5 yamas five yamas—kindness, truthfulness, abundance, continence, and self-reliance (responsiblity for self contentment - willingness to question cravings)

5 niyamas -

aparigraha --abstinence from greed


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Liebermann describes how much conventional yoga tourism degenerates into shopping.

"Nevertheless, quite a few ofthose Americans who have cultivated a “practice” - usually referred topossessively as “my practice” - find their way to India to secure furtherinstruction at dozens, if not hundreds, of centers for teaching “yoga.”

Few ofthese centers offer much more than asana and a web-site, although someelementary pranayama may be included. At a number of these establishmentsthe commodification of yoga has taken hold, and ad hoc yoga-tourism industries,actively promoted by the Government of India, have bloomed whereverAmerican yoga students gather. (I speak of “Americans,” since I know thembest, but much of what I describe may be applied to European and LatinAmerican nationalities.)

Yoga is for sale, almost exclusively asana, and thereare a great many purchasers who come for periods of a few weeks to a fewmonths and even years, if they can secure the visas. The commodification –yoga mats, yoga bags, yoga shirts, yoga leotards, etc., mostly geared to thepractice of asana – is an American modification of yoga, and not part of theoriginal ascetic ideal of a yogi practicing aparigraha, perhaps living in the forestsitting on an animal skin in padmasana. But it does ironically fulfill SwamiVivekananda’s dream of American investment in India."

"A few enterprising Indian yoga teachers have learned thatthere is a solid niche in the yoga market for an 8 am starting time, and they areable to secure more students that way. Following a post-asana shower, there isalways a large, healthy vegetarian breakfast to be found. This usually takes place in the dining room or yard of an enterprising Indian housewife, but a number of yoga students themselves have recognized the opening for a moreWestern-oriented menu, and Westerner owned and operated black market restaurants have appeared spontaneously, which permit the students tofraternize among themselves, uninterrupted by actual people from India.
"
Enterprising Americans (“Are all Americans so enterprising? I wish we Indianswere equally enterprising,” an Indian housewife once told me) have purchasedautomatic washing machines and will do yoga students’ laundry for a fee,relieving students of the opportunity to attempt to communicate with even adhobi (an Indian washer-person), or indeed wash their own clothes by hand. "

"Insulated by a critical mass of like-minded pleasure-seekers,they are socialized quickly to a mild hedonism, and they unnecessarily limit theiropportunities for discovering India; instead, they invest a good deal of theirenergies shopping, a task at which they are masters.

It can be said without any cynicism that Americans are brilliant atshopping, and India offers quality and bargains that cannot be obtained in theUS. The same brand-name clothing Indians ship to the US is available on theIndian market for a fraction of its US cost. The cotton and silk garments areluxurious, and woolen shawls and sweaters are rich, natural, and sold for lessthan a second-hand store in the US would sell them.

Cassettes of the latestworld music are available for $2 each, and a fabulous array of Indian classicalmusic is available for $1 each (CDs $2). India is the world’s second largestpublisher of books in English, but they sell them for a tenth of what an Americanpublisher charges.

Woodcrafts, beauty oils, soaps, jewelry, the list ofinexpensive items available keeps the “yoga” students’ heads spinning, and thesatisfaction of acquiring so much for little money leaves the students satisfiedthat they have been living fruitfully.

But is that satisfaction a healthy thing, atleast for a yogi who should be practicing abstinence from greed (aparigraha)instead of coveting everything that is spread out before one and is within one’sgrasp? What is troubling about this is that the students are building vasana –habitual, automatic mind-energy patterns – for doing even more shopping, andit is not difficult to imagine that this vasana will continue to operate after theyreturn to the US, rendering their trip to India a failure, by any yogic standard.

Itis not difficult to encounter American yogis who are shopping animals, ravenousfor yet another bargain-filled outing. Even for Americans with modest incomes,it is as if they have become rich at last.

The serious problem here is not that they acquired a good book at a low cost, but that they have developed not more,but less, ability to be satisfied with few possessions (the practice of santosha,during which one learns to be responsible for one’s own contentment, with out any props) – an accomplishment that will endlessly enrich their lives and thatcan serve as the basis for a real practice of yoga.

