Quote:
Originally Posted by ElliotR
Can you expand on the spirituality angle and your issues with it?
The shorter longer version is they not only presented, as fact, a whole lot of Hindu and other traditional mythology, they are actually going to be testing us on it. We spent many hours of our time — which was limited enough that, by contrast, I learned essentially zero in our anatomy and physiology lectures because it was too shallow — on stuff like ayurvedic medicine (which is 80% common sense and 20% utter tripe), energy channels, pseudoscientific rephrasings of hindu lore, our daily prayers (seriously — about fifteen minutes of it to start every day), and so on.
Kripalu literature was clear that their approach was fine for members of all faiths, and I suppose that's true because they also kept emphasizing how, for example, what they were selling was not inconsistent with Christianity. But what it WAS inconsistent with was a science-based, atheistic view of the world, which of course I hold.
So my beef was essentially that (1) they spent huge chunks of our limited time on this; (2) they expect us to regurgitate it to them, not as metaphor (which I'm OK with) but as fact; and (3) this runs contrary to how I believe they sold it.
Note also that no, this is not inherent to yoga; it is inherent only to some versions of yoga. Some variants of yoga today are entirely non-spiritual; even some ancient versions were not as steeped in the Hindu stuff (though they substituted their own forms of mysticism). Nor is it necessary for the more calming, quiet versions: We could speak in terms of vagus nerve tone, theta and delta wave states, left cortical suppression, and so on and be perfectly correct. It just wouldn't be as palatable to some people — but I thought we'd get a lot more of it.