By Madhava Smullen 

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Bhakti Center in New York City has been offering a new selection of virtual yoga teacher training and meditation teacher training programs, as well as training in Ayurveda and kirtan.

Taking advantage of the online format, the classes are held at times that also accommodate a global audience – often hour-and-a-half sessions from 5:30 to 7:00pm on weekdays, with some modules offered between 10:00am and 5:00pm on weekends. This

From Back to Godhead

How the Gita teaches the eight steps of hatha yoga, the topic of Patanjali’s Yoga-sutras.

According to a survey by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, an estimated 13.4 million Americans practice yoga, and many more experiment with it every year. Yoga is everywhere—from Mumbai to Moscow to Monte Carlo. But while yoga is meant to bring one closer to God, many of today’s yogis have a different agenda, the most common being to keep their bodies in shape.

“They’re not

As a teenager coming of age in the 1960s, I was preoccupied with spirituality. I had become disinterested in the mainstream religion of my forbears, and I was passionately looking for a path that spoke directly to me as an individual.

I didn’t want some amorphous, otherworldly transcendence, either — this I knew for certain. Nor did I want mere political activism, which many in my day tied to spirituality in a rather tepid, tenuous way. Instead, I wanted something that truly nurtured my inner w

Yoga is often misunderstood as merely breath control, asanas or exercises; for some it is about practising some rules and regulations based on morality and for others it is cultivation of scriputral knowledge. But the real purpose of Yoga is to fix our mind on the Supreme.

According to Bhagavad-gita, yoga can not be practiced unless we practice mind control. An uncontrolled mind restricts the soul from reaching its natural blissful state, which a practioner is trying to acheive through yoga.

Ou

From Back to Godhead

In the West yoga is more popular than ever.

“It’s at the top of its game,” says Dan Gurlitz, general manager of Koch Vision, whose distribution of Yoga Zone DVDs and videos is a “serious seven-figure business.” According to Kimberly Leonard, writing in US News & Word Report, “During the last decade the number of Americans who report practicing yoga has nearly doubled to 21 million.” Other Western countries follow close