That is why santosha andaparigraha belong to the niyama and yama (respectively) and are placed at thebeginning of a yogi’s quest. Ask most students what is the meaning ofaparigraha, and they will not be able to offer a response. This is rendered morepathetic by considering that a majority of these yoga tourists are yoga teachersin the US."


and

"Whilesome impromptu classes are offered by an ad hoc yoga tourism industry(including Indian cooking, Ayurvedic massage, Sanskrit, etc.), the Indianteachers of these classes, mostly ordinary householders, nearly always report surprise and dismay over the lack of responsibility many yoga students displayby not showing up at classes for they have registered, skipping classes (for the pool or party), or leaving town inadvertently forgetting to pay balances(insignificant to them but significant to most Indians) owed on servicesrendered.

“One expects more from yoga students!” is the exasperated lament Ihave heard most frequently from Indians.

Study of any yoga that SwamiVivekananda would have recognized is rarely undertaken.Even book-reading is kept to a minimum, and most serious texts that elucidate the thought of Vedanta, Buddhism or Jainism are considered “too heady.” That is because many of the people who are attracted to yoga are vehemently anti-intellectual.

The strategy of using the body and one’s 72,000 nerves in skillful ways to produce harmony - which is surely the genius of yoga -attracts Americans who have mostly rejected analytic strategies.

Yes, we have bodies, but the point is to use them to gain more control over the mind, for theobject of a practice of yoga is to control the mind.

In Vivekachudamani (which some attribute to Shankara) the sage himself cautions against “book-knowledge,” and yet Shankara is tendering this advice in a book.

While the Chandogya Upanishad asserts, “If speech were not there, there would be no knowledge of virtue, truth and falsehood, good and bad, pleasant andunpleasant. Surely speech makes all this known.” Yet Swami Sivananda s correctly that since samadhi is “beyond the reach of speech and mind, you will have to realize this yourself.”

Hence, the study of texts is a necessary but not sufficient part of swadhaya (self-study), yet most yoga tourists skip the text study part, while offering glib anti-intellectual cants about the shallowness of words and the need for “actual practice.”

"One expects more from people who will teach yoga."

The entire article is worth a look.

The ten traditional Niyamas are these. The text is from Wikipedia.

Corboy will presume to insert some commentary

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Hri: remorse, being modest and showing shame for misdeeds;

(A willingness to make amends if one finds one has done harm. A willingness to recognize one can make mistakes and a willingness to be curious about one's own errors and learn from them. And a willingness to shut up and listen when other persons tell us that we have hurt them or behaved badly.

Santosha: contentment; being satisfied with the resources at hand - therefore not desiring more;

(A willingness to question media and advertisements designed to trigger our greed and discontent. A willingness to question one's cravings.

Balanced with a special challenge: how to cultivate contentment while at the same time exercising agency as citizens of participatory demoracies----to recognize those situations where one must not be accepting but instead recognize harm being done by others, to others and--exercise agency as a citizen and human being and care for others and defend them from harm.

Dana: giving, without thought of reward;

(Corboy: giving can be the giving of undistracted attention. Turn off your smart phone, put the iPod away and pay attention to persons and your surroundings.

Astikya: faith, believing firmly in the teacher, the teachings and the path to enlightenment;

(Faith in the teachings include attention at all times to ethics and morality. Never stay with a teacher or enlightement path that claims at any point that ethics and moral behavior can be discarded, especially by those advanced on the path. If a teacher fails to follow the yamas and niyamas or wants you to keep secrets -- get away. Ethics must not be discarded at any position on the path.

Ishvarapujana: worship of the Lord, the cultivation of devotion through daily worship and meditation, the return to the source;

(See it as re-setting one's thermostat. Our larger culture is based on inflaming cravings to get you to spend more money. That alone makes it very important cultivate deep gratitude for the ultimate gift of being alive, in this body and in this very life.)

Siddhanta shravana: scriptural listening, studying the teachings and listening to the wise of ones lineage;

(This gives humility. You are on a path that began long before you were born and will continue long after you die. You are part of something larger than you are. The earlier teachers of your lineage practiced amidst wars, plagues, famines, heartbreak that is beyond our imaginations today. Thier writings were preserved by scribes who copied texts despite being sick with malaria, in pain from hunger and ill health. To read what they taught and to be part of a human and humane community.)

