Lowresidency Program Visa Master of Arts Los Angeles Yogic Studiea
Ana Funes gathered her Westside yoga class in a circumvolve on the floor. She bent her right knee and instructed her students to cradle their ain "similar a baby."
Simply hers wasn't the "namaste," downwards dog, Lululemon type yoga form every bit familiar to L.A. every bit breathing.
Funes is a philosophy professor at Loyola Marymount University. She sat nether a whiteboard she'd filled with flow charts and Sanskrit. Her graduate students had just spent more than an 60 minutes examining the "Hatha Yoga Pradipika," a 15th century transmission. At present they were eager to understand how the aboriginal text could exist translated into physical experience.
They were studying to earn master's degrees in yoga studies in the simply academy in the country where it is possible to do so.
Forty-meg people in America say they practice yoga — twice every bit many as five years ago — only how many of them really learn most what it is and where it comes from? It's an important expanse of study, says the do's few (but growing number of) scholars. Later all, Mohandas Gandhi proficient yoga; it is associated with social change, empathy, healing — and is enormously popular.
"I'one thousand personally surprised there aren't more graduate programs in the study of yoga, given that we're talking virtually a transnational miracle," said Andrea Jain, co-chair of the Yoga in Theory and Practise unit of the American University of Organized religion, whose members teach religion at schools, seminaries and colleges beyond the country. "It doesn't occur to us as scholars to tap into that cultural trend and demand."
There are a handful of other yoga main's programs around the world, including 1 at SOAS University of London (formerly known equally the School of Oriental and African Studies), but scholars say LMU'due south stands out.
In the LMU program, which enrolled its first students iv years ago, the classes are difficult, the discussions philosophically complex. Students written report Sanskrit grammer, anatomy and history. A few drop out each year when they realize the quantity of reading and writing.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
At the Catholic university, information technology took time to build backing for such a programme. When Indic and comparative theology professor Christopher Chapple, who has proficient yoga since he was 15, offset pitched the idea two decades ago, many people however thought of yoga every bit something like a cult or dismissed it as the stuff of suburban housewives.
Chapple had been hired in 1985 to teach all non-Christian religions, in accord with the pope's proclamation to "recognize, preserve and promote" the practiced that is found in other traditions. He co-created an Asian studies plan, and then 2 theology master's programs. In 2002, at LMU's extension school, he introduced a certificate programme in yoga therapy, which was and then popular that he started 5 other yoga-focused programs, such as Yoga and the Healing Sciences and Yoga, Mindfulness and Social Change.
Part of Chapple'southward statement to LMU was L.A.'s deep connection to yoga — that it was home to some of the first yogis who came to America, that the Westside lonely has hundreds of registered instructors certified in its various forms.
"Los Angeles," he says, "really is a perfect laboratory to teach yoga."
Yoga shares cadre values with Buddhism and, like Hinduism, recognizes the Vedas as an authoritative source, Chapple said. But it'south best understood non every bit a faith but as a system of spiritual practices.
Its origins and history — dating back thousands of years by some measures — are rich and hungry for scholarship. And its disciplines go beyond physical poses (asana) and includes breathing techniques (pranayama), meditation (dhyana) and other activities that connect body and mind. The give-and-take itself, yoga, comes from the Sanskrit word yuj, which means to join or apply. Modernistic practitioners such every bit B.K.Southward. Iyengar, T.K.Five. Desikachar and Yogi Bhajan, who popularized Kundalini Yoga, spread their own applications and interpretations to thousands.
"Information technology takes someone similar Chris to bring the scholarship side and the yoga side together — and keep pushing," said Andrew Tanner of Yoga Alliance, which oversees the standards of yoga instructor grooming in America. "The commercialization of yoga sometimes gets in the way of this higher discourse."
At LMU, studying yoga takes two years and is more than in the books than on the mat. V professors — 2 full time, 3 part time — lead virtually 30 students through numerous disciplines. Students written report health sciences. They learn Sanskrit in order to read the "Yoga Sutras," the "Upanishads," the "Bhagavad Gita" in their original language. They grapple with Eastern philosophy and numerous Indian theologies.
