UNITED STATES, June 21, 2015 (Huffington Post):The Indian ambassador to the United Nations joined a room full of journalists this week to talk up the first International Day of Yoga. Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji laid out some of the plans for the day in New York City, which includes a yoga teaching at the UN Plaza followed by a much larger event in Times Square that 20,000 people are expected to attend. In all, Mukerji boasted that up to 2 billion people in 192 countries around the world would be participating in the United Nations-sponsored event.
While it is clear that yoga is wildly popular in almost every corner of the world, much less understood are the origins of yoga, including the religious and cultural context out of which it grew. Changing that appears to be part of the aim of the International Day of Yoga — and it is not without controversy. The idea for the UN-sponsored day was first proposed during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the General Assembly in September 2014, during which he laid out the personal, societal and even global benefits of yoga. The UN adopted the resolution proposed by the Indian mission just a few months later, with 177 countries sponsoring.
It is important to honor the roots of yoga, as contested as they are. It is equally crucial to celebrate the blossoms that are blooming in ways that would have surprised those practitioners in the past. For thousands of years, yoga grew in the rich and diverse soil of spirituality within South Asia — in the 21st century, yoga’s vitality continues to be revealed in its ability to transform lives from South America to Iceland, from atheists to Zoroastrians.