Yoga gets dunked on a lot. Even more when you are a guy doing yoga. It is seen as a feminine and hippie kind of thing.
But that’s a dumb way of thinking, of course.
Yoga is good for flexibility, training your balance, focussing on your breath and staying calm and it even trains strength. A daily yoga session of ten minutes can keep you stretched, flexible, and calm.
As I said, yoga for women is already pretty popular. I know multiple women who do yoga on a regular basis. Men, not so much. But I want to change that, and inspire men to step out of their comfort zone, break the patriarchic view of yoga and keep them fitter.
Who in here has experience with yoga already? Please share your tips and visions!
Yoga is great. My only gripe with it is that yoga and meditation are frequently associated with the divine in India because of which the “yoga industry” is full of charlatan hacks who try to amass a following kinda like how Gandhi did. If you look at this list of modern yoga gurus on Wikipedia, many of the recent ones are hacks as well. I can only speak of the ones that are alive because I don’t know about the older ones. Yoga (and ayurveda) is also the pride of Hindu fascists who like to bask in the false glory of a mythologised past where yoga (and ayurveda) was a cure to a multitude of ailments, an art which now has supposedly been forgotten about due to the rampaging colonisation by Western ideas. They take the popularity of yoga in the West as affirmation of the idea that India of the past was the most advanced civilisation and other idealist notions like that.
Mostly though if you go to a normal gym which has yoga classes, it is usually fine and normal. But there are a ton of “foundation” run by aforementioned hacks. My neighbours tried to indoctrinate me into one when my parents told them I was depressed. It was extremely stupid.
Wut
What do you mean?
I think they’re just pointing out the absurdity and orientalism of suggesting that as yoga has been distorted and popularized in the West, Indians must be backward and not doing enough yoga, or at least not correctly (correct being the coopted version).
Yes yoga has as a whole has some disturbing sides to it. As a form of exercise it is good though.
Yeah it is very helpful. I hurt my disc while deadlifting which caused a muscle spasm. Yoga stretches were helping me out a ton with it until I spiraled and broke the habit. Have to get back into it again.
The disturbing sides of yoga don’t stem from yoga itself, but the people using it. Nationalists will always seek to misappropriate cultural artifacts of “their people’s history”. This is why Indian nationalists use yoga to justify supremacist actions, why Nazis use Viking imagery, Buddhism misappropriated by Tibet, etc etc.
So we shouldn’t shun or dismiss a practice just because nationalists use it for evil. If we do that, then that becomes a victory for the rightists as they can further point to it being “exclusively theirs”. Culture is meant to be shared and enjoyed by all, including guests, so long as everyone is respectful.
When rightists use culture artifacts to justify the suppression of others, they do not respect even their own culture any longer.
When studying the history of yoga, you won’t find original yogis, or even the disciples/students suggesting the elimination of other cultures. What you’ll find is people suggesting that by exercising control and discipline over your mind and body, you will come closer to and possibly achieve enlightenment and experience divinity.
Yes, of course. I didn’t meant to discredit yoga and its spiritual sides but I can see how my wording is a bit wrong.