Woodstock in US has a yoga studio for each 1000 of its residents

Nevada (US), July 03 (ANI): The Woodstock town in New York state of the US, known as 'Colony of the Arts', is now one of the '10 fantastically yoga-friendly towns' of USA, as declared by August 2011 issue of Yoga Journal.

Other nine towns on the list of this San Francisco (California) headquartered prestigious yoga magazine are: Asheville (North Carolina), Austin (Texas), Boulder (Colorado), Encinitas (California), Minneapolis (Minnesota), New Orleans (Louisiana), Portland (Oregon), Salt Lake City (Utah), and Washington (District of Columbia).

The journal reports that Woodstock, with a population of 6,090, has six yoga studios. At this rate, Mumbai (India) should over 13,626 yoga studios. It also points out that yoga is part of the curriculum at some New Orleans charter schools.

Welcoming the widespread interest in yoga, esteemed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada on Saturday, said that although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, yoga was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. One could still practice one's respective faith and do yoga. Yoga would rather help one in achieving one's spiritual goals in whatever religion one believed in.

Zed, who is the president of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that yoga, referred as 'a living fossil' whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, was a mental and physical discipline handed down from one guru to next, for everybody to share and benefit from.

According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical. Yoga was based on an eightfold path to direct the practitioner from awareness of the external world to a focus on the inner, Zed added.

He argued that yoga, which never had any formal organization, was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche. Yoga had been booming in USA and there were splendid yoga studios all over the country.

According to National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. Swami Vivekananda reportedly brought yoga to USA in 1893. According to an estimate, about 16 million Americans, including many celebrities, now practice yoga.

Woodstock, which lies within Catskill Park, is famous for lending its name to Woodstock Festival of music, held about 43 miles on a dairy farm in 1969, but it has long been a center of activity for writers, musicians, and artists even before that. It is said to have played host to many Hudson River School painters during the late 1800s. It has the country's oldest Arts and Crafts colony, houses Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Buddhist monastery, and a separate "Artist's Cemetery". Jeff Moran is Town Supervisor.

Kaitlin Quistgaard is the Editor-in-Chief of Yoga Journal, which claims to "empower readers to make healthy lifestyle choices for their bodies and minds", and is published by El Segundo (California) based Active Interest Media headed by Efrem Zimbalist III as CEO. (ANI)