New York City, USA - A Hindu organization is fighting to take back yoga, saying that America’s version of the practice has lost its meaningful roots.
The Hindu American Foundation launched the “Take Back Yoga” campaign not to convert Westerners to Hinduism or urge them to cease practicing it altogether, but to remind people that yoga is rooted in Hindu philosophy.
Sheetal Shah, senior director at the foundation, says the group started the campaign after noticing the words “Hindu” and “Hinduism” were rarely mentioned in yoga magazines.
“We noticed our sacred texts, philosophical ideas, and deities were consistently being referred to as ‘yogic,’ ‘tantric,’ ‘Indian,’ etc.,” Shah told the Daily News.
“We wondered, ‘How many different ways can a magazine avoid using the word Hindu?’”
The foundation called Yoga Journal, one of the country’s most popular yoga magazines, to ask about the peculiar avoidance.
“We were told that the magazine does avoid using the word ‘Hindu’ because ‘Hinduism carries too much baggage,’” Shah said.
Shah’s claim that Americans are not comfortable with Hinduism is even harder to ignore as a new crop of “Christian yoga” classes emerge.
Last month, msnbc.com reported about the “Christ-centered” practices, which cater to Christians who are eager to jump into tree pose but “uncomfortable with yoga’s Eastern roots, and its association with Hinduism.”
“We can absolutely service the people who are afraid of yoga because they thought yoga was incompatible with Christ,” Brooke Boon, founder of Holy Yoga in Phoenix, told the website.
The classes begin with a Bible scripture, and while the poses are no different than they are in any other yoga class, the instructors don’t use their traditional Sanskrit names. Chaturanga, for example, becomes “high-to-low push-up.”
Shah is wary of these adaptations, noting that yoga teaches pluralism, “the idea that there are multiple paths to the Divine (or God.)”
“I believe that at some point a person with an exclusivist mindset (i.e. the idea that my God is the only God, my way is the only way, those who don’t believe in my God cannot be ‘saved’, etc.), who is deepening his/her yoga practice will eventually realize there is an inherent contradiction between his/her belief and the path of yoga,” Shah said.
“I have yet to understand how ‘Christian yoga’ reconciles that.”