headstands, which are, unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace as sedentary officegoers frequent yoga studios to add some yoga to their fitness regimen. None of those people are remotely interested in karmayoga or nyanayoga - they just want to learn the asanas.
Asanas minus Yoga is not yoga.
But that's the reality of today. Learning shirasasana without learning its spiritual yogic root is akin to calling yourself a programmer and not knowing what a red-black tree is. But guess what, most programmers today don't know what a red-black tree is. That's sad, but its also a reality and we have to deal with reality as it exists, not based on Kipling's delusional rants. There are hundreds of actual people with actual broken ribs who desperately want to learn matsyasana and don't give a flying f--- who gautama buddha or ramakrishna paramahamsa or swami vivekananda was. That's just the way it is.
>Bringing in Kipling into this discussion is hugely ironic >considering how much of a royal prick he was in his attitude towards Indians ( Kipling's transparently racist portrayals of Indian characters in Kim and Gunga Din, among others )
If you consider Rudyard Kipling's characterization as racist then perhaps you are missing a few subtleties and humanizing nature of such character portrayals. I am from India and I do not consider Kipling's characterization as racist but rather a dig at the ills of society that existed during the British rule similar to Mark Twain's characterization of Native Americans and African Americans in the pre-civil war American south.
Well, he's clearing up a semantic point. As he said - Yoga has many branches - many different meanings. He's not taking the bullshit route of "Yoga is good, I practice Yoga, people who hurt themselves aren't really doing Yoga". He's said that there's different meanings, not one true Yoga, and admits what some people call Yoga may be a bad idea.
You are taking it to extreme. One cannot claim to be a computer engineer by learning to edit web page, same way doing few postures is not learning Yoga. Many people are following types of Yoga not associated with Asanas so you cannot put all in one category.
Here are two interesting statements from A Perfect Man, a biography of Eugen Sandow. Unfortunately, the author does not cite a source for these statements and doesn't appear to be familiar with yoga himself. (Also, the author strikes me as a little too eager to establish Sandow's influence on the modern world.) With those caveats in mind:
Sandow's ideas were taken up enthusiastically [in India after Sandow's visit there.] There were many who saw physical fitness as the first step on the road to independence and political power. These included Swami Vivekenanda, the Hindu nationalist leader (and exponent of the three Bs: beef, biceps, and the Bhagavad-Gita.)
Later, speaking about the physical practice of yoga that became popular in the west:
According to some historians, this modern posture-based yoga owes more to Western physical culture (including Sandow's) than it does to Indian tradition.
Sandow himself made many grandiose statements about the power of his physical exercise program to cure almost any bodily ailment. No one takes his claims seriously nowadays because he presented them as material facts, but if he had cloaked them in a bunch of mystical bullshit and attributed his ideas to an exotic ancient tradition, he might still have followers today instead of being a mostly forgotten Victorian curiosity.
As Pierre Bernard, one of the first of many indefatigable charlatans who popularized yoga, or at least its physical-training aspect, hatha yoga, in the United States, put it, “The purpose of yoga is to prepare us from getting cheated; to enable us to make better bargains, and to get what we go after!” Fabulous sex was high on Bernard’s menu even in the strait-laced 1910s. Robert Love’s entertaining biography, “The Great Oom,” depicts a bold and successful liar who could tell his gullible disciples with a straight face that oral sex, punishable in 1915 by up to 20 years in prison, was a sacred practice in India and produced orgasms 10 times longer than ordinary intercourse.
The more accurate statement is that Yoga can be a way of life if you choose to make it so. Just like a martial art can be a "way of life" (as in Karate-do - the way of Karate). But you can just practice your hour of Yoga a day, without any mumbo jumbo or assumptions about the ultimate aim of life and so on, just as you can practice Karate to get some exercise, or learning to fight, or to win a competition, or just have some fun. All are valid ways of approaching the "way".
And Vivekananda's works, while potentially interesting to someone who wants to understand Vivekananda's views, aren't, by any stretch of the imagination, the definitive books on what Yoga is and is not. Discussing what version of Yoga is the 'right' way and decrying other approaches is "inferior" or "just twisting" or whatever is reminiscent of the endless debates on the martial arts forums on what is the best style.
Or arguing about what "real" music is. with an implied 'those people over there aren't doing "proper" music' sneer.
fwiw I am Indian (not sure why that should be particularly relevant, but whatever) and a Yoga practitioner, of the "shut up and do the work and the ultimate aims will take care of themselves, meanwhile don't make pompous claims" school ;-)
Vivekananda was an extraordinary man. He came to the US in the 1890s not knowing a soul and ended by winning everyone over so completely that he became not just widely admired but loved. He had movie star looks and a brilliant mind and was the perfect figure to expound Hinduism to the West. His writings are marvelously alive and his English is first-rate. He deserves to be better remembered for the pivotal role he played.
