Читать книгу Yoga Therapy as a Whole-Person Approach to Health онлайн

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When we hear someone saying, “I have a yoga class today,” we tend to see in our minds a studio with yoga mats and people doing all kinds of different poses. The common understanding of “yoga” nowadays, in the West and in some parts of India, seems to have been reduced to an exercise practice with perhaps some controlled breathing. Even meditation is usually mentioned separately from yoga or in addition to yoga.

This general reductionist misconception of what yoga is, paired with mistaking spirituality for religion, creates much confusion in yoga practitioners. Even some yoga therapists seem to think that spirituality is beyond the scope of yoga and yoga therapy. It seems that even we, practitioners, yoga teachers, and therapists, cannot agree on this subject. This was the question an anthropologist, Caroline Nizard, tried to answer in her paper titled “Is Yoga a Spiritual Path?” during the recent Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) in June 2018 in Bern, Switzerland.35