Mati: cognition, developing a spiritual will and intellect with the guru's guidance;

(In this culture we are given countless pretexts for distraction. You are getting help in an activity that is counter cultural.

Vrata: sacred vows, fulfilling religious vows, rules and observances faithfully;

(Vows matter. This is not use and dispose culture. )

Japa: recitation, chanting mantras daily;

(Counting breaths can itself be a mantra. This is not done for purposes of bliss or zoning out. If you want to get high, go to a drug dealer. Anyone who equates yoga or mantra with getting trippy or intoxicated is either misinformed or has something to gain by turning you dizzy. Such states are addictive and true yoga means questioning addiction, not fostering addiction)

Tapas: the endurance of the opposites; hunger and fullness, thirsty and quenched, hot and cold, standing and sitting etc.

(In ancient India, where life conditions were tough, ascetics had to seek especially harsh tapas. In our comfortable modern world, it takes real effort to eat only when hungry, not eat more than needed for health, and it takes effort to put away distraction devices such as iPods and mobile phones.)

Five niyamas of Patañjali[edit]
In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Niyamas are the second limb of the eight limbs of Raja Yoga.

They are found in the Sadhana Pada Verse 32 as:

Shaucha: cleanliness of thought, mind and body. Traditionally, this item is listed under Yama; this word means purity.

((So much advertising exploits violence and sexuality. Avoid these or at least, be aware of this trashy material and dont let ones decisions be guided by it. Question friends and social settings that are full of gossip, lurid talk etc.

Ask yourself if you will get respect if you wear clothing that clings and tattoos that draw onlooker attention to your body crevices.

Santosha: happy satisfaction; good contentment.

((Contented persons are less vulnerable to seducation by advertisements. Notice the difference between being with people who show simple contentment, versus persons who complain all the time.))

Tapas: spiritual effort; austerity.

(Keeping your environment quieter than the usual noise level of the outside culture. Be mindful of social circumstance and ask if what you say is useful or not. Ask if you need to read or hear certain things or can do better by letting these go. Getting up earlier than one likes. Going to bed earlier so as to preserve mental stability and good mood. Thinking twice, even three or four times before purchasing something new.)

Sv?dhy?ya: self study, study to know more about God and the soul, which leads to introspection on a greater awakening to the soul and God within.

A hospitable curiosity about your mind and body state. What makes you noisy inside or steady inside? What brings out the best in other people? What makes things worse for you -- and or makes things worse for other people?

Ishvarapranidhana: surrender to God.

((Even if you dont believe in God, a recognition that while we do possess agency, we dont have total control. Respect your own agency and develop it as best you can. But recognize that while you have agency, you'll only have embarassment if you insist on pissing into the wind.))

The myth of yoga as a cure for everything

Many “medical” claims being made today for yoga are reminiscent of similar (and unproven) claims made not so long ago for prayer, says columnist.

By:Brian PalmerSlate magazine, Published on Tue Mar 11 2014


NEW YORK—Fifteen years ago, a handful of poorly constructed, clearly biased studies purported to show that prayer was a legitimate medical tool. Americans fell for it, and we still haven’t learned our lesson. It’s hard to resist something we want to believe, especially when it comes in a science-shaped box.

Today, people want to believe yoga will solve their problems. There were more than 200 studies published about the health benefits of yoga last year. They appeared both in specialty journals like Ayu, a quarterly about Ayurvedic health research, and in mainstream scientific publications like the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Yoga is supposed to cure everything from low back pain to short attention span to several forms of mental illness. Yoga is the new prayer: a risk-free, cost-free solution to all your medical problems. The evidence is shaky and the methodology questionable but we just can’t get enough.

We should probably revisit the “prayer as medicine” craze annually to remind us of the credulous depths we plumb. In 1988, the Southern Medical Journal published a study that asked “born-again” Christians to pray for only half of participating patients in the coronary care unit. Those patients achieved better outcomes, aided by questionable statistical analysis, than the prayer-deprived. The author concluded that “prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect.”

