The traditional way of Hindus praying/ prostrating before Gods is different from the way one does to Lord Ganesa.
Lord Ganesa.
In this process,one holds the Right year by the Left hand and the left by The Right.
Standing on the toes of the feet, one has to go down till the calves and the back of the thighs touch each other.
Then, one has to rise straight and repeat the process.
This Religious practice followed by the Hindus is found to be most useful in increasing the electrical activity of the Brain and enhances Brain Health.
This is named as Super Brain Yoga.
Watch the Video.
There is a Legend narrated by Kanchi Periyavar in ‘Deivathin Kural’ part -1.
(The Sudarshana Chakra (Sanskrit: सुदर्शन चक्र) is a spinning, disk-like super weapon with 108 serrated edges used by Lord Vishnu. The Sudarshana Chakra is portrayed on the right rear hand of the four hands of Vishnu, who also holds a Shankha (a conch shell) in his left rear hand, a Gada(mace) in his right fore hand, and a Padma (lotus) in his left fore hand.
Unable to retrieve,Lord Vishnu made a prank of holding his ears with his four ears , sat and stood again.
The child laughed heartily and and the Sudarsana Chakra came out.
Lord Vishnu then declared that those who do the same before Lord Ganesa shall receive His and Lord Ganesh‘s Blessings.( I have marked as Ganesh here to enable Readers to go to Wikipedia)
‘Thorpi’ in Sanskrit means hands, ”karanam’ means ‘ears’.
That this practice is not initiated by Man is explained by Paramacharya.
In Sanskrit there are three categories to indicate numbers in Grammar,as againt two in other languages.
We have Singular and Plural in English;’ஒருமை , பன்மை ‘ in Tamil.
Singular indicates one, whereas Plural denotes more than one.
As Lord Vishnu has four hands The Acharya concludes that this Thoppukaranam practice was started by Lord Vishu and not by Man as Human’s have only two hands.
Dr. Paul Nogier MD, a neurologist, spent 20 years from 1950 to about 1970 doing medical research. He rediscovered that the ears correspond to the whole body. The ear corresponds to an inverted fetus curled in the womb. The ear lobe corresponds to the head [ref: Nogier, Dr. Paul M. F., Handbook to Auriculotherapy, (France, 1981)]. The correspondence of the ear to the whole body was already recognized by the ancient Chinese acupuncturists and also to the great rishis (teachers) in India, who developed a technique to increase people’s intelligence. Now we know it worked because it was based on the principle of ear acupuncture.
THE ENERGY BODY
Clairvoyants, with the use of their psychic faculties, have observed that the physical body is surrounded and interpenetrated by a luminous energy body, which resembles the visible physical body. Clairvoyants call this the etheric double or etheric body. The “energy body” as they called it was first photographed by Russian scientists Semyon Davidovich Kirlian and his wife in 1939. With the aid of Kirlian photography, they observed, studied and photographed small bioplasmic articles* like the “light” or bioplasmic energy of the fingers, leaves, etc. It is through this energy body that prana or vital life energy is absorbed and distributed throughout the whole physical body [ref: Master Choa Kok Sui, Miracles Through Pranic Healing, (Phil, 1987), 5]
Unless these these eight steps are followed in order and you have a personal God Yoga will not be effective.
What is now being taught by so called Gurus is nothing but a fraud on Yoga.
Read Patnjali’s Yoga Sastra.
Yoga in this sense belongs both to Hindus and non Hindus if they follow it correctly.
Hinduism does not need labels;it does not need some one’s certification.
It is for your benefit.
Take it as it is.
Forward Received by me..
Sheetal Shah, an official with the Hindu American Foundation, hears a lot about the physical practice of yoga these days – but not much about its religious roots.
So her group, which seeks to provide what it calls “a progressive voice for American Hindus,” recently mounted a “take back yoga” campaign, including appearances at conferences and attempts to raise media awareness of the practice’s Hindu origins.
For Shah, who is the Hindu American Foundation’s senior director, yoga is primarily a moral and spiritual philosophy, a fact she says has been lost as the popularity of physical yoga has boomed in the West. “There has been a conscious De-linking between Hinduism and yoga,” in the United States and elsewhere, she says.
Yoga is mentioned in many of the ancient Indian texts that form the basis of the religion now known as Hinduism, which claims to be the world’s oldest religion – and which is the third most-practiced faith on the planet.
One main source of yoga philosophy is the sage Patanjali, who lived in the 2nd century B.C. and whose Yoga Sutras describe a philosophy comprising 8 limbs, one of which is the physical poses, or asanas, which are commonly referred to as yoga in the West.
Other elements of Patanjali’s yogic philosophy are concepts like the yamas, moral vows that include chastity and nonviolence.
Sheetal Shah of the Hindu American Foundationpractices yoga asanas in her home. She tries to incorporate yogic concepts like nonviolence into her life.
In a yoga class offered by the Hindu Temple Society of North America in a New York temple, yoga is taught as a spiritual practice in which the physical asanas are an essential component. But the practice is supposed to lead to meditation.
“Yoga is really a spiritual discipline,” says Uma Mysorekar, the Hindu Temple Society of North America’s president. “From its origin in Hinduism, yoga really originated from a Sanskrit word yuj, which means union.”
