'But I started doing yoga, I slowly started healing internally, dealing with my anger and I loved it so much and now I feel I am a very smart person. 'Due to the consequences of genocide, I used to have a lot of anger and resentment,' Uwingabire explains after the yoga class. She joined a yoga group in 2008 and in six months she started witnessing changes in her life. Yoga instructor and genocide survivor Mediatrice Uwingabire is only too aware of the benefits of taking up yoga. The classes are popular amongst the community of women, many of whom are affected by a history of genocide, sexual violence and infection of HIV or AIDS.īut in this yoga class they are able to relax their bodies and minds and take a moment to breathe. ( Return.A long line of women chatter excitedly as they rush into their yoga class in Kigali, Rwanda. 23, 2015: This article originally misattributed an allegorical interpretation of The Wizard of Oz to “Oz’s biographer.” The interpretation is Evan I. Societies without change aren’t authentic they’re just dead.” As Kwame Anthony Appiah put it in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, “Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. There’s no such thing as cultural purity, and searching for it never leads anywhere good.

But the way that some contemporary activists would silo different cultures-as if anything that travels from outside the West is too fragile to survive a collision with raucous mixed-up modernity-is provincialism masquerading as sensitivity.

When privileged American kids party while wearing Native American headdresses, it looks like they’re donning the spoils of a long-ago war. Symbols and practices can be wrenched from their traditional contexts and used in ways that are disrespectful. Obviously, power plays a role in the way cultures develop. My prayer is that India may represent the co-operation of all the peoples of the world.” Tagore-who, incidentally, wrote India’s national anthem-founded a university whose motto translates to, “Where the whole world meets in a single nest.” “The infinite personality of man (as the Upanishads say) can only come from the magnificent harmony of all human races. “All humanity’s greatest is mine,” wrote poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. India is a country of dizzying dynamism, one that has always eagerly absorbed elements from other cultures into its own while proudly sharing the best of its own culture with the world. But it shows that the spread of yoga in the West is not just a story about Westerners raiding some pristine subcontinental reservoir of spiritual authenticity. There was much to deride in International Yoga Day it served as PR for India’s highly reactionary government and was widely seen as an affront to India’s Muslims. Earlier this year, Narendra Modi, India’s right-wing nationalist prime minister, succeeded in getting the United Nations to recognize International Yoga Day on June 21, which was celebrated with mass yoga demonstrations worldwide. That mass marketing continues up until this very day. They called their system “yoga,” a word that previously had had very different connotations. The short version of this story, which scholars like Mark Singleton and Joseph Alter have described, is that Indian innovators combined facets of medieval tantric practices with elements from Indian wrestling exercises, British army calisthenics, and Scandinavian gymnastics.

Vivekananda’s yoga didn’t involve the asanas, or poses, that we know as yoga today, because asana-based yoga is a modern phenomenon-one that emerged from the Indian nationalist movement’s attempt to develop a distinctly Indian version of what was then called physical culture (essentially, physical fitness). Schwartz argues that the quests of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are allegories for the four yogic paths that Vivekananda elaborated. One small example: Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, heard Vivekananda speak in Chicago and was deeply moved Baum’s biographer Evan I. Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, published in 1896, became a best-seller and had a lasting impact on American culture.

Dinocide yogs