As for explaining to yoga class attenders that they don't know what yoga is, forget it. Someone I met once brilliantly said: "The east never came west. What came west was a western version of the east." In particular, Western interest in Eastern religion (as well as in supposedly non-religious practices like yoga and meditation) has everything to do with Western societies' reaction against their own religions. It's self-referential.
We prefer to get our religion unconsciously these days.
"Western interest in Eastern religion (as well as supposedly non-religious practices like yoga and meditation) has everything to do with the reaction against Western religion"
I think this is only true among people who don't actually understand what religion is, which admittedly is probably the vast majority of Americans. There definitely are though a lot of people in the west who are interested in yoga, meditation, psychedelics, etc. specifically because of their religious nature. Even among most of these people there is a lot of orientalism, but this isn't the same as a reaction against religion per se. If you watch the documentary about Ram Dass or else that new movie Crazy Wisdom that just came out, you'll see though that these movements definitely did start because people were seeking primary religious experience rather than fleeing from it.
this isn't the same as a reaction against religion per se
I'm saying it's fundamentally a reaction against Christianity on the part of Christians and Judaism on the part of Jews.
But I see that my comment was ambiguous because I also said "we prefer to get our religion unconsciously". I suppose what I think is that some people who engage in these practices believe that they've transcended religion altogether while others believe they've found a better religion. In both cases, though, it's a reaction against the traditional (Christianity and Judaism) - it's our reaction against our traditions, so it's really about us and the contradictions in our own society.
Yeah, I understand that Yoga means something different to you, but what it means to you isn't at all what we're talking about.
It's kind of like the word "hacking", which to the mass market refers to the activity of taping two batteries together with an LED or making proper use of placebos.
Well frankly speaking if you remove the spirit of Yoga and restrict it to merely acrobatic and gym sessions kind of a regime. I would advice you better go with the actual gym and aerobic exercise.
You either need to adhere to things in their true spirit or just do some thing else.
Also the title in this article is highly misleading. Yoga won't wreck your body.
Rather it will take you a level higher. Like the Buddha! It will let you ponder on the deepest meaning of your existence.
Its very sad that its being marketed in America this way. Some time back I read somewhere that meditation is being marketed as 'hallucination'. That is by taking narcotics and dangerous intoxicants!
So those people whose bodies were wrecked doing yoga - and several specific examples were given in the article - I assume they weren't doing yoga? Sounds like the Fallacy of the True Scotsman to me.
Those Christians who steal, they aren't really Christians, right? Those Jews who let men and women mix in the synagogue, do they "adhere to things in their true spirit"?
And so on. Those who claim that there is a true way walk a dangerous path.
Exactly. As pointed out by the OC, Yoga is about ridding the ego and assuming awareness. "those people" were not practicing that at all, but rather the exact opposite. They were pushing themselves to do things they were not ready to do in the spirit of ego (or "I should be able to do this by now.").
>Those who claim that there is a true way walk a dangerous path.
This is true, however I believe it to be misapplied in this case. You could also say "That person eating an orange, how can you say he is not eating an apple? Is there not more than one way to eat an apple?"
Generally: words are defined by how people use them. They are not defined by history, or by experts, though experts may attempt to keep the meaning pure (often with limited success). Shared definitions are what enable communication; we don't have a choice in the matter if we want to communicate.
When you say "apple", virtually no one will think "citrus fruit, orange color" etc. We generally agree on what an apple and orange are.
If you say "yoga", however, and 80% of the people listening to you think of flexibility/twisting/poses/etc., you can't say "you're all wrong; I'm more expert than you".
It's frustrating when words and concepts are diminished and twisted in the process of greater adoption, but it's very common.
On top of that, the entire article is about how yoga (in the form it's most often done in the US) has the "potential to inflict blinding pain" and in teachers (in the US) the lack of "deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury."
The reason people do yoga (as it's most often done in the US) is because it appears to: "lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life."
Once you take out the "as most often practiced in the US" then the entire article is of course null and void. But since it's premised on differences between the US and India, like how Americans more often sit on chairs than on the floor, that's of course to be expected.
If you use another definition for "yoga", then you take away the bad parts, but then you also take away the attributed good parts. How do you know that the "pure" form of yoga is better at lowering blood pressure, etc. than the US form of the same? What's the cost benefit analysis?
As the essay rightly points out, yoga as it's taught in the US rarely includes the negatives. Apparently from various others in this thread, there are no negatives for yoga done right. Is this because every injury is attributed to not doing it right, or to the lack of good statistics on the matter? I presume both.
I've run into this position before on many things of unrelated matters and it never really agrees with me. I think mostly because redefining something does not inherently change what that thing is. 80% of the U.S. population may define Yoga as a bunch of twists and contortions, but people who know what yoga really is do not agree that those 80% are actually practicing Yoga. Likewise, if posting an unfortunate status update on someone's FB, that you found left in the logged in state at the library, suddenly became defined as "hacking" by 76% of the FB community, would you be inclined to agree with them?
Firstly, it's not a position; it's the fact of how communication works and how word usage evolves.