That union is supposed to happen, she said, “between individual being or the soul with Paramatman,” or cosmic being.
According to a 2008 study commissioned by Yoga Journal, there are roughly 16 million yoga practitioners in the United States. Those people spend $5.7 billion dollars a year on yoga classes and gear.
Most of that yoga is marketed as physical exercise as a health practice. Some Sanskrit terminology is usually used, and many practitioners in a non-religious context say they sense a vaguely spiritual aspect in the activity.
But most American practitioners wouldn’t go nearly so far as to label yoga as a religious act or even to relate it to a specific religious tradition.
“Yoga is a great thing, no matter what style you do, how you come about it, why you come about it, what you end up with spiritually from it,” says Donna Rubin, the founder of Bikram Yoga NYC, a New York chain of yoga studios offering yoga in the style of Bikram Choudhury, a contemporary Indian yogi who now lives in Los Angeles. “So to start nitpicking or criticizing this type of yoga or that type of yoga or what it’s not doing or what it should be doing, I don’t really see the point of that.”
Bikram yoga involves a set series of postures performed in a heated room.
“Bikram has developed this specific series so that it’s more accessible,” said Christopher Totaro, a Bikram Yoga NYC instructor. “It’s more palatable to a wider demographic of people by pulling that religious part or separating that religious part from it.”
Yoga students exercise at an Atlanta Hot Yoga class in Atlanta, Georgia. Classes are conducted in a room heated to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Among those that have taken up yoga in the United States are devout followers of Western religions.
Atlanta, Georgia’s Northside Drive Baptist Church holds a weekly yoga class.
Amanda Gregg, who instructs the class, says that she is respectful of Hinduism but argues that yoga didn’t “come from” Hinduism as much as it developed alongside the religious tradition.
“Although Hinduism and yoga grew out at the same time of the Indian subcontinent and there are references to yoga in the Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita, that doesn’t mean that Hinduism has the exclusive hold on yoga,” she said, referring to sacred Hindu texts. “Sort of like Jews don’t have the exclusive hold on prayer.”
Some churches attempt to “Christianize” yoga by adding Bible verses to the practice, but Northside Drive Baptist Church does not.
Related.
Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism?
Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?
– Wendy Doniger
Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some American Hindus have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that Hindus should “Take Back Yoga” (the label of a campaign by the Hindu American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga—but because yoga is too Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their (Christian) souls, for “yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs directly counter to the spiritual counsel of the Bible.” The problem should not have been breaking news; a spoof in 2003, “Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts,” depicted a Christian minister who was asked, “Should Christians practice Yoga?” He replied, “Are we going to have to bring this whole thing up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga!”
But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact, “a spiritual practice”? More particularly, is it a Hindu spiritual practice? The word “yoga” originally meant “yoking” horses to chariots or draft animals to plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate). Though many yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c. 200 CE), the word “yoga” in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-control, “yoking” the senses in order to control the spirit, and then “yoking” the mind in order to obtain immortality.
Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word “yoga,” owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical “positions” or “postures” that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still others devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.
So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in today’s yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far cry both from the Upanishads and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century American yoga practitioners have more in common with a jogger than with a meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not etymologically related to “yoga”)–oh yes, and a route to God.
Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or like going to the gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To all these questions, the answer is: yes. For some people (both in India and in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for many, both.
Yoga is defined as the cessation of the modification of Chitta, that is the cessation of the thought waves at the level of Chitta.
Activity of thr Brain is the mind, which is akin to CPU that receives inputs with no say in choosing stimulii/action..
Intellect is the instrument which decides what is correct/incorrect,Right/Wrong.
Higher than this is Chitta which guides the Intellect as to what to do in tune with the natural disposition of the individual.
As thoughts are innumerable, control over thoughts becomes difficult.
To control thoughts medi is used.
In this process , the brain is slowly guided into moving to Delta wave zone.( we normally operate on Alpha-waking,Beta,sleeping,Theeta,deep sleep).
At this level, the mind is divested of all multifarious thoughts and remains fixed on a single thought.
This changes the structure of the Brain.
Story:
Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s grey matter.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time
The following video shows a Russian lady subjecting a squirming baby to “dynamic exercises” that involve swinging it by its arms and ankles, upside down and over her head. Oddly, there is precedent: Russian swinging baby videos are a meme.
“Baby Yoga with Lena Fokina” (as, I am told, the title frame translates) originated on YouTube. It contains a URL that leads to a Russian ‘404 error’ page. The baby moves at the beginning (0:10) and end (5:10), and spends the middle portion swinging around like a discus. It’s so ridiculous, I burst out laughing the first time I saw the baby flip—then grew uncomfortably quiet as I contemplated that possibility that I was watching an infant being hopelessly maimed. But it can’t be real, right?
As it turns out, Russian swinging baby videos of dubious origin are a recurring phenomenon: Two years ago, video of a Russian (or perhaps Ukranian) man swinging a baby by its arms and legs ignited mass hysteria and led to Australian police raiding a journalist’s house. (Child abuses charges were laterdropped.) In the aftermath, Liveleakposted a clip from a documentary about a Russian circus family, which shows a man “training” a baby by swinging it around, albeit significantly more gently.
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