YOGA AND PUBLIC EDUCATION

The O recently published an article on how yoga was being kept out of schools on religious grounds. Denying yoga in public education is a misguided cultural isolationism that threatens to rob humanity of a rightful inheritance. The richness of human experience across history exceeds all attempts at academic description. We can't capture culture in a bottle, it must be experienced. Modernity doesn't make what we've already learned any less important. Our bodies, our nervous systems, the way we sense things and attach meaning to them, who we are in relationship to one another and to our environment, are all a product of our ancestral heritage. We owe it to our future family to preserve in reality the cultural gems of history.

The offended school patrons say yoga is Hinduism, but this is not clear from history. Yoga's earliest preserved writings seem to draw on the Vedas, a large body of writings from ancient India, but in an oral tradition all good things were likely taught as one. The practice of yoga may be found in many parts of the world today, separate and distinct from the practice of Hinduism or any other orthodox religion. Yoga is a process for achieving deeper levels of self consciousness, with the body itself as the vehicle for learning. It is a practice leading to deeper innate human potentials, not a belief system that arises from prophetic source.

Nor, do the offended patrons doubt the beneficial effects of yoga on students, on the contrary, yoga's value is highly respected. It is solely because of an alleged historical connection with a religious system that these benefits are prohibited. All streams eventually reach the ocean; good things benefit us all.

Of what value is an act, justified on religious grounds, that separates what is good for humanity from people? It would be better to have no religion than to be divided by religion. There is more 'church' in the decision to ban yoga from schools than there is 'church' in yoga. Such a narrow perspective is self defeating.

The world has become a small place. Now with internet capacity, we are shrinking even more. We are nearing a time when we will see what the Golden Rule really means, that all of humanity is a single organism on earth. As one organism, we really are doing unto ourselves all the time. Civilization advances, and we would be wise to understand religious allegory as descriptive of those advancements, not restrictions to it's reality.

By Michael Sears

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