Skip to Main Content »

Pranamaya

The Best in Yoga DVDs.

The Sacred Cow

A Place to Talk Yoga (Without All the Bull)

Posts Tagged ‘Hindu’

Who Owns Yoga?

Posted on December 10th, 2010 by Karen Macklin — Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article in The New York Times about a new campaign called Take Back Yoga introduced by the Hindu American Foundation. You can read the article yourself, but the gist is that this group is trying to get Americans to acknowledge that yoga was initially a Hindu practice. Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, is quoted in the article as saying: “In a way, our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”

The brand? Is yoga a brand? I don’t know. Read More »»

Q&A: David Newman on the Kirtan Craze and the Human Heart

Posted on October 20th, 2010 by Karen Macklin — Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

David Newman, also known as Durga Das, is becoming one of the most recognized names in the rapidly growing kirtan movement. To date, he’s released six CDs—including Lotus Feet, Leap of Grace, and To Be Home—and he was one of the headliners at Bhakti Fest 2010. This month, The Sacred Cow talked to him about the devotional practice of kirtan, and why so many yogis are now singing its tune.

Read More »»

Holy Kirtan

Posted on October 3rd, 2010 by Karen Macklin — Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

A couple of weeks ago, I returned from the second annual Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California. For four days, kirtan artists like Krishna Das, David Newman, Deva Premal, Shyamdas, Shantala, Girish (pictured at left), The Mayapuris, and handfuls of other amazing devotional musical acts played nonstop on two stages. People were dancing, picnicking, spinning poi, forming makeshift drum circles, and springing into spontaneous AcroYoga. In fact, everyone I met there was high. That’s not to say they were on anything; this may have been the soberest music event I have ever been to. It was the music—combined with a full spectrum of daily yoga classes, desert heat, and yummy raw food—that elevated the energy on the concert grounds to an ethereal buzz of bhakti bliss.

But when I wasn’t entranced by the magical vocals and the tribal tablas, I got to thinking: What is all of this really about? Read More »»

Have a Seat

Posted on September 9th, 2010 by Karen Macklin — Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

My first yoga teachers simply didn’t teach seated meditation. But that didn’t bother me. I was restless when I entered class, and always fiending for a good, hard sweat. I liked pushing my body, but the thought of being still for any lengthy period of time only agitated me. I would sit quietly and still in places that forced me to: airplanes, cubicles, cramped buses, and vaccination clinics where someone was sticking a needle in my arm to ward off some disease I might contract in some developing country. But why would I sit in silence voluntarily?  Read More »»

Dear God, It’s Yoga

Posted on July 13th, 2010 by Karen Macklin — Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

At my brother’s wedding last month in New York, I mentioned to a wedding guest that I wrote about yoga for a living. “Is that a religion?” he asked. “No, no,” I answered, immediately dismissing the idea that I might be “a religion writer” and simultaneously wondering how many drinks it would take for a total lightweight like myself to forget that I was wearing three-inched heels.

I went on to explain that yoga is more of a philosophical system than it is a religion. He tried to argue, citing some book he’d heard of, but I contended that I should know—after all, I’ve been studying the path for more than a decade, and he’s never even taken a yoga class.
Read More »»