Source: CG Leaders' Training by Dr. Lee Ken Ang, 20.10.2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?
- Yoga is such a broad term - that's what causes a difficulty.
- "The word yoga is a Sanskrit word that means 'union with god' or 'yoke'," says Laurette Willis, the founder of PraiseMoves.
Types of Yoga
- bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion
- hatha yoga - a path towards enlightenment that focuses on building physical and mental strength
- yogic asanas, or positions, retain elements of their earlier spiritual meanings
- Yoga classes vary. While some feature the chanting of Hindu sutras, others will make vaguer references to a "life force" or "cosmic energy". A session might end with a greeting of "namaste" and a gesture of prayer. There will probably be a moment for meditation, at which point participants may be encouraged to repeat the sacred word "Om", which Buddhists and Hindus regard as a primordial sound which brought the universe into being.
History
Malaysia- Yoga stems from the Vedas - the Indian holy texts that were composed from around 1900BC. Besides yoga, three major religions came from those texts - Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.
- Around 200-400AD, a sage called Patanjali composed the Yoga Sutras. His "eight limbs" of yoga still inform practice today and discuss posture, breathing, meditation and correct living.
- For many centuries yoga was all about meditation and austerity practices, such as standing on one leg for weeks or hanging upside-down from a tree. There were only 14 yoga asanas or postures.
- The big explosion in hatha yoga didn't come until the early 1900s in Mysore, India - now there are over 100 postures.
Similar prohibitions on spiritual yoga exist in Malaysia, where a 2008 fatwa - a religious ruling - resulted in a yoga ban in five states. In the capital Kuala Lumpur, the physical activity is permitted but chanting and meditation are forbidden. Clerics in the world's most populous Islamic nation - Indonesia - make a similar distinction.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25006926
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