A Non Yoga for All People

Note: Most of you know I had a move going on recently, in addition to the rest of life.  Now that I'm settled in Durham with Jeff and the hounds, I'm going to try to get back to real daily entries.

Today's New York Times article proved that the NYT can, in fact, write articles on yoga whose primary purpose is not to troll the yoga community.  It also raised one of the issues yoga in the United States deals with constantly, which is, to what extent is yoga Hindu?  Probably more important to the people who worry about such things, to what extent will yoga compromise one's commitment to other religions?

There's some debate about the extent to which yoga is rooted in religious versus nonreligious Indian traditions, and there are people much, much more qualified to speak on that topic than lil' ole me.  I can only speak as a practitioner of modern American yoga, but my take is that contemporary yoga is not neutral towards religion.  Certainly, I believe people from all traditions can and do practice yoga, but the one thing to which contemporary yoga is not particularly friendly is fundamentalism.  If you are insistent that one way to Heaven exists and it demands we follow a narrow, rigid path, American yoga is probably not for you.  We preach inclusivity and acceptance of diverse viewpoints, exactly as you'd expect a bunch of good American liberals to do.  What can I say?  We're flexible people.

What surprises me is that I haven't heard other religious/cultural traditions trying to design something like yoga around their systems of belief.  I guess Christian Yoga kind of qualifies, but just giving the poses Christian names doesn't seem to be fooling anyone.  I'm talking about, I am shocked that no one has started from the ground up.  Read the Bible, come to an understanding of the principles in it, and design a series of physical exercises designed to help the practitioner embody those principles.  You can't tell me that with the rise of evangelical Christian marketing, there's not a place for such a practice.

If you know of a counterpart to yoga in other religious/cultural traditions that is still active today, I'd love to hear about it.  If I've just given you an idea that nets you and your house of worship a jabillion dollars, all I ask is ten percent.