there are 2 types of yoga that I found. one focusing on strength and flexibility, like you talked about. and one that feels like meditation, with a pagan ritual to the sun. when looking for a yoga program, how can I specify the former?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Body
[2] https://www.alomoves.com/instructors/dylanwerner?instructors...
I was not born with an innate knowledge of how to do yoga :)
I recommend finding a class that speaks to you. A good teacher will make you get the right focus and postures.
That does not mean practicing by yourself is a safe or healthy alternative.
If you can't find good teachers in your city, do something else. But please don't blame a whole discipline for the poor quality of teachers and students.
Again, I'm absolutely not affiliated with them and I'm not even in the fitness space. I run a cybersecurity company. It's just worked really well for me for about 4 years.
The instructors are pretty good, and if you just want to try out Yoga for a week or two and see how difficult it can really be I can recommend it.
I normally do 15 minutes over lunch, and I can recommend the "Flamingo Flow" for balance, and "yoga core" for core strength
[1] Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fiton.andr... [2] iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fiton-workouts-fitness-plans/i...
Some of the old texts may seriously alter perspectives, though it also need to be lived.
Any culture can redefine anything they want from other cultures. Just like most western yoga studios are LGBTQ friendly and many Hindus are not.
That is false. Please don't spread this myth. The homophobia is mostly a social hangover from colonial times. Steps are being taken to change that, and it should go away with time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_religion#Hin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_India
https://time.com/5918808/homophobia-homosexuality-lgbt-asian...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/11/asia/british-empire-lgbt-...
Also blaming pretty much everything bad on colonialism is a pretty tired excuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSwhpF9iJSs
Which guess what? Is just a variation of a Yoga move from India that the teachers used to give to improve cognition in children who were not focussing in class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murga_punishment
The idea is that squats or moving your head up and down rushes blood to your head. Further if you hold certain activation points like your ears whilst doing it, it activates certain parts of the brain that improve coordination and brain power.
All ripped from Hinduism, what I suggest to those who love Yoga and feel they benefit from Yoga is explore the other types of Yoga mentioned in the Gita. After all, if the Rishis/Sages were right about Yoga, Hinduism is clearly onto something in the Gita about the other types of Yoga.
So, even if one thinks that cultural appropriation is a thing, the culture where Yoga originated is perfectly happy with the appropriation.
Is there something else that makes it unethical?
If the term doesn't clearly convey what it means, it's a shitty term, or it's designed to create friction rather than understanding. This is such a case, where those with identity-politics as a hobby and religion will talk out of both sides of their mouths.
Buzzwords are favored in media and op-eds because of their nefarious nature. We should dispense with them and communicate what we mean. Most of them share the same problem, e.g. "white fragility" ("well ackshuallyyy it just means that white people are uncomfortable talking about race" -- yeah? Then why call it that?)
Yes.
The main problems are around taking elements of a culture without providing proper attribution or butchering them.
Translated to FOSS, it's the equivalent of reusing somebody's software without attributing authorship (even if the license requires it).
Or a large company making a backdoored fork of Firefox called "FireFox" and misleading users into blaming Mozilla for it.
It gets worse when the copycat overshadows the original.
Besides, I met plenty of people, both from India and not, complaining about the butchering of Yoga.
What would be the appropriate means of providing attribution in case of Yoga? Would a rendition of Sare Jahan Se Achcha before each Yoga session suffice?
> Translated to FOSS
Applying copyright and trademark law to a practice that is a part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage is beyond farcical.
> Besides, I met plenty of people, both from India and not, complaining about the butchering of Yoga.
I've probably met a few orders of magnitude more Indians than you have, considering how I live in India. I have only heard of appreciation when foreigners adopt even superficial aspects of Indian culture. I don't see why Bharat Tyagis[0] get to be gatekeepers.
My Chinese colleagues were horrified by what is called Chinese food in India.[1] But the world would be a poorer place if we gave up this wonderful cuisine because of some misguided notions of appropriation. You can pry my manchurian[2] from my cold dead hands. Wait, did I just appropriate American culture and disrespect an impassioned defence of a cherished constitutional right?
If you still have a problem with cultural appropriation, please start with giving up the concept of zero and the positional notational system. Afterall, it's been butchered and misattributed to the Arabs for centuries.
0: https://devdutt.com/articles/hiss-of-the-pio-bharat-tyagi/
I never said to apply copyright and trademark to cultural heritage. I was making a comparison.
Besides, you just made a good example of appropriation: registering the name of a cultural item from another culture as your own trademark in another countries. It happened a lot of time with food.
> But the world would be a poorer place if we gave up this wonderful cuisine because of some misguided notions of appropriation.
I never said one should give up any cultural artifact. You are making a strawman after another.
You wake making some reference to attribution. You didn't clarify what would be appropriate attribution in this case though.
> registering the name of a cultural item from another culture as your own trademark in another countries.
Which is an entirely different issue. Let me remind you the discussion was originally about people from other countries practicing Yoga.
> I never said one should give up any cultural artifact.
But you did say that cultural appropriation was not ethical. So, we can continue with it as long as we feel bad about it?
Registering a trademark is a by-the-book example of claiming ownership of something. Especially when it goes together with introducing something to a population largely unaware of it.
> But you did say that cultural appropriation was not ethical.
Yes.
> So, we can continue with it as long as we feel bad about it?
No, and again, I never said that. I very clearly said that once attribution is given properly and mashups/variations are clearly identified there is no problem.
At this point I can't imagine that the attempts at arguing I'm reading are written in good faith and without an agenda.
I'm asking for the third time: What would be appropriate attribution for Yoga?
> At this point I can't imagine that the attempts at arguing I'm reading are written in good faith and without an agenda.
And what agenda would that be?
It doesn't really matter whether people want to call it yoga or not; we fundamentally have the right to practice whatever exercise we want, no matter our ethnicity or culture of origin.
Reading the very first 3 paragraphs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation is enough to disprove your claims.
> butchering them
Not sure what this is supposed to mean considering that culture is not static, and all cultural elements as they are appropriated help create something different from their source of inspiration, by definition.
> Reading the very first 3 paragraphs
Read the first sentence.
I wouldn't put much stake in a wikipedia edit-war that sources op-eds from media as citations, but don't see anything explicitly contradicting what I said - it doesn't make sense to liken India as a "minority" culture. In the first place for being on the global sphere, not local, and in the second their population stands at 1.2 billion. There's nothing minor about it. And it's been independent since 1947. Add to the fact, most people in their respective countries are part of the "dominant" culture.
Calling something colonialism doesn't make it so. Colonialism has a very real meaning: power or control over another group through colonies. You can't just wantonly use it as a modifier. Likening yoga to an act of colonialism is disgraceful.
Proponents can just come out and be candid about the fact that this is really a pissing contest over have-not cultures, i.e. the Indigenous. The insult in a hypothetical appropriation stems not from appropriation itself, but because their sociological group still gets the shaft today in the West, which is being attributed to colonialism. Just about anything would provoke a reaction because of widespread discontent, it's just a power they can exercise, and who can blame them? No one can "own" the likeness of wearing a feather in their hair, and they know this - it's not about the feather.