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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm of Indian descent. Yoga weirds me out precisely because of this.

Especially when they use Hindi or other made-up Hindi-like words/phrases/chants. [/quote]

They're not Hindi chants.  It's Sanskrit, not Hindi.

As for OP, there are schools of Hinduism that are pretty close to being atheistic.  They don't have a notion of a personal god, which is what most American atheists reject.  So it's possible to be an atheist and a yogi at the same time.  Union with the divine doesn't necessarily mean union with a specific personal god.  "Divine" is a pretty open-ended concept.  And a lot of yogic texts are very vague on the notion of what "divine" actually means.

As for the whole debate about cultural appropriation, pretty much all of my Hindu friends celebrate Christmas and participate in Christmas, and they don't care if Americans meditate and say Sanskrit chants.  The thing they mind is when Americans (or Indians for that matter) try to copyright poses and phrases that have been around for hundreds of years in order to profit from them.

Most of the yoga teachers I know don't make a lot of money from their classes.  The money maker is the studios and their teacher training programs.  I take issue with them only because I don't know that they're really adequately regulated so that people who know anatomy and philosophy are running it.

I don't know why people are so touchy about it all.  [b]The thing about Hinduism is that it has drawn from so many other traditions.  My theology professors said that part of what has made it so dynamic is its ability to absorb other philosophical movements.[/b]

One of the most physical forms of yoga, by the way, is Ashtanga.  It's not just in the West that there are different styles of yoga, some more physical than others.

[/quote]

Do you recall which ones? I wonder why this is not taught in Indian schools... [/quote]

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