Similar studies followed. A 1999 paper in the highly regarded Archives of Internal Medicine claimed that prayer “may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care.”

By the late 1990s the media was hyping prayer studies far and wide, but the article in Archives was the high-water mark. That article caught the attention of skeptical scientists, who pointed out the absurdity of its methodology. For instance, families and friends of patients in the non-prayer groups were probably praying for their loved ones too, making it impossible to separate the control group from the test group.

There were other questions. Does it matter how much time a patient is prayed for or to which God the prayers are directed? How do we know people were really praying? (A cheeky Dutch physician claimed he was telepathically influencing the results from across the Atlantic, thereby nullifying the research.)

The statistical analysis, which should have been easy enough, was also deeply flawed. In the Archives study, the prayer group only won out in two of 35 outcomes measures, which is about what you’d expect from random chance. The authors, however, chose to focus on a small number of obscure cardiac outcomes to support their conclusions.

In 2006, a well constructed study finally proved that praying to God confers no medical benefit. The Cochrane Collaboration published a thorough review reaching the same conclusion in 2009 and mercifully counselled: “We are not convinced that further trials of this intervention should be undertaken and would prefer to see any resources available for such a trial used to investigate other questions in health care.”

God’s medical career was over. But he left a void in the public discussion of medicine — and yoga has filled it.

Studies come out on a near weekly basis trumpeting the benefits of yoga for any problem. Yoga for diabetes. Yoga for high blood pressure. Yoga for heart disease. Yoga for cancer. Yoga for slow reactions. Yoga for bad grades.

The quasi-miraculous healing powers of yoga are, I concede, more credible than the truly miraculous healing power of a divine being. At least there is a nexus between health and yoga — the human body — which is something you can’t say about therapeutic prayer.

The yoga studies, however, contain myriad methodological problems, some of which are similar to those that plagued prayer research.

First, what is yoga? That’s not a Zen koan but an honest question. In a real sense, medical researchers must agree on the elements essential to yoga practice before they can test it as a therapy. Is deep breathing or stretching the source of therapeutic benefit? Or is it simple exercise, which wouldn’t exactly be news.

In addition, yoga, like prayer, can’t be dosed in milligrams. How much yoga do you need to do, and for how long, to achieve a benefit? There’s also significant individual variation at play. Some people breathe more deeply, hold poses for longer and meditate “better” (I assume) than others. That’s going to muddy the statistics.

Control and blinding are also problematic. When you test a pill for heart disease, you give some people the pill and others a placebo (or an existing medication). Unless they’re extremely motivated and expert in chromatography, the patients can’t tell which group they’re in. It’s not easy to convince someone that they’ve been doing yoga for six weeks when they haven’t, so the placebo effect is always a problem. And in a surprising number of yoga studies, the researchers aren’t blinded either, raising the risk of a second form of bias.

Take a look at systematic review articles and meta-analyses — studies that aggregate other studies — and you’ll see where the miraculous yoga cure really stands. The majority of such compilations both criticize the methodology of yoga research and find that yoga has little or no effect on serious illness.

A systematic review on the treatment of asthma with yoga was published in 2011. The author found that the methodology of the underlying studies was “mostly poor,” due to problems with blinding and randomization. High dropout rates also biased the results.

In the only study included in the review that offered a credible placebo control — a non-yogic stretching regimen — yoga offered no benefit. The author of the review article concluded that “the belief that yoga alleviates asthma is not supported by sound evidence.”

A review of yoga for the treatment of schizophrenia, published in 2013, noted that none of the underlying studies blinded participants, and only three of the five studies blinded the researchers. Dropout rates were either high or unreported. The authors concluded that “no recommendation can be made regarding yoga as a routine intervention for schizophrenia patients.”

A 2013 review paper on yoga for hypertension complained that the “methodological quality of the included trials was evaluated as generally low,” and therefore “a definite conclusion about the efficacy and safety of yoga on (hypertension) cannot be drawn.”

To be fair, the folks who review existing studies occasionally do conclude that yoga may have modest benefits for sufferers of some afflictions, but they almost always include a laundry list of gripes about methodology and offer the weakest possible recommendation.