About liking it or not -- well, I don't like it, I care deeply about clarity of communication, and I despise how many debates on subjects like evolution, abortion, and all things political are derailed by (sometimes intentional) muddling of words' definitions.
So certainly, if you can convince everyone to re-adopt the original, more useful definition, then you have won and I salute you. Certainly you have the right to try -- sometimes it's very important to try and wrestle words back from the brink of uselessness.
But if you can't, then you are the odd one out. If everyone says "hacker" and means "someone who does stuff I don't like using computers", when you use the word with another meaning in mind, you are failing to communicate.
And the dictionaries will eventually start putting "archaic" after your definition.
If an article titled "How Hackers can use your credit card number" goes into details about what they mean by "hacker", examples of botnets and phishing, and mention that hacking in the criminal world can mean something different than what it means in the programming world, then I would have no problem with that.
This article was much more along those lines than the example you gave here. It often uses the term "yoga exercise" or "position", etc. and to state the specific action which caused an injury, or in the case of bikram yoga, to state a physical negative effect that it can have on the body.
In other words, it's what 80% of the population uses, and stated in such a way that the other 20% can tell exactly which of the many definitions of "yoga" the author means.
But then if real hackers came along and read that article, and then poised to point out that the "hackers" described in the article were not actually hacking but were rather engaging in an nonsensical tangent activity that could loosely be grouped within the technical field but not necessarily termed "hacking", we would then have to defend hacking by "redefining" it on the spot..
Not that I entirely disagree with you. I have no problem with observing a group performing such acts and pretending to define themselves within the collective for a group in which their activities really do not apply. I can certainly agree with saying "Fine, let them be." Until those activities begin to reflect badly upon the real collective, and then you must come out and explicitly distinguish between the real and the imaginative.
In your scenario (using someone's still-active account), I'll say it's ignorance from the author. But that's not the case here. My scenario (details about phishing attacks, mention that there are other uses for the word hacker) is much more comparable to the NYT article.
The author of the NYT article appears cognizant of the differences in different yoga forms, and of its history in the US and in India. This article uses proper usage of one of the many accepted meanings for "yoga", in a way that's understood by the readers and by domain experts.
Were real hackers to complain in my scenario, then to them I say "you've lost." They don't get to decide language, and real black-hat hackers embrace the term for themselves while many proficient white-hack hackers do not. People in the 1990s tried to introduce the term "cracker" as a substitute but that didn't take. The war is lost. Embrace (or accept) the white hat/black hat spectrum and get over it.
To yoga people who care about the precise term, just start saying the specific kind of yoga you mean. And don't call it "true" or "real" yoga.
I'm an Indian too and have attended classes under atleast 3 different schools of Yoga. Let's not beat down the schools which focus on asanas. If you do an intense study of Iyengar Yoga, you would understand that it is a fantastic system with the attention to details that is hard to find elsewhere.
Yoga means to unite/connect. There are many branches of Yoga - Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Hatha Yoga, etc. They all differ in their philosophy.
In west Yoga means Yogasana (Yoga + Asana) - postures used in Yoga.
Thank you for this thoughtful explanation, which I have never encountered before. Off topic, but because you have a unique perspective, I would like to ask you a question I have been polling interesting people I meet: determinism or free will?
What is wrong with Yoga? Answer : Wrong question!
The right question is, What is wrong with our understand of Yoga?
As per most people and if you ask them, they would reply Yoga means twisting, bending and turning your body in crazy ways to heal/medicinal use. Nothing would be further from the truth. Unfortunately things have come down to a level where people only give ritualistic definition of Yoga! Yoga also has many branches.
To understand Yoga in its essence I would advice you to read Swami Vivekananda's complete works.
I practice Yoga. Yoga is not a 2 hour exercise session. Yoga is a way of life. I practice Yoga, Its a branch of Yoga called Karma Yoga! So what does Karma Yoga mean? Its exemplified from a verse in Gita:
You have power to your actions only, not its outcome. Act therefore forth right without succumbing to inaction
This is to dedicate yourself towards a goal, consciously iterating and eliminating your faults in moments of self reflection improvising and not giving up until you reach your goal.
This is easier said than done! The key here is self reflection. I felt that David Allen's Getting things done took me to a better enabler to following Karma Yoga! I started following these techniques since last February.
I started taking one day a time, trying to most productive in a day. Eliminating distraction. And working towards a larger goal. The results have been astounding to me.
Karma Yoga! for westerners can be explain by a poem by Rudyard Kipling - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94
---
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same: If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss: If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much: If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
---
There are also other forms of Yoga! My mother practices Pranayama. Which is basically meditation and breathing practices.
You also need a good teacher. Who knows Yoga! Else you will end up making mistakes which can be dangerous.
Yoga is a way of life. Stop thinking it in terms of gym sessions.
Ultimate aim of Yoga is to make you bring you to a state of self actualization. Like what Buddha was! And healthy body plays a important role in that. So Yoga helps you build that too. But people tend to understand Yoga only as some form of medical exercises.