Non-Religious / Non-Spiritual Yoga - Does it Exist?

Transcript

one of the common questions I get at the yoga Teachers College is do you teach meditation do you teach spirituality and do you teach religion and the answer is no no and no I love meditation I love spirituality I love religious studies we don't teach it because it's not what our students want I taught for many many years I used to chant in classes I used to do Hindu chants and poly chants I used to do Native American chants and after one of my classes somebody came up to me they're like why are you saying this stuff and I realized I hadn't really put myself in check and when I looked at the market I realized that yoga students in general yoga publications yoga conferences we do a lot of cultural appropriation if you look at like a Yoga Journal conference for example you'll have a bunch of North American anglo-saxon judeo-christian background women typically and there's a big Buddha statue on stage and then there's a big statue of a dancing Shiva and it's just a little bit silly they've taken these major world religions and made them into spiritual kitsch they've appropriated these religions and is not really respectful and it's also not appropriate it's really important that you be true to who you are if you're a Hindu by all means incorporate that into your classes if you teach Christianity by all means incorporate that into your class I know people who actually preach in their classes but it's important that you set it up if you look outside my studio it says Yoga body fitness it doesn't say Yoga body religion Yoga body called yoga body and neo Hinduism it doesn't say any that we're a fitness based organization we teach mind body fitness so what that means is I don't teach the Yoga Sutras I don't teach the Bhagavad Gita I don't teach the Bible I don't teach the Quran we just focus on mind-body Fitness tools that can really help people to change their lives now why don't we teach meditation meditation of course is totally secular the reason we don't teach it is because it's an advanced practice and while everybody loves to read books about meditation and download apps about meditation they don't really practice instead we focus on breathing which is kind of the gateway practice to lead you from yoga practice and meditation breathing is far more accessible you get a much higher compliance rate in so much bed to teach beginning students I loved meditation my students loved meditation but they don't practice shivananda has this famous quote that you know if you have a yoga asana class it'll be packed if you have a pranayama breathing class it'll be half full and a meditation class will have one or two students and this is very very true meditation is very very challenging and not so popular people are not ready to sit for an hour on their bum instead we have them sit on their bum and breathe yoga body's a mind-body Fitness organization this is what we focus on we embrace people all faiths all backgrounds we have one of the most diverse student bodies and even teacher training bodies in the world in a typical course what people speaking 12 languages from 17 different countries so we want to honor and respect people from all different backgrounds we certainly don't want to preach what somebody should believe or not believe in terms of their personal spirituality