Why haven’t you already heard about all of these anti-yoga studies? It’s simple: they have no constituency, and therefore don’t interest the media much.

When a journal article showing that yoga improves quality of life in breast cancer patients came out earlier this month, hundreds of stories trumpeted the results in the mainstream media. Yet it’s difficult to find any mention of the review articles discussed above that question the efficacy of yogic practice as a health care tool.

Few people wanted to read a skeptical take on therapeutic prayer in the 1990s, and there aren’t many people today who will click on stories about how yoga won’t solve their health problems. The negative studies never make it beyond medical journals.

Doctors eventually realized — most of them, at least — that prayer didn’t fit well into a clinical trial. Yoga doesn’t either.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do yoga. By all means, do yoga, pray and eat lemons if those things bring you contentment. Do yoga especially if it’s your preferred form of exercise: exercise is a health intervention supported by thousands of clinical trials.

But recognize the “yoga as medicine” craze for what it is: an indicator of the zeitgeist, not a scientific discovery.

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[www.elephantjournal.com]

Elephant Journal, 2009. Worth reviewing.

Year kindness is a precious treasure.

Have respect for yourself and dont let people plunder your heart.

This wounds you.

And..it enables them to become more skillful at doing this dreadful
deed to many others.

When you are advised or downright told to open your heart or trust your heart
----please be aware that there are some persons who will then try to
turn your opened heart into an ATM.

Sometimes the person telling you or teaching you heart opening will
be the same one to exploit your heart after you are lured to open your heart.

Or...the teacher may be sincere, fail to tell you that outside the teaching
space, when you leave, local con artists will be waiting, intent on turning
your opened heart into their ATM or cash point.

And those con artists do not see you as children of God or Dharma siblings.

They see you as walking ATMs.

IMO Moses, Jesus and Buddha did not teach so as to turn us into ATMs for persons violating the precepts.

How it happens:

Part of a blog entry by someone living in Dharamsala concerning
exploitation of

[richiemello.blogspot.com]

" I had found out that if people off the streets are coming up to you begging you to buy something then chances are that it's a scam or a some
sort of trick.

Now with that said I was contemplating buying this bag of powdered milk
anyways for this mother and her child, yes I have a soft spot and I thought well how expensive could powdered milk be in India after all its like the
milk epicenter of the world.

The owner grabbed it off the shelf and said 350 rupees.

(Corboy current exchange rate for US dollar to rupee is one dollar
to about 58 rupees.)

"What!?! Was my instant reaction. "That's ridiculous!"

I told her that it was to expensive and offered her what little money
I had on me. She declined my offer.

That's when I realized something's wrong, why would someone decline
an offer for money but want someone else to buy something for them?

After that I said my prayers for them and left the store walking back
to my hotel. For awhile it tore my heart apart.

"How could I deny this child the necessities he needed to stay alive,
what kind of person am I to not give someone the equivalent of $7 to help
keep her child alive and healthy?"

I contemplated going back and finding the women to buy her the milk.

However I just wanted to check online first to see if it was a possible
scam.

I felt weird searching the Internet for such an odd and fucked up thing thinking that I was the only person who thought it could be a trick.

But then I came across hundreds of hits.

"I can't fucking believe it, they were trying to scam me."

I read that these mothers were not even mothers, they just "rented"
these babies from there family members for the day in order to scam
travelers into believing that it was there child and they were sick.

They actually cut a deal with store owner and when someone buys the outrageously priced powdered milk then they will give it back to the
shop for a portion of the price. This is apparently a huge scam in Nepal.
Well after that I was pretty outraged, putting it nicely.

So when you come to India just know that many people don't give a fuck
about morality or sacredness. Just saying.

Though I have met many nice people here as well so it's really about just
being wise about who you trust and that goes for anywhere. Lesson well learned. "

Why I left yoga (and why I think a helluva lot of people are being duped)

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Yoga and the Shadow of Ayn Rand

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Why I left yoga (and why I think a helluva lot of people are being duped)

[www.google.com]

Yoga and the Shadow of Ayn Rand

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