Julia Kasza, who is heading into her second year, spent four hours a week this year studying Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary for her readings in merely one of her classes, then many more hours trying to grasp the philosophies she was reading about.
"All these concepts are so new, I accept to read and reread just to be able to talk about it in a manner that allows me to produce the kind of idea that'southward required to actually make sense of it all," she said after i particularly challenging Sanskrit class. I word, she said, could encompass an unabridged and many-layered concept.
First-twelvemonth master's degree in yoga students nourish a class taught by professor Ana Funes at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles. LMU is the only place in the U.S. you can get a master's caste in yoga studies.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Kasza and her fellow classmates — who as undergraduates studied faith, social psychology, business, fine art — come up from all over America, besides as Spain, England, China. They have organized yoga training for inmates, taught at transitional living homes and created stress management programs for social workers. One student developed a yoga curriculum for community colleges; another hopes to make yoga part of hospital care.
Many bring what they larn each calendar week into the studio classes they teach around town.
"Permit'southward warm up the spine," Rob Zabel, who just graduated this month, told the students in his regular downtown L.A. class as he instructed them to arch their backs while resting on their easily and knees. The sunlit room, tucked inside a converted historic building, filled with purposeful breathing, as if the whole grouping were trying to fog up a mirror.
He kept his optics closed as he used what he'd learned in anatomy course to guide his students' thoughts to the five vertebrae in the lower spine, then the 12 along the ribs and finally the seven leading up the neck. He counted down in Sanskrit, treeni, dve, ekam.
Before coming to LMU, Zabel, a Pitzer College graduate, had completed three yoga teacher training programs. But he wanted more. LMU's program, he said, allowed him to written report yoga — its original texts, forefathers, concepts — considerately equally an bookish.
"To learn a lot of these things, you basically take to join i of these groups with a lineage and practice it equally your religion, or you have these yoga studios where they don't really want to teach yous anything that vaguely comes off as religious and scare you lot away," he said. "It's dainty to exist able to get an uncensored version of yoga with no agenda."
After his master's, Zabel hopes to get a doctorate in history or religious studies. One day, he would love to teach yoga at a university. "It's of import to raise the standard of information," he said.
Abbie Britton, who got her available'south degree at Barnard, said at first she was embarrassed to tell people the subject field of her master's. But when she talks about her studies at conferences, she said, "everybody gets it."
"We need a new way of intersecting religion with everyday life," Britton said one afternoon equally she and her classmates gathered on the couches of LMU's Theology Village. "This idea of scholarship in spiritual traditions, I think, is the hereafter in theology and religious studies."
A key examination for a new degree, however, is whether graduates get jobs or are taken seriously when they apply to doctoral programs.
These days though, more and more religion doctoral students are researching yoga, and every bit LMU's plan continues to produce graduates, yoga's academic stature will likely abound, said Jain of the American Academy of Religion, who teaches at Indiana Academy-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Chapple said he hopes to produce a new generation of thought leaders and yoga scholars, not fettle instructors, who peradventure could go on to go tenured professors.
"Our students — they come from all walks of life, dissimilar academic preparations. They're people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and what they find that they agree in common is this love for learning," he said. "It's this love for what's possible with human idea, and what's possible in terms of effecting positivity in the world."
Beyond boondocks, on the steps of USC's concrete education building, LMU graduate Andre Haralyi sabbatum crossed-legged one afternoon equally he thought near his new full-time yoga educational activity position at USC.
Eight classes a semester, 240 students, the opportunity to teach a new generation that yoga is nearly more than just stretching, having a six-pack or wearing the right dress, he said. There was so much he could share with them from his own experience.
A skateboarding blow 17 years ago had led him to explore the meditative aspects of yoga, which eventually prompted him to leave his domicile in Brazil to search out other yoga communities. Information technology was at an international yoga conference in Bharat that he first heard of LMU'south program.
"That's how my journey began, which has brought me here," he said, every bit he airtight his eyes.
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Source: https://www.latimes.com/la-me-sl-yoga-masters-degree-20